Jerry Sadowitz

[Bearsinmotion]

Is anyone following this?

Really strange - the Pleasance theatre have cancelled Jerry Sadowitz’s show at the fringe, citing audience walkouts and complaints of extreme misogyny and racism. But have not quoted what was said that was so offensive even to him. Both Sadowitz and people who were there have questioned the walkouts. The show had many, many warnings about offensive content, and that he was going to be getting his cock out, which he did, as do other comedians at the Fringe.

there are a few comedians supporting him on Twitter, around the defence of free speech. But what stood out to me in the language was that audience members felt “unsafe,” yet I have not seen a single person say that was them. Graham Linehan has written about it here. Just wondering if it was related to the TRA frenzy as Glinner implies, with manufactured outrage or whether Sadowitz genuinely went too far this time.

I used to love Jerry back in the day, and he was one of the few calling out Jimmy Saville when it counted, so I want to believe he’s not been targeted for once again calling out those doing real harm…

The people pleasers won .
I watched JS years ago- his controversy is because he says what he thinks others are thinking. It's not necessarily what he is thinking.
Freedom of speech is actually written into the human rights act .
If you don't want to be offended, if you don't like his style or his content - don't book a ticket .
Do t dictate to the rest of the population that they can't make up their own minds .

I actually think he's a decent bloke , he's of the same vein as bill hicks. (God rest his soul )

Some people like to be offended.
If you do t want to be - and you do t find it funny - don't go buy a ticket . Jerry is hardly unknown for his act . It is what it is . I stand by freedom of speech anyday .

From Jonathan pie on Twitter

Going to see Jerry Sadowitz and then complaining he was offensive, is like going to a nudist beach and complaining there were too many turkey skin crotch nuggets on display.

Well said .

Freedom of speech is actually written into the human rights act.

First, "freedom of speech" is a legal principal that exists to ensure freedom from government persecution. "Without interference by public authority" - that's a direct quote. It solely and exclusively refers to people having the right to not be persecuted or oppressed (eg imprisoned or arrested) by the government or other authorities due to what they've said.

"Freedom of speech" has nothing whatsoever to do with forcing people to give you a platform for your views. There is NO right or law that compels a commercial venue to give someone a platform. We can argue that a commercial venue made a bad decision to cancel the show but they are 100% within their legal rights.

Freedom of speech laws would only apply as JS had been arrested or imprisoned due to what he said. He hasn't, so the Human Rights act is completely irrelevant in this specific case.

Second, the Human Rights Act contains numerous exceptions where it's very explicitly spelled out "you do not have freedom of speech under these circumstances." The Human Rights Act explicitly states that governments can overrule freedom of speech, and that people do NOT have the right to freedom of speech, if that speech would endanger national security, harm someone else's reputation or endanger someone else's rights, breach confidentiality, incite crime, or incite hatred.

This is a direct quote from the Human Rights Act:

"2. The exercise of [freedom of speech] may be subject to such restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."

The Human Rights Act explicitly says that freedom of speech is not absolute, and that freedom of speech does not apply to certain things. Using racial slurs could be considered to be a breach of hate crime legislation, and hate crimes by definition are excluded from freedom of speech in the human rights act.

I'm famous in my family for not liking comedy shows, comedians, alternative comedy, end-of-the pier humour, carry on films, Mrs Brown's Boys, The Office, comedy panel shows etc etc. But I absolutely understand that all this should be allowed to exist and banning it on the grounds of offence is wrong.

And if anyone tried to ban Tom & Jerry I'd be out there protesting.

Sarah Ditum's column in The Times. In case people haven't spotted there are some posters working this and the AIBU thread. I have put this there too:

Policing comedy is no way to fix society.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b5290db8-1ccd-11ed-add4-d333562d46fb?shareToken=32cf6c91696c5d428857b590df56af4dd_

Also in the Times, this is Alex Massie's take:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/abbd5776-1ca9-11ed-add4-d333562d46fb?shareToken=8b243bbd390ff6666aebec0b4ee263a0

Knowing the fringe as well I do and knowing how it all works I'm 99% convinced it was student staff at the venue getting collectively worked up and threatening to walk out which would have screwed the venue big time. Hence the weasel words. Fuck the venue - which isn't even the best one (IMHO Summerhall is much better but not really comedy). A lot of the venues within the Pleasance are uncomfortable and very hot with a mental queueing system and make big bucks for the University to whom the building belongs which is why my partner and I nicknamed the Unpleasance.

Times 2012

Jerry Sadowitz wears a lot of hats in his new stand-up show. There’s the Nazi peaked cap he dons as he gets stuck into an anti-Semitic rant. There’s the blond wig he wears as he impersonates, badly, Jimmy Savile, whose sexual proclivities were providing material for Sadowitz about 25 years ago. There’s his top hat, which he slips on after a few foul-mouthed card tricks. And there’s the Santa hat that droops on to his curls for most of the set as he vents his spleen at women, Americans, Asians, the Scots, homosexuals, the handicapped, Michael McIntyre, Nigerians, racists, atheists, believers, white men, the English. Among others.
Whatever you think of Sadowitz — I think he’s amazing, but there’s no question he goes too far: his whole act is going too far — you can’t say the man who named one of his shows Equal Opportunities Offender doesn’t know what he’s up to. This American-born, Jewish Glaswegian lets us know from the off that there is nowhere his bile will not take him. He hates the world, he hates himself. But he will not give us the calming wink we crave. There’s no irony here, he insists (ironically).
If there’s not something in here that doesn’t make you gasp you’re not really listening. But if you can’t cut him the slack he needs then you’re missing out on one of the purest, most powerful comedians of the past 30 years. Sadowitz is a phenomenal performer who delivers each line with fire and fluency. And those lines, however rancid, are carefully crafted to surprise and amuse. His dismissive routine about empiricism and the scientific process, say, or about chocolate and self-loathing, have a breathtakingly offhand intelligence. Does he tell it like it is? Not exactly. He tells it like it feels — to him, to all of us, now and then. The feelings aren’t pretty or acceptable; that’s why we have the safe space of comedy to defuse them. Sadowitz is a bumpy ride. And a great comedian.

Interesting tweet from Josie Long about how a staff member described his show to her in 2019

Also I remember in 2019 my extra show followed his- the room was like a morgue and the tech told me his show was just unironic racism and islamophobia and that that venue would never book him again.

Telling that, as many professional comedians see the wider implications of this and are speaking out, Josie Long would say that.

The point is actually not about how good he is as a comic @Revolution808 I suspect he is not for me.

The point is that he gets to make the joke and we get to judge him on it- laugh or not. And Josie gets to have her opinion about it too.

I have this conversation with kids at school (mainly boys) all the time. Yes, kid you have every right to say that crass/sexist/racist/ homophobic thing that you said. But then I also have the right to find it offensive, give you a detention for rudeness and talk you through exactly why what you said was stupid/offensive. And then calling your parents to tell them what you said.

Because sunlight is the best disinfectant for bigoted views. This thing about ‘you have free speech but not freedom from consequences’ is absolutely true. But is it really proportional to try to get someone fired, ruin their reputation or hound then out of somewhere for saying something that offends you? What do we then do with someone who actual commits crimes with more than an emotional impact?

The consequence of tasteless comedy should surely be word of mouth that it is crass and bad reviews and people calling him out on his jokes. Not, as I have seen reported this morning, The Pleasance ringing round his venues to get his tour cancelled.

This article seems to have been pulled already. Any recall of what it said?

SARAH DITUM
Policing comedy is no way to fix society
The banning of an ‘offensive’ Edinburgh Fringe performer shows that free speech is losing out to liberal consensus
Sarah Ditum
Monday August 15 2022, 9.00pm BST, The Times
Share
Alittle while ago, I decided it was time to introduce my teenage daughter to Victoria Wood. Some of it was a hit: who can resist Let’s Do It, with randy Freda begging reluctant husband Barry to “beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly”? Some has aged out of comprehensibility: how do you explain Acorn Antiques to someone whose idea of a soap opera is Keeping Up With the Kardashians?
And then there was the debacle of Alternative Tango, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in 1997 and released on DVD in 2006. Wood sets up the song by describing an article she’s read about political correctness, and listing some of the epithets that are being shunted into the realm of the unspeakable. “So I’ve written this song,” says Wood. “Hope it doesn’t offend anybody. Well, I don’t mind if it offends somebody.”
In the first two lines, Wood — lovely, friendly, national treasure Victoria Wood — deploys a variation on the N-word, and the P-word. My daughter looked horrified. Because the shift that Wood was mining for comedy has happened. Using racial slurs, even if you’re using them only to disavow them, is absolutely taboo for contemporary sensibilities.
“Slurs have become our profanity,” writes the linguist John McWhorter, “repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment.”
This weekend at the Edinburgh Fringe that punishment fell abruptly and mercilessly on the stand-up Jerry Sadowitz, whose run at the Pleasance Theatre was cancelled after audience complaints that the act had made them “uncomfortable and unsafe”.
Jerry Sadowitz is very much not Victoria Wood. His present tour is called Not for Anyone, and is billed as a mix of “highly offensive stand-up and sleight of hand skills” — Sadowitz is an accomplished magician as well as a torrentially misanthropic comedian. One of his past routines began with: “Nelson Mandela, what a c*. You lend some people a fiver and you never hear from them again.” That’s about as repeatable as he gets.
Not, of course, that the Pleasance would ever want to dictate what comedians can or can’t say. “The Pleasance is a venue that champions freedom of speech and we do not censor comedians’ material,” said the theatre’s director, Anthony Alderson — before continuing: “The material presented at his first show is not acceptable and does not align with our values. This type of material has no place on the festival.”
The show that got Sadowitz cancelled apparently included showing his penis, using a “racial slur” about Rishi Sunak, and sundry derogatory comments about women. Sounds nasty. It also sounds like exactly the kind of material Sadowitz has been doing since he began gigging in the early 1980s. It takes some gall for the Pleasance to pretend they had no idea what he was like until someone dropped by the box office in a state of affront.
It also takes some gall for anyone to buy a ticket to a Sadowitz show expecting a comfortable evening. The theatre’s brochure promises “less hate fuelled swearing and [to] focus more on faux liberal pish in order to appeal to the middle class and their disposable income and personalities”. There is perhaps a tiny clue here, even for people who’ve never heard of him, that an abrasive time is in store.
But the galliest thing of all, the gall mother lode, is in the Pleasance’s claim to “champion freedom of speech”. Now there’s some faux liberal pish for you. You can argue that comedians should have unfettered expression. You can argue that comedy needs to align with certain values. They’re both defensible positions. But they’re not compatible positions. If your theatre will only host comics it agrees with, it can’t claim to be a beacon of free speech.
With Sadowitz, one of the problems is that it’s hard to imagine anyone “aligning” with his act’s “values”. Even he sounds unsure at times about whether what he does is justified. He’s expressed dismay at having inspired bad-taste comics such as Frankie Boyle, saying in interviews he would never have taken up comedy if he’d known he’d end up giving “some very nasty people a good living”.
Unlike Boyle, Sadowitz has never moderated his comedy to suit panel-show tastes. Unlike “blue” comedians such as Jim Davidson, whose jauntily bigoted material got left behind by the mainstream, Sadowitz has never turned to the DVD market. There’s a perverse purity to what he does.
“My stuff comes from the fact that my life has been miserable,” he told an interviewer in 2011. “I would rather be happy and have no act. Some would say I’m unhappy and still have no act.”
It’s particularly strange for the Pleasance to cancel Sadowitz for being offensive in the week that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed for, effectively, offending Ayatollah Khomeini with The Satanic Verses. Perhaps it seems absurd to bracket a comedian’s penis with an award-winning novel, but that’s the point about free expression. It doesn’t depend on a worthiness test. The right to offend is valuable on its own terms. If you put decency over comedy, comedy will be the loser.
Standards change, and a word that Victoria Wood could once sing in the Albert Hall is now too shocking for a known shock-comic to say in a Fringe venue. But racism didn’t go away because its language became taboo, says McWhorter. Instead, it became “something to hide, to dissemble about and, among at least an enlightened cohort, something to check oneself for and call out in others”. It’s easier to police art than to fix society, and maybe Sadowitz’s ultimate crime was to rub his audience’s face in the vanity of their linguistic decorum.

So the building the Pleasance uses is part of Edinburgh Uni? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

The article is still there for me. Does this work?

Policing comedy is no way to fix society

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b5290db8-1ccd-11ed-add4-d333562d46fb?shareToken=59e784ceaaa7c7bbb96f4eb067b4dfed

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b5290db8-1ccd-11ed-add4-d333562d46fb?shareToken=49791255880f7bffe50e020749aaa1b5

haha no still not working, Times link must be broken

Not, as I have seen reported this morning, The Pleasance ringing round his venues to get his tour cancelled.

Is that true?! Makes even more of a mockery of their statement. That's appallingly vindictive.

I note the nearest date to me is in a commercial theatre, not Arts Council funded or affiliated with a uni. I really hope they tell the Pleasance what they can do with themselves.

Not, as I have seen reported this morning, The Pleasance ringing round his venues to get his tour cancelled

what in the fuck. I hope that’s not true! Though it has the “unbelievable but somehow completely predictable” quality of things that turn out to be the truth.

If you want to buy tickets for his tour and see it for yourself. Here's the link but buy soon he's selling out fast.

www.ents24.com/uk/tour-dates/jerry-sadowitz

'the galliest thing of all, the gall mother lode, is in the Pleasance’s claim to “champion freedom of speech”. Now there’s some faux liberal pish for you. You can argue that comedians should have unfettered expression. You can argue that comedy needs to align with certain values. They’re both defensible positions. But they’re not compatible positions. If your theatre will only host comics it agrees with, it can’t claim to be a beacon of free speech.'

Nailed it.

There are loads more venues than there were last week
Maybe it's all a fake outrage to sell more tickets!
Go woke go broke in reverse

The Pleasance has quite an unusual set up for Fringe, this is taken from elsewhere

The Pleasance isn't a venue as such, but - during the Fringe at least - a constellation of around 20 performance spaces operated by a London-based theatre company (actually, a charity) that calls itself "The Pleasance" and which I presume derives the majority of its income from the Fringe run.

The theatre trust derives its name from a building called "The Pleasance", which out of Fringe time is used by the Edinburgh University Students' Association as space for its societies. The theatre and cabaret bar (which serve as venues during the Fringe) get some use by touring comedians and others outside the Festival, as well as student groups. (I have performed in the theatre, in fact). That building is on a road, also called "The Pleasance", and next door is the University's Centre for Sport and Exercise, which converts into performance spaces during the Fringe that are also operated by "The Pleasance" theatre trust under its brand.

A few blocks away is the Potterow Students' Association building, which gets taken over by "The Pleasance" theatre trust under the branding of "The Pleasance Dome". More recently, as "The Pleasance" theatre trust's Fringe operation has grown, it has had acts perform in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, this nothing to do with the University or the Students' Association. I had assumed only the biggest acts would perform at the EICC but I'm assuming it has smaller spaces as well. I don't know, because I've never seen anything there, and probably never want to. I suppose it's possible that punters and/or staff are used to more mainstream acts appearing at the EICC, which could result in the anything-goes "spirit of the Fringe" being a bit out-of-kilter there. I suppose it's also possible that staff taking exception to the content of a show could have a harassment case, but one would have thought venue managers would have had that worked out long ago.

A bit more comment here from the Pleasance.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/20647881.pleasance-defends-decision-cancel-jerry-sadowitz/?ref=rss

'In a new statement, the Pleasance said they "chose to pull Jerry Sadowitz’s second and final show" after becoming "aware of content that was considered, among other things, extreme in its racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny.

"We will not associate with content which attacks people’s dignity and the language used on stage was, in our view, completely unacceptable."

They added: "A large number of people walked out of Jerry Sadowitz’s show as they felt uncomfortable and unsafe to remain in the venue.

"We have received an unprecedented number of complaints that could not be ignored and we had a duty to respond. The subsequent abuse directed to our teams is also equally unacceptable.

"At the Pleasance, our values are to be inclusive, diverse and welcoming.

"We are proud of the progress we have made across our programming, which includes significant investment and support for Black, Asian and Global Majority artists, LGBTQ+ voices, those from working class backgrounds, and the strong representation of women.

"We do not believe that racism, homophobia, sexism or misogynistic language have a place in our venues.

"In a changing world, stories and language that were once accepted on stage, whether performed in character or not, need to be challenged.

"There is a line that we will not cross at the Pleasance, and it was our view that this line was crossed on this occasion."

The Pleasance said they do not "vet the full content of acts in advance" and while they knew that Mr Sadowitz is a controversial comedian, they "could not have known the specifics of his performance."

"The Pleasance has staged his work numerous times over the years, but as soon as we received complaints from those in the building which caused us great concern, we knew we could not allow the final performance to go ahead.

"The arts and comedy in particular have always pushed the boundaries of social norms but this boundary is always moving.
Our industry has to move with it.

"However, this does not mean that we can allow such content to be on our stages."'

[emphasis mine]

There is no mention at all of penises. This seems to be about language and the use of certain words.

Perhaps the Pleasance could produce a list of which words are not acceptable to be used on their stages?

Perhaps I should point out that the reason why this is a feminist cause is because societal norms change all the time.

If you don’t defend this then you are buying into the same tactics that we’re used to ban The Life of Brian by the church in the 70s. And the same reasoning used to ban To Kill A Mockingbird in lots of Southern states and all that LGBTQ+ literature as well. Because it is two sides of the same coin (things I don’t like and disagree with are harmful and need to be banned).

Again, who gets to decide? Are we happy to have films censored in China? What level of punishment is okay for saying socially unacceptable things?