Edinburgh Fringe 2019: Is stand-up comedy too woke and ruining the fun for audiences? At this year’s Fringe, the battle lines are drawn between shows defending the comedian’s right to offend and less divisive offerings

Like anything spread on social media, “woke” has rattled through the familiar cycle of obscurity, ubiquity and irony. Coined by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2012, it was originally a term used to described awareness of racial injustice, but soon became a byword for alertness to injustice of any kind. Before long, people were adding #staywoke to joke posts about corn, wine and even The Simpsons.

Now, much like “social justice warrior” before it, “woke” has become an insult, used to mock people with an activist instinct – in particular, those seen to be too easily offended.

At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, comedians Andrew Doyle, Leo Kearse, Konstantin Kisin and others from the political centre and right are devoting their Edinburgh shows to skewering the “woke movement” and defending comedians’ right to offend.



Whereas once conservatives censored comedians speaking truth to power, they say it’s now social media’s leftist elite policing jokes about gender, sexuality and race. The consequence, they claim, is an atmosphere of fear, where comedians are self-censoring to get gigs. “Culturally, it’s actually the woke left who have the most power,” Doyle says.

But for the three-quarters of British people not on Twitter, anyone who has spent a Saturday night in a comedy club, and those who have watched the continuing success of comedians like Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr – whose stand-up routines feature divisive jokes about gender, race, religion and sexual harassment – these claims may come as a surprise.

“You can do ‘woke’ stuff in London, but you can’t do it in the rest of the country,” says comedian Fern Brady, who has observed the reactions of audiences while touring her stand-up worldwide.



“The UK is still conservative with a little ‘c’. A lot of the guys who are saying comedy [is] too woke come from a background where being a feminist isn’t rebellious. People like Andrew Doyle and Leo Kearse think that we’re doing this to virtue signal and, I cannot stress enough, it’s not rewarding to be woke where I’m from.

“People who think that the woke movement dominates clearly don’t gig around the country, [where] you can see that there’s not the same preoccupation to be politically correct or follow what’s going on on Twitter,” agrees the stand-up and comedy writer Sophie Duker. “I think it’s a really insidious way of trying to silence activists by saying that they are the majority, because they’re demonstrably not.”

Brady and Duker are performing Edinburgh shows some might label “woke”. Brady’s Power and Chaos (at Monkey Barrel Comedy, 6pm) looks at cat-calling, bisexuality and how women are socialised to act certain ways, while Duker’s Venus (Pleasance Courtyard, 7pm) explores the fetishisation of black women.

Both say they’ve become more confident talking about these subjects as they’ve established their careers. But for women and people of colour there’s still pressure to dodge “woke” topics to avoid heckling and trolling – and to fit in with the comedy establishment when starting out.

“I definitely had to make a decision about whether to tackle race and gender,” says Duker. “Lots of acts find it difficult because they get accused of pandering or box-ticking.

‘There’s a problem with women in any kind of public life being shut down and I’ve experienced that recently. Those male comedians don’t have the first clue. They’ve never been forced to empathise’

Fern Brady

“It’s still a thing to walk on stage and have people hate you because you’re a woman, so you have to censor yourself from the start,” says Brady, who even a decade into her comedy career receives aggressive responses to her work.

“There’s a problem with women in any kind of public life being shut down and I’ve experienced that recently. Those male comedians don’t have the first clue. They’ve never been forced to empathise.”

Duker agrees: “People who are now starting to self-censor on the outside chance that it might get picked up on Twitter and they might lose some work don’t realise that’s what certain people have always had to do in conversations and public life in case it puts them in physical danger.

“Social media makes people more accountable… I don’t want to police what people say on stage, but if you can’t do your material in front of the people that your joke is about, that’s weird.”

Doyle sees things differently. Mxnifesto (Pleasance Courtyard, 9pm)brings his Twitter creation Titania McGrath – a contentious intersectional feminist caricature – to stage for the first time.

‘Woke liberals have got the power on social media these days. They talk about male privilege and white privilege, almost using it as a stick to beat people with. Nobody is actually taking the time to look at my material’

Leo Kearse

“The target of Titania is very much the people who seek to patronise minorities, the people who say: ‘I’m going to be offended on your behalf, I’m going to decide which jokes you should be hearing and which jokes you shouldn’t be hearing’,” says Doyle, who described the social justice movement as a “kind of cult” in a 2018 column.

Right-wing Scottish stand-up Kearse’s show Transgressive (Gilded Balloon, 9.15pm) was inspired by a recent brush with social media criticism over jokes about his relationship with a trans woman.

“Woke liberals have got the power on social media these days,” he says. “[They] talk about male privilege and white privilege, almost using it as a stick to beat people with. It got me thinking – nobody is actually taking the time to look at my material. They wanted to have something to complain about so they could look good.”

Russian-British podcaster and comedian Kisin agrees, calling the woke movement “an ideology that wants to make everything about who is oppressed”. Kisin’s refusal to sign an agreement to approach jokes in a “respectful and kind” way for a comedy gig at SOAS gained widespread news coverage last year and his show Orwell That Ends Well (Gilded Balloon, 7pm)centres on the controversy.

‘We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between a joke about race and a racist joke’

Konstantin Kisin

“It’s having a massive effect on the comedy world and no one wants to talk about it, because no one wants to be in the position that I’m in with people attacking them,” he says. “Comedians are self-censoring all the time. We should create a situation where people don’t have to self-censor.”

This idea informs Doyle’s monthly London night Comedy Unleashed – “the home of free-thinking comedy”.

UPDATE! We all know that the word “woman” is offensive because it contains the word “man”. But did you know that the word “black” is equally offensive because it contains the word “lack”, suggesting inferiority? From now on, it is no longer “black woman” but “blxck womxn”. ✊? — Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) July 26, 2019

Whether the resulting jokes are different from what’s already available at comedy clubs around the UK is up for debate. Kisin believes “in London, Brighton and places like that, audiences are becoming very sensitive. We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between a joke about race and a racist joke.”

Duker, on the other hand, says that “edgy comics say that they’re provocative, but they don’t say stuff that challenges people’s opinions”.

Comedians have a job to do: make people laugh. While jokes that tread the line of offence are what some audiences want and still get in many places, the success of kinder nights and projects like The Guilty Feminist show a growing desire for something new.



Social media is a reactionary forum where snippets of jokes are shared without context. Comedians dispute the threat to free speech in their industry, but most agree that everyone should be free to tackle any topic on stage.

“I really like when I watch stuff that I disagree with, but it makes me laugh anyway,” says Brady. “I don’t want to be seen as getting ‘virtue laughs’. I’d rather shock an audience, then bring them round to my line of reasoning.”

“Being offensive can be a really interesting comedic tool,” says Doyle. “Shock in particular,” he agrees, “can be very interesting, because all jokes are based on a principle of surprise.”

For Duker, it’s not about the subject matter, but the way it’s dealt with. “Some comedians now think that it’s the topics themselves that are interesting and buzzy,” she says. “But what people are excited about is that there are new voices and new ways of telling stories.”

‘Nobody’s born woke. But there’s a very big difference between saying ‘you might get hurt’ and ‘I don’t care if you get hurt’’

Sophie Duker

As well as performing stand-up, Duker hosts Wacky Racists, a comedy night intent on “crushing bigotry”. Far from being a “safe space”, it’s a place for comedians to experiment and make mistakes as they develop material.

“Nobody’s born woke,” she says. “But there’s a very big difference between saying ‘you might get hurt’ and ‘I don’t care if you get hurt’. The kind of comedy I want to do is always going to be a bit dangerous, but I’m not so arrogant as to think it doesn’t have consequences.”