Jerry Sadowitz’s comedy isn’t for everyone. That’s the point

We were at a venue in Cambridge. Not a big one. They were rarely big until very recently, and then for all the wrong reasons. We’ll come to that in a moment.

Jerry Sadowitz was on stage, talking about immigration in a way no other comedian does. About repatriation, sending people home. “And everyone says: ‘How do you decide who goes first?’,” Sadowitz raged. “It’s easy. You do it in alphabetical order: Asians, Blacks…”

And then he said it. The c-word. Not that c-word. Another c-word. The topic is immigration, remember. And as Sadowitz said that word, a frisson of fear went through his audience. There weren’t many of us; 25, 30, tops. One or two had walked out already. No more than usual. What was left could probably fit in a police van or two, once news spread that there was a fascist rally masquerading as a comedy and magic show in the centre of town. But he’s off now, working his way through the epithet alphabet. Every horrible slur you could think of, some you couldn’t and some you’ve forgotten. Some on the nose, others surreal, a masterpiece of hateful invention. With every fresh letter comes the thought of being led away in handcuffs. Him, me, all of us.

Then he gets to Z, his anger having risen with each barb spitefully ticked off. “And, most of all,” he roars, “XENOPHOBES!” There is a silent pause. Wrinkled brows in the darkness. He’s not a stupid man. Surely he knows. “Spelt wrong,” he grimaces, with that Punch and Judy smile. “Just to ratchet up the tension.”

And the point is this. If, at any time, those fears had been realised, if Sadowitz had been interrupted mid-joke, mid-stream, if the doors had burst open and the thought police of modern comedy had dragged him away without delivering that pay-off, who would have imagined he could have pulled it back? Who would have thought there was anywhere an outburst so perfectly vile and unacceptable could go that would redeem its creator, that would turn something simplistically offensive into a joke on him, and on us. For we’re the target there. Not Asians, not Blacks. Us. The people in the audience feeling uncomfortable, awkward and scared. And Sadowitz, undercutting his persona as the racist advocating repatriation. The joke’s on us. After the recent controversy that saw him propelled on to the news pages – the alphabet is a relatively ancient routine, between ten and 15 years old, and he didn’t get in trouble for that – Sadowitz continued publicising his tour but with a new warning. “And yes I will get my dick out,” he posted on his website. “Artistic licence and I’m a FUCKING ARTIST…”

Is he? I think he is. I also think, on form – and he isn’t always because who is? – he’s as funny and skilled as any comedian in the country and considerably more important. Ricky Gervais wouldn’t attempt that high-wire act. Nor would Frankie Boyle. When Gervais says the unsayable he is careful to make sure everyone knows that’s exactly what he’s doing. There’s a cheeky grin, an ain’t-I-naughty smile. It’s knowing irony. Everyone’s in on the joke. Boyle tempered his act sufficiently to have a substantial career on television and a column in The Sun. Sadowitz, you never know. Sadowitz could return one day as an active shooter he’s so embedded in that moment. Notoriously protective of his intellectual copyright – nothing of his act appears on YouTube, lest it be misinterpreted – he might even think he’s given too much away by admitting he sees the performance as art. There is no such admission of artistry or artifice when it is unfolding. Sadowitz may be playing a character who is racist, homophobic, misogynistic, antisemitic, who hates himself, his life and everything that intersects with it, or that may be him. We think we know where the line is drawn, but the mask never slips. He once observed that it was possible to get away with some very offensive comedy in this country as long as it was done in costume, Little Britain being a case in point. He said it was where he was going wrong, doing his stuff straight. He then reappeared in an SS cap. “What about the fucking Jews, then, eh?” he said. He’s Jewish, by the way.

It takes its toll, mining this dark material. Ian Cognito, another comic who could be alienating, combative and, at times, hysterical, died of an aortic dissection on stage in Bicester in 2019. He often started gigs by hammering a nail into the wall or the frame of the stage, and hanging his hat on it. “Now you know two things about me,” he would say. “First, I don’t give a fuck. And second … I’ve got a hammer.” Cognito rarely played the big venues, either. Yet the irony for Sadowitz is that on 15 November 2022 he moved, almost by accident, from the usual dives to one night at the Hammersmith Apollo on the back of a nasty bit of business in Edinburgh.

On Saturday 13 August 2022, the Pleasance theatre – one of the festival’s big four venues – cancelled his second show after what it called an “unprecedented” number of complaints about his 75 minutes the previous night. The content, it said, was “extreme in its racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny”. And it was pointless arguing that it always has been and that any show called Not for Anyone rather comes with a warning to the faint-hearted. Complaints were from audience members and staff and it was alleged that Sadowitz had exposed himself, which he admitted was part of a joke, and the majority of those who heard it will confirm it was and is very funny. Like all those who seek to censor, Pleasance director Anthony Alderson immediately claimed he was not at all censorious. The Pleasance was “a venue that champions freedom of speech” and did “not censor comedians’ material”, except it unquestionably doesn’t and it did. Sadowitz’s show, added Alderson, “is not acceptable and does not align with our values”. But he’s not a censor, obviously. He’s just a man who cancels any show that doesn’t align with his values. Apparently, that’s different.

Equally free of mind, they will claim, are the owners of a venue in Margate – Olby’s Creative Hub – that also bailed on Sadowitz’s most recent scheduled appearance, having read the adverse publicity. No matter, though, because, buoyed by human fascination with controversy, Sadowitz embarked on a tour of mostly sold-out venues instead, including one in London with a capacity north of 3,000. Also, he momentarily found himself the cause célèbre of those fighting the woke culture wars, probably until they heard about the rest of his act. Commentators who write straight-faced that Piers Morgan or Jeremy Clarkson are being cancelled, rallied to Sadowitz’s cause and then just as swiftly dropped it probably out of fear of championing a comedian who might use his own penis or Nelson Mandela as a punchline. Still, Sadowitz called this. He’s been asking to be cancelled for years, begging for just a little of the judgemental action other, less challenging, comedians get. Then he got it, and as predicted, began selling out venues. Yet, before that, there was further insight into the man. An erudite riposte to the Pleasance and defence of his work was published. “I ask nobody to agree with anything I say or do on stage,” Sadowitz concluded. “God forbid they should end up like me. And I have never once courted a mainstream audience to come to my shows because – guess what? – in real life I really don’t want to upset anybody, including Anthony Alderson…”

Is this true? Anecdotal evidence suggests so. Off stage, Sadowitz isn’t a terrifying presence at all. He’s a brilliant magician, and very encouraging of others with less talent. He championed Derren Brown – who, of course, his crushed on-stage persona now viciously targets as an obvious, ungifted hack – and did helpful stints at a magic and joke shop in London. He has a, sadly necessary, sideline, handwriting insulting personalised T-shirts or gift cards for a small fee. And at the bottom of one interview, a poster told a story of meeting Sadowitz as a complete stranger and getting into a conversation about the genius of John Barry that ended with Sadowitz taking the man’s address and then sending him a lovingly compiled cassette tape as an introduction to Barry’s music. 

Comedy this dark often comes from a dark place, but that doesn’t make the real Sadowitz some foul-mouthed loner mumbling about Rishi Sunak in the corner. What it does mean is that if he depicts himself as some powerless loser, unhinged, unsuccessful and at war with everybody, anything he says is punching out against the system and, in character, permissible. It makes no difference who he targets. Every target has it better than him. And his reaction to finding a new 3,000-strong audience on the back of notoriety? “Come along and watch hundreds of casually curious newbies walk out, complain and have heart attacks because they’ve never heard shouting, anger, swearing and ideas not espoused on the BBC before,” he posted.

So they’ve been warned. In fact, everybody has been warned. There is a record – reasonably rare, average price on Discogs between £40 and £50 – of Sadowitz at the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms in 1987, the year I first saw him. It’s rare because it had to be withdrawn because of what he said about Jimmy Savile. He said he was a child molester. He was right, but that’s not the point. There were a lot of people in prominent positions on television who had the same suspicions and did nothing; people who had enough influence to make a difference. But, again, not the point. The clue is the record is called Gobshite and the tour went by the name of Total Abuse with Jerry Sadowitz. So, for 36 years, Sadowitz has been pre-warning the audience what his shows contain. Other tours: Comedian, Magician, Psychopath; Make Comedy Grate Again; Not for the Easily Offended; Equal Opportunities Offender. His billboards invariably emphasise the nature of the material, even his magic shows – and, rather amazingly, he doubles as arguably the finest close-up, sleight-of-hand magician in the country, with card tricks that are his alone. This makes what happened in Edinburgh, and Margate, even more poisonous. Nobody in any auditorium should be unaware of what is about to take place on stage. Taking Sadowitz at face value is, as the comedian Richard Herring pointed out, like arresting an actor portraying Macbeth for murder.

Not least because the philosophy behind it all is right there, from the beginning, on Gobshite. “Life is a piece of shite,” he reports. “Doesn’t matter what I say, doesn’t matter what you say. Life is fucking shite. I’ll say whatever I want, sometimes just for spite. Such as: Nelson Mandela – what a CUNT. Terry Waite – fucking bastard. Tell you what, you lend some people a fiver, you never see them again.” That joke was repeated in a defence of Sadowitz in The Times during the fall-out from the Edinburgh show. Wrongly, the line about the fiver was attached to the Mandela joke. It shows the nuance, how hard his stuff is to get right. In 1987, Waite was being held hostage in Beirut. He had gone there that January as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy to negotiate the release of prisoners captured by the Islamic Jihad Organisation. The captors betrayed his trust and took him hostage too. Waite would spend 1,763 days in captivity, the first four years in solitary confinement, much of it chained to a radiator. Sadowitz made his joke only seven months after Waite was taken. It is a far darker line connected to the name of the humanitarian negotiator than to Mandela, whose imprisonment by then was a very public and popular cause. “A lot of thought goes into my shows,” said Sadowitz after the Pleasance cancellation. Some, who erroneously believe they understand comedy and comedians, find that surprising. 

So why is Sadowitz important? Perhaps because we have seen the alternative alternative: a stagnant pool of comedians and comedies, desperate to be liked or to upset only the right people with the right jokes. At the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe, the director of the Comedy Awards, Nica Burns, was looking forward to “comedy’s future in the woke world”. The woke movement was going to “establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”. And who put them in charge? Who decided what was unsayable, who removed the context, the challenge, the discomfort, the sheer spectacular brilliance of a performer like Sadowitz? And what will this deliver beyond the inexorable rise of the mediocre? Sadowitz is different, even to our best-known contrarians. We talk of cancel culture, but nobody is cancelling Jimmy Carr or even Dave Chappelle. Not really. Louis CK played Wembley Arena in October. Yet just 300 people had bought tickets for the abandoned show at the Pleasance, and they were denied. That’s true cancellation. Sadowitz isn’t one of those controversialists riffing on the desire to force him out of business while midway through his fifth Netflix special. Had the intolerance of his act taken hold, he could genuinely have been forced off stage. He did have television work some 20 years ago, but nothing was picked up much beyond its initial run. And, unlike some, he didn’t compromise.

Yet, in his own way, he played the game. He even recorded a trailer for the first episode of The People vs. Jerry Sadowitz. He put on a serious face. He looked intently into the camera. “And tonight on the show that tackles the real issues,” he said. “Jews and Nazis – so who’s right?”