On Monday, a man drove a car through a crowd of football fans in Liverpool, putting dozens in hospital (53-year old Paul Doyle has now been charged with multiple offences). A day later, comedian Andrew Lawrence posted a tweet about the incident that, even allowing for subjectivity in the field, I feel confident referring to as a joke. “To be fair,” he wrote, “if I was in Liverpool, I’d drive through crowds of people to get the fuck out of there as well.”

Almost immediately, the city’s most famous comedy club, Hot Water, issued a statement saying that Lawrence “is not welcome at any of our events or venues. His name will never appear on a bill associated with us. His brand of cruelty has no place in the kind of comedy we stand for.” The venue criticised his “vile attempt at a joke about a tragic incident”, labelled it “cruelty, plain and simple”, and claimed that it went “against everything this industry should represent”.

This post was then shared by The Comedy Store in London — perhaps the preeminent venue in live comedy — with a vow to “stand beside” Hot Water Comedy and the people of Liverpool, and a confirmation that Lawrence would never again be welcome in the club. One can hardly imagine a harsher response had he supported an extremist cause, or driven the vehicle himself, rather than cracked a variation on one of the oldest tropes in British comedy — namely, that a particular city is a bit of a shithole.

Context has some value here. It is perhaps important to stress that nobody has yet been reported dead from the incident. But that would be to concede the notion that there is a line — which once crossed by a comedian, puts them beyond the pale and outside the scope of ongoing employment. And that’s something which nobody invested in comedy should feel comfortable about.

Lawrence first tested the limits of the liberal comedy establishment 11 years ago with a Facebook post in which he excoriated “out of touch, smug, superannuated, overpaid TV comics with their cosy lives in their west-London ivory towers”. In his view, these professionals took “a supercilious, moralising tone [towards Ukip supporters], pandering to the ever-creeping militant political correctness of the BBC with their frankly surreal diversity targets”. The subsequent response to the outcome of the European Union referendum may not have proved him correct, but it certainly didn’t damage his case.

Another blow to Lawrence’s conventional career prospects came in 2021 after he joked about England’s penalties defeat in the Euros final. “All I’m saying is, the white guys scored,” he posted — the context being a tournament in which players took the knee during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

So Lawrence was already largely persona non grata in polite comedy circles, and was in no danger of getting booked by Hot Water or The Comedy Store anyway. He long ago transformed himself into a sort of comedy cockroach, reviled by the liberal consensus but busily going about his business and able to withstand any nuclear blast that comes his way once in a while. Yet he also finds himself part of a worrying trend, of venues deciding that they cannot afford to be associated with certain kinds of jokes.

Sheffield Council banned Roy “Chubby” Brown four years ago because his humour did “not reflect our city’s values”. Soon afterwards, Jerry Sadowitz had a show cancelled at the Edinburgh Fringe because it supposedly contained “extreme […] racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny”. In 2023, Graham Linehan was left without a venue at the Fringe and had to perform on a concrete underpass thanks to his long-standing gender-critical views — views which both the legal and medical establishments have since largely vindicated.

I have shared with other comedians a joke which I have never told on stage: “If you had to name three subjects that you are too scared to joke about, what would the other two be?”

We all know Islam is number one: that’s the joke. For a few years, it seemed as if transgender ideology might nab second place, though that appears to be on the wane. Either way, it would be a shame if the people of Liverpool made common cause with these two indignant, humourless creeds, instead of just resorting to their own native wit.

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Simon Evans is a comedian and radio presenter.

TheSimonEvans

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