but this show isn t just about the bad parts. social media is very complicated in terms of what it s doing to us, and there s undeniably an incredible thing going on. it s an incredible form of mass technology, of mass communication. and i find that sometimes when i think it s at its worst, i ll do a joke, possibly trying to take down a troll, and then suddenly people will build on thatjoke. i have this process, which you ll know about in the show. i talk about people saying yes to comedy , about accepting and building a sort of improvisational technique. and if i do that with a joke, then suddenly there s all these people who are not trolls and not abusers who will be going with thejoke and being funny, and it can make me feel. you have this wonderful phrase. i think you call it becoming the conductor of an orchestra of comedy. yeah, well, that s what it can feel like. slightly grandiose, but it does feel like that, because there s so many people. and they re often the people you d
but what i mean is the book is complex. it s trying to draw some quite complex intellectual ideas around how anti semitism has been a neglected thing that the people who are very obsessed with identity politics have left behind. i see no reason why a joke in the middle of that would deflate or subvert an argument. i think that s a weird thing that people assume that the minute you go into comedy, you re somehow upending what you re saying. intellectually, i don t see that at all. iam glad. i mean, it s a privilege, really, that, despite being a comedian and probably being best known for being a comedian, the times literary supplement still come to me and say, we d like you to write a book about an essay, a book about anything you like. i say, i want to write it about this, and they don t say, well, don t be ridiculous, you re a funnyman. you know, a little theme i ve been developing is how you ve changed and evolved over time, both in your comedy and your wider life. i mean, you
not have been heard before, that comedy is more monitored and policed than ever before, and that s changing all the time. so, who decides? it probably is the case, and that probably is kind of a good thing that before, there was a kind of top down thing, where it was producers and tv people and i guess of those people. and now it is more this notion of a mass, largely democratic response. but my issue with that is that ignores the madness of crowds. cause you did get it wrong, didn t you? cause you ve basically said sorry for one particular funny sketch you wrote back in the mid 90s when you had a very popular sort of football comedy show in the uk, and you portrayed then a sort of middle ranking black footballer who actually was having a bad patch, not scoring many goals, and you sort of blacked up. i did. i performed in blackface. i ve said sorry for that. i know. i feel it was racist and i shouldn t have done it. and, you know, obviously, i m not always going to get it right. iju
whole thing, i can t give you anything more than that. well, one thing i m going to now try and dig into is evolution and age, and whether, you know, cos we re now almost 30 years forward, whether you feel like a very different person and whether empathy matters much more to you now as a comedian in your sort of middle 50s than it did perhaps when you were a young tyro in your late 20s. i think probably, yeah, i mean, ithink i have evolved as a person and, you know, all sorts of things are involved with that, which are notjust to do with being a comedian, they re also to do with having children, being around people who are more empathetic than me who i ve learnt from. and also, i thinkjust. the notion of empathy, which is important and which trolling leaves out, does have to involve imagining the inner life of someone else. and there is an issue there, which is sort of notjust to do
a lot of journalists or whatever. and the old media does a thing of picking up on what s said on twitter and using it to say, oh, this is happening, or this outrage or whatever. and so, what you get is driving the temperature of discourse up happens via social media. but even as you re talking and very passionate and engaged, describing to me how twitter works and why it matters, i m thinking to myself, you re a really creative guy. you ve got lots going on in your life. you write children s books. you write other serious books. we ll talk about this one later. you know, you write jokes for a living. you re a comedian and a tv personality and all sorts of other things. why do you feel it s a good investment of your time to be almost literally 24/7 on social media? cause i follow you. thank you. you re on it, in that case. well, i am on it. why are you on it? but if you look, i m not on it anywhere near as much as you. well, there s two things about it. to be honest with you, there s