Sadowicz and the culture war

 

Oh shit, the inevitable has happened and now Twitter knows who Jerry Sadowicz is. He's had his run at The Pleasance cut short after complaints over his content. J K Rowling and the Freeze Peach keyboard warriors have come out to bat for him.

I've seen Sadowicz's stand up since I was a kid and have seen him perform recently too. He's also a brilliant personal magician and card trickster, he wrote the text books that you by if you want to learn stage magic. The shows are as he puts it "card tricks with 'patter'", the "patter" in question being the rawest, purposefully offensive un-PC, bunch-of-old-guys-on-a-building-site-level craíc, directed at his audience, other stand ups, anything else going on in the world at the moment and especially himself.

I have seen him tell the most racist and sexist joke I have ever heard in my entire life, an impressive feat for a 2-line gag.

I've seen him go up to a person in the front row at his gig in a wheel-chair and say "for my next trick I'm going to make this cunt get up and walk!" to their obvious amusement and delight

Apparently what specifically got him into trouble this time is calling Rishi Sunak a "Paki" and gettting his dick out on stage. Both those things are pretty much par for the course for one of his shows, he didn't do anything out of the ordinary and it seems like the climate has just changed.

As far as the whole "ironic racism" discourse and how this relates to it goes; yeah I get how the apparent "ironic racism" of online internet culture and sites like 4chan was de-subverted and just led to the literal and unironic racism that heralded a resurgence of the far right across the world. I get that this is a problem and should probably inform how we look at "ironic racism" in a modern cultural context even when it is sincerely ironic.

That said, Sadowicz is not 4chan. He is very much a product of analogue tech and old media. If you are buying a ticket to a Jerry Sadowicz show (which is pretty much the only way you're going to experience his performances these days) you really ought to bloody well know what you're letting yourself in for. As he talks about himself, he's purposefully cultuvated an audience who are capable of recieving his material in the manner intended. His face should be your trigger warning.

Personally I can't see this going too badly for Sadowicz. It sounds like the Pleasance was bang in the wrong and have been making shit up about their reasons for cancelling the second night (this wasn't a full Edinburgh Fringe run this was 2 nights, one of which was cancelled). He'll be fine and the lost revenue will be covered by earnings generated by the subsequent publicity. I'm more concerned that dragging him into the culture wars at this stage of his career is going to make him into some icon of the alt-right, the shows aren't going to work or be as much fun at all if the actual shitlords, incels and Dankula stans start showing up at them and clearly being a bit too much into it. I think we'll just have to see how it goes.