My husband has just shown me your work and I am in love. Utterly delightful.

Basically I’d love to invite my friends to open mics I’m on and be able to guarantee at least to some degree that they’re not going to get dehumanised in their seats by some chucklefuck I’m sharing the bill with as a result of their wish to support me. That feels like a low bar, right? Christ.

I’m not talking here about clumsy attempts at allyship, even. Just out and out appalling transphobia. I wish more comedy nights had clear policies that said “we don’t want to put on this stuff”. (Chortle-award winning Quantum Leopard *does* have an excellent policy along those lines, for example.)

And so many blokes who, after some beer, go “I could do stand-up. I’ll do it now, in fact! Wahey!” with zero prep. May the Lord one day grant me a FLECK of your blithe confidence, whilst sparing me all of your attempts at material. 9000% aspirational drive, 0% effort. You fill me with horrified awe.

My fellow aspiring cis comics: some of you really are devoting a worrying amount of time to what you appear to think are zingy one-liners about that Supreme Court ruling. I’ve not heard a single one so far that didn’t sound like a school bully. You need to cease this. This is not our story to tell.

Here’s the ‘But’ about London open mics.

I have encountered some of the most racist, homophobic, transphobic material I’ve ever heard on the open mic circuit. All of it from people punching down from outside the house, as it were.

In the Ewe language, an equivalent phrase to “between a rock and a hard place” is hlo madekotoku; kpakpla tse do, makplamakpla ha do. It means “you’ve got yourself a problem if you carry a porcupine in a sack or not.”

Ooh, good suggest. Will check that out. Good name. Nice and goth.

And now I’ve posted that I see the link doesn’t even have a preview on it, just a login screen. Rest assured that I was obviously really cool, or something.

Often preceded by “absolute” or “an absolute f****ing-“.