Stand-up comedians are having a peculiar time of it at the moment, what with getting invited to perform at the Oscars and finding themselves at the center of discussions around free speech and the so-called cultural wars.
Joe Lycett, on the other hand, is one of the good guys. He is a British comedian with a killer sense of self-deprecation who goes viral for the right reasons. These reasons include holding the government to account with clever bits of satire, such as his spoof Sue Gray report. Joe Lycett is one of the good guys.
Despite this, the 33-year-old comedian has his critics, including a member of the audience who, as he revealed in a post he published on Instagram this week, went to the authorities to report him for a joke he cracked during one of his performances.
Someone attended one of my live shows on tour a few weeks ago and claimed that one of the jokes insulted them. "And their totally rational answer to this was... to call the fucking police," he added. "And I don't blame them one bit."
Lycett, who frequently appears on television series such as "Quiz Show" and "Taskmaster," didn't tell the entire joke that was being made fun of, but he did give away the punchline:
To be fair to them, the police were extremely kind about everything, but they believed that they had a responsibility to investigate. This required me to write a statement for them in which I explained the context of the joke. I found it particularly enjoyable to include the words "huge donkey dick" in a communication to a police investigator.
He further stated that he has no plans to change the joke and that "the tour goes till September, unless I get incarcerated."
True, this is the same man who staged a walk-off protest from a TV show about single-use plastic a year ago; however, the Instagram post included a screenshot of an email he received from the police, which appears to be a somewhat risky thing to fake. As a result, you might be tempted to dismiss the whole thing as a publicity stunt; after all, this is the man who staged a walk-off protest from a television show about single-use plastic.
The fact that the complaint was filed after Lycett's performance at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on June 8 has also been verified by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). An obviously exhausted police officer was heard to say, "Enquiries were done, and no offenses were discovered."
What are we to make of the fact that somebody called the cops on a comedian because of a joke they didn't like? It's hard to explain, but it's clear that we live in a peculiar world when transphobic comments may propel you to the top of the Netflix charts, yet a joke about animal anatomy can get you a 999. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the year 2022.