“You won’t
tell me whether I can scream or not! You can lick my ass!” –Klaus Kinski.
Well, faithful readers (and unfaithful – I’ll take anybody I can get), I am
back again. This is the first thing I have done on this blog this year, maybe
the last, because I have been off doing other, more profitable things, like
banging my head against the wall, or screaming into the void. So it’s been business
as usual, really. This blog is just a way for me to primal scream, or get down
things I feel like just battering off at the time.
So what’s to primal scream about now?
Plenty, which anybody living in Scotland – or indeed the Western world – well
knows.
Now. This piece is about last August, so it’s not exactly current. But the
message is timeless anyway, so I’m not going to beat myself up about it too
much. And nobody’s paying to read this anyway, so it hardly matters.
First of all, let’s have some mood music:
In August 2022 (and 2023, for that matter), as anybody paying any attention to the news and Scottish culture will have noticed, Edinburgh had one of its wee pissy hissy fits. More specifically, the sociopathic-act comic magician Jerry Sadowitz got into some hot water. He’d been booked to play two gigs at the ironically-named Pleasance.
After he played the first one, the venue pulled the second night, saying that although it was “a venue that champions freedom of speech” that his nippy sweetie sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, glansphobic, hobophobic, homophonephobic, phobicphobic and just plain hilarious act was just a wee bit too confrontational for some audience and staff, a nude word disorder. The Pleasance sniffily announced that the unpleasant Jewish comedian “does not align with our values” and dropped him like a hot potato, saying, with no discernible sense of irony or self-awareness, that it does “not censor comedians.” For fucksake. If pulling their gigs isn’t censorship, what is?
I mean, it wasn’t like they didn’t have four decades of his career to look at and then decide that they didn’t like him or his work – he just suddenly sprung this nastiness on them! The Pleasance has been booking Sadowitz since the 80s! Christ, I remember a pal of mine bringing round an album by the man in 1987 to play me. This album, Gobshite, recorded at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms, was ironically quickly withdrawn from sale for fear of the comedian-magician being sued by Top Bloke Jimmy Savile, OBE, for saying the following (the ‘Cleveland’ he references at the start refers to a spate of – often later discredited – child abuse cases in 1987 in the English area of Cleveland):
Transcription:
“There have been serious allegations of child abuse in Cleveland. To my mind there is only one way of finding out whether this is true or not, and that’s to…CALL IN JIMMY SAVILE! You can’t afford to fuck about! Bring in an expert! Am I right? A friend of mine reckons Jimmy Savile is a paedophile. Rubbish – he’s a child-bender! That’s why he does all the fucking charity work: it’s to gain public sympathy for when his fucking case comes up.”
You can’t say that man was wrong. Unfortunately.
Sadowitz has always had a controversial, envelope-tearing-up-and-pissing-on career. It’s been common knowledge since the 80s, when he was saying stuff like “Nelson Mandela, what a cunt. Terry Waite, fucking bastard. I dunno, you lend some people a fiver, you never see them again.” I was laughing as I typed that, but I have always had a very bleak, black sense of humour. I’d say the Scots probably have the darkest, most vicious sense of humour in the world. The top-yersel top-hatter has always taken great glee in saying the unsayable, to the point it’s always rendered him a somewhat marginalised figure. He’s pushed himself so far out for so long he can never come into the comfy mainstream and make a living doing easily-digestible pap. The name of his 2022 show attested to that: ‘Not For Anyone.’ Whoever might have gotten an inkling that it might be offensive, eh?
Whines from the young staff included that Sadowitz called the Tory prime minister (I can’t even write the cunt’s name) a ‘p’ (prick, penis, pussy, patsy, pansy, parasite, prostitute, choose yer poisonous pejorative) and exposed himself onstage. As it turns out, it was a prosthetic boaby he was waving, and the Pleasance cunts were actually lucky. I went to see Sadowitz round 1996 in Edinburgh at the Assembly Rooms as part of a deranged dare-ye-ya-chicken comedy duo he was in with Logan Murray called Bib and Bob. At that gig, Sadowitz came out from behind a curtain, and walked up to a woman in the first row, pointing at her: “I was watching you from behind the curtain before we came on, and I had a wank.”
So you knew what you were getting even then, if the previous decade of his career hadn’t given you enough warning. By the end of it Sadowitz and Murray were bollock naked – Sadowitz’s real circumcised boaby on display this time, as opposed to a fake one – and threw (as I recall) custard and paint about each other. It wasn’t offensive, it was more puerile than anything else.
And that’s basically how the American-born anarcho-entertainer’s career has gone in Scotland since the 80s. I hadn't thought that much about him, as he doesn’t play too much, and I would imagine that was much the same for others, too.
And his work got a massive boost again.
Which he actually hated, perverse, contrary bastirt that he is.
I read about the ludicrous, pathetic, cowardly cancellation of his gig on the net, wishing I could have been there. When discussing his work, it said he did an impersonation of Frankie Boyle, a once-fearsome comedian now sunk to defanged BBC dross depths, thinking he is a writer after his shite 'novel' Meantime. Read 60 pages of that columns-flung-together crap and had to put it down, wishing I had not bought it. I was genuinely curious to see what he would say about somebody who, like other ‘non-PC’ comedians, clearly owed large chunks of his career to Sadowitz’s controversial, baleful, large, top-hatted shadow. But the rest of the Scottish tour (though it went to England too) had sold out, so no such luck.
For a while, that cancelled appearance became a kind of obsessive talisman of how low Scotland is getting Freedom-of-Speech-wise. As I detailed on this blog before, I have always been a total Free Speech advocate, so this latest pathetic ‘victory’ by young bawlyeyed pantywaist hankysniffers disgusted me to my core:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2021/02/dead-kennedys-and-video-nasties-fuck.html
Now, this young-vs-old crap has been discussed since the dawn of time, really. Over the last few years a new breed of religious extremist has come into view in Scotland, weaving and waving what last July’s Understanding Extremism in Scotland: Evidence Review would call a ‘mixed, unstable or unclear ideology.’:
https://www.gov.scot/publications/understanding-extremism-scotland-evidence-review/pages/5/
In other words, they talk a load of confused, self-righteous, pathetic shite. I
have named these young middle class (because the working classes have more
sense, and less time to piss about being obnoxiously self-righteous, being too
busy with working) extremists ‘New Americans’ (their motto being “From the
Bible of none of the above”). They have ludicrous half-American accents (the new Scottish Received Pronunciation), and they have their very own theme song from ye
olden daze of 2004:
What happened is very simple. Scotland, like a lot of Europe, had become post-religious. There was a dry retching throb in the hearts and between the pimply legs of the yooni-age young, a subconscious wish and yearning for the long-buried certainties of that old crime religion. The open-24/7 net only gave them a blinding death-confusion of a million vagrant scraps of clues, theses, afterlife theories, overarching thoughts, bridges to the other side of nowhere. The world had never been so confused, so crazy, so brainsniper bombastic. So our young frightened bedroom cell dwellers sat huddled under a threatening electronic sky, the world and everything in it theirs for the taking…if they only knew how, or why to even bother. Everything had already been done and they didn’t know what they wanted.
But suddenly: a EUREKA moment, the silent unbeatable hiss of the NEWLY-MINTED ETERNAL TRUTH IN AMERICA!
(As fucking usual)
Down the humming buzzing sparking crackling wires came intersectionalism, wokeism, wookieism, warm social jissom to replace every other form of failed ism. God was still dead, but now Woman was The New Goddess, and the App-Junkie blister-palm monks hurled a million reverent hallelujah prayers on The App Formerly Known As Twitter towards their new Holy Place, Holyrood, in praise of the narcissist messiah bam who had taken over from the (boospithiss) old man who had last held the job. The new First Minister Goddess was just the Woman for the job.
Compromised in a manner that became transparent after she stepped down, zipping up and down the island to hang out with her “squad of travelling Scottish lesbians,” she set out to get revenge for every high school insult, every lonely teenage party Saturday spent rallying the Young Faithfool, becoming the Avenger Of The Spotty Prom-Spurned Virgins. She hollowed out her party with the help of the FBI, CIA, MI5, MI6, MFI, BFI, BAME, BLM, B&M and B&Q. In a mere nine years she had destroyed the party completely, leaving it to a ‘continuity’ halfwit, tearing out the hearts of many older Once-True Believers. She then swanned off to write her worthless self-serving memoirs and take her place, alongside her ghostwriter, in Great Scottish Traitors history.
But what a legacy she had left! The New Godbotherers had never had a time like it in their lives! Hurling abuse online, battering women with no consequences, closing down performances they didn’t want or like, screaming American-fed psychotic gibberish reveries to minor broken deities, they had had one helluva time attacking and noising up the old ‘cis’ (as the Yank made-up word put it) idiots who were basically their parents, getting them back for making them do the dishes occasionally when they were growing up.
They were unaware that they had stepped into an unsafe space made more dangerously alluring and sad because of Scotland’s historical adherence to extremist Calvinistic doctrines. This made some of the country’s people susceptible to filling religious voids with hot almighty pots of shit and zero and nothing, out of a fear and loathing of getting out of their bedrooms and actually having relationships and sex with other people, instead of just bleating and greeting about this stuff online eternally.
They were New Zealots, and did not even know they were so. They were (supposedly) All-New, they were Right Here Right Now, they were Always Right. Reality-detached, gender-agenda-pushing, tenured, 60s-refugee Harvard academics had told them they were Right in Youtube vids and attacks on disgusting white male middle-aged media heretics, and there’s no Believer like an Untrue Believer. Biology became density, science became magic, right became wrong, wine became water, history became the ever-consuming, always-evolving present, impossible to stay on top of. Only an Elect Select Few Priest(es)ses Of Harmless Matter knew the daily dosage of new nouns and pronouns and con-nouns and no-nouns and yo-nouns and bro-nouns and slow-nouns and fast-nouns and everysex secrets in the key of grunting filmed Only Fans-posted Battle of the Sexless.
The Untrue Believers were just trying to do what every other deluded or dictatorial Leader Of The Cracked had done in history when trying to make a ‘Perfect’ society, i.e. trashing the old society and trying to unleash and lease the new Right Way upon it. It was scorched earth policy all the way, and they were going to remake The Beautiful Human Animal (especially if it was an ethnic or sexual minority; their parents – eh – white people in general could die, as far as they were concerned.) in their own self-tortured image.
They vandalised history, and imported The Good Old US of A’s totally fucked up racial bin fire to try and rub in the resisting face of a country with a completely different racial history. If it’s American it’s good, right? They have all the good films and music and food, after all. This caused racial tensions and divisions, of course, as it was meant to do, being a basic fundamental tenet of Divide And Conquer tactics, a Machiavellian manoeuvre as old as time and bullshit political chicanery itself.
But in a way, who could blame them? What other difference could some of the frightened, deranged, deluded, screeching weasel young born into a world seemingly dying on its feet make? They could at least try to proselytise and preach, saving a few miserable middle-aged sinners from the fires of not-recycling Hell, save a few shrivelled racist and sexist hetero souls with the timeless eternal beauty of How Amazing All People Are. This despite having all of human history pointing to the contrary, but you have to admire them for trying to wipe out their liberal guilt itch and original white skin sin stain by bringing the Old 20th Century Lost Folks into the fold to berate and sneer at. After all, it’s what the Yank elites do, and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery from those looking for recognition scraps from the master’s table. Pol Pot sneered from a shallow amnesiac grave, rotted crooked teeth flashing messages of dictatorial truth from a mouth full of yellow wiggling Year Zero maggots.
But all this Saving The World took it out of our young mentally and emotionally troubled heroes. They wanted time to rest, recuperate, and berate others on the net. The first generation in human history to grow up easily exposed to sick and evil extreme violent and sexual stimuli in their bedrooms, they wanted so-called Safe Spaces, where the REAL knowledge of what humanity could do to itself would not assail their crybawling eyes.
So they started causing trouble for people online and at venues, decrying comedians and entertainers and, well, anybody else who dared not speak with their Superior American-Educated ideas and ideals and inflections and slang. They were the first generation in history to become more conservative than their forebears. They were not having the Beauty Of The Gorgeous Human Animal ™ sullied by common concepts and swearing and sex and such…such…decadent filth!Plus it was a good way to piss on the common vulgar herd of the working classes, whose ever-more-impoverished fate terrified the fuck out of the chatterati middle classes as they began to see their own fates a few years down the line. If they ever – New Goddess forbid! – made it to having to shop at LIDL or ALDI, they at least would do it with a bit of class. And if their subconsciously-worshipped femi-deity blew the world up and took them all with it, well, at least they could say We Tried To Save Them.
Isn’t it great to be Right all of the time, for all eternity, to infinity and beyond?
Mixed, unstable and unclear indeed.
I hope you’re as fucking sick of this insoluble, bleeding, weeping, creepy crap as I am.
Anyway.
This crackpotesque, slightly satirical recapping of recent Scottish/Western world history brings us neatly back to Jerry Sadowitz, along with others in Scotland recently affected by this pompous vainglorious yoonicunt arseholery. Let’s see, who or what do we have here:
Joanna ‘No Fan Of Men’ Cherry got a speech of hers cancelled by the (un)usual suspects at The Stand last August. She had to threaten to sue to get to spew her bilious bilge. By the way, I’m not taking sides in all this rubbish, as it’s all just too ludicrous, hilarious, and depressing. I truly do think on one level that the melodrama queens on all sides are enjoying all the toing-and-froing, the self-righteous rub-and-tug-of-war. But that still doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be allowed to speak:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-65575748
Faded comedian Graham Linehan went into mor(t)al combat with the online activists a bit too deep, and seemed to lose everything. He got banned from The App Formerly Known As Twitter, which is a blessing in disguise, if you ask me. Unfortunately they let him back on again; not a good thing for the old mental and emotional health. He booked a gig at the Leith Stand at the Edinburgh Fringe last August, then had the event shut down by the venue, who claimed, hilariously, to have no idea what his gender agenda was. He’s been shouting somewhat disturbingly obsessively about trans people for years:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/15/edinburgh-venue-cancels-graham-linehan-event-complaints
After losing a second booking, he finally did his event in front of a smallish crowd standing on the steps of Holyrood; interesting symbolism, if a bit depressing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-66542300
Last I heard he had written a memoir, and was doing bad stand-up in London. I saw a clip of the latter, and, well, don’t give up the day job, Graham, if you still have one anymore. Still, at least he stood up for himself, which is more than these disgusting, hypocritical venues do, probably booking then cancelling people like Cherry and Linehan for publicity.
Anyway, this brief, Scottish-sanity-grieving recap will bring us back to…
I decided I was definitely going to have to get a ticket to see Sadowitz the next time he played somewhere near(ish) me, and managed to snag a couple of tickets for a performance at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh on August 23th, one of four nights he played in our English-as-fuck wannabe-London capital city that month. His show was wryly called ‘Jerry Sadowitz proudly presents…Last Year’s Show!’ So you knew what you were getting, really, a slightly cynical cash-grab reworking of dolt-offending material that a lot of people didn’t get to see first time round, but that was fine. The blurb for the show stated:
‘Please note that I might just do card tricks and say NOTHING for a whole hour or I might just do the usual 'screaming fascist' schtick. Or both.” No refunds!’
So it’s not like we could say that he didn’t warn us again, as he had been doing for the last four decades. We were stoked to be getting to see the show anyway; as ever, censorship always ends up attracting more attention than it sets out to. Why the fuck idiot wannabe-censors never learn this simple single fact of life is beyond me. But nobody ever accused the bitchy twitchy witch-hunters of being intelligent and forward-thinking, I suppose. Thankfully.
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