Comedian Benjamin Bankole Bello created the character of President Obonjo 14 years ago, but he never experienced racial abuse on stage until April this year.
He was looking forward to performing the headline slot at the West End Comedy Club, but when a group of men with their female partners arrived in the interval before his set, everything shifted.
‘The atmosphere just changed within the venue,’ Benjamin remembers, ‘they just felt really unruly, drunk, and just not the right people.’
Benjamin carried on brushing it off, having experienced years of hecklers. But this did not turn out to be just heckles – it was a hate crime.
‘When they started with the racial abuse – when they called me the N-word and used the word monkey – I said, “Look, I can’t take this any longer. I had to leave the stage,” he said.
The club were ‘amazing’ at dealing with the situation, and a ‘brilliant’ off-duty police officer in the audience also got involved, leading to an arrest.
While Benjamin has experienced racial abuse at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before, that happened on the streets. In all his years he’s never known racial hate to be hurled at him while he was up on stage.
Afterwards, Benjamin spread the word on X – for which he got backlash, with some saying he got a man arrested because he couldn’t hack a heckle.
‘I wanted to make sure that we knew within the comedy industry that there’s an increase here in terms of abuse,’ he said.
‘We comedians reckon there’s been a rise. We don’t know what’s causing it. But we know there’s been a rise.’
Last year we heard how, after Covid lockdowns, theatre audiences – like cavemen emerging from the darkness into civilisation for the first time – simply forgot how to behave when they re-entered venues. In the comedy world, Nish Kumar told The Guardian in 2022 that ‘something doesn’t feel quite right’ with audiences post-lockdown, as he experienced racist abuse during his shows.
We’ve seen it across the board in theatre, when ‘unprecedented levels of violence’ were reported at a Manchester performance of Bodyguard: The Musical in April, and even music, with fans throwing objects at often high-profile artists on stage.
Pop star Pink was the unlucky recipient of human remains while on stage in London, after a fan saw fit to chuck her mother’s ashes at the singer mid-performance. Even away from the stage, in supermarkets and on buses, staff reported customers behaving badly across the country.
But three years after the last lockdown ended, comedians are still experiencing a rise in unruly behaviour from audiences. Surely by now, we are socialised creatures again, able to show up in the world not as a feral, angry mob..? Perhaps there is some truth to the caveman theory, but has dug deeper and found this explanation only scratches the surface of what’s behind these threatening audience members.
Fern Brady thinks the UK has a particular brand of audience. The Scottish comedian told me that she’s gigged in around 20 countries now, and audiences on the UK comedy circuit are the ‘worst behaved’ – except her tour audiences, who are ‘lovely’. The problem of unruly audiences seems to emerge more at mixed bill events, and stand-up nights, rather than tour shows.
The Celebrity Bake Off star has endured her fair share of this, quite frankly, threatening behaviour, teetering on physical violence.
‘I had to leave a gig in Leicester once because this woman was gearing up to glass me in the face,’ she revealed. ‘This is not unusual in British comedy.’
Another time, Fern was performing in Hampton Court, and she was actually chased out of the gig by a woman screaming: ‘Go back to Glasgow!’
‘I’m not even from Glasgow, so that hurt,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t even the first time that had happened at that gig. I found out the same villagers had chased out a comedian the month before.
‘I went into it thinking it’s going to be fine because they’re going to be middle-class suburban English people… No, man.
‘One of the other comedians who was on, he ran away too. On the train back he was like, “You looked so calm and I was waiting for you to cry.” I was like, “Don’t worry I will cry when I get home.”’
This kind of situation is ‘so regular’ for Fern that she admits ‘there are parts of [her] that are dead inside.’
She also doesn’t like gigging in Essex – ‘If you’re Scottish and a woman in Essex they can’t handle it,’ she says – and Fern will not be returning to Hampton any time soon.
Bristol MC and comedian Dani Johns has only ever had to get an audience member thrown out of a gig three times – and all occasions have happened in the last year or so.
‘On Monday, I had a guy who wasn’t physically aggressive, but he was just acting weird,’ she said in April.
He was slow-clapping acts, making comments, staring people down ‘aggressively’ and putting his feet up on stage from the front row – and so Dani kicked him out in the break.
‘He did not like that,’ Dani laughed. ‘He then waited outside for me for half an hour, throwing a massive tantrum, shouting at the bar staff, telling them to go get me.’
Dani had to be walked to her car at the end of the gig over fears for her safety.
‘I wouldn’t say it makes me scared to be on stage,’ she said, ‘but it makes me nervous leaving.’
The UK’s drinking and drugs habits
Comedian Liam Withnail – who has seen fights in crowds, had a drink thrown on him in 2019, and recently drafted in the police to drag out a drunk couple refusing to leave – reckons bad audience behaviour isn’t rooted in the pandemic.
‘It’s almost like pop psychology to say, “Oh, audiences forgot how to behave during the pandemic.” I don’t see much truth in that, I think it’s more fun to say than it is true.
‘I think we generally have a drinking and drugs problem in this country, and 99% of the problems at live events are down to alcohol and cocaine. And as long as those numbers are going up, which they both still are, except with younger people, then I think that’s going to continue.’
A study in December 2023 found one in 40 British adults take cocaine, which is more than any other country in Europe, beaten only globally by Australia. In 2022 charity Rehabs UK found that in recent years cocaine use has ‘risen significantly’ and the drug goes ‘hand-in-hand’ with an alcohol problem. So this theory checks out.
Some comedians think the rise in hostile audiences could be down to viral TikTok comedy show moments. A popular TikTok trend sees audience members heckling at comedy gigs, and comedians heroically putting them down, leading to clickable viral moments. The theory is that these videos could impact the expectations of what a comedy gig is.
Co-founder of Comedy Bloomers Kuan-wen Huang and comedian Andy Watts, 29 agree this social media trend could be part of the issue, but both also make deeper, bleak observations.
An unexpected consequence of Brexit
‘The violence thing is true,’ Kuan-wen said while talking about how LGBT+ comics still don’t feel totally at home at ‘straight’ nights. He recalled how one audience member came up to him during a break at a gig and accused him of ‘lying about living in Bermondsey’.
‘I don’t know whether it has to do more of my foreignness or my gayness,’ said Kuan-wen, who moved from Taiwan to the UK 20 years ago.
‘I came here when it was a much happier time,’ he observed, considering whether audience hostility is a symptom of a much bigger national identity crisis.
‘Everything after Brexit is a bit weird. It’s a whole country that’s lost its mojo and doesn’t know where to go.’
The cost of living crisis
Kuan-wen remembered the UK as confident and happy in the run up to the 2012 Olympics, despite the financial crisis.
In 2024, Andy pointed out that stand-up ticket prices could be jarring for audiences struggling with the soaring cost of living crisis, but concedes the politicisation of comedy and its relationship with freedom of speech could be underlining the hostility.
The anti-woke campaign
‘Comedy is divided. It’s created the lexicon of, “Oh you can’t say anything these days.” Liberalism is dividing comedy. There are seemingly political camps, which fall into the types of comedians they support,’ he said. This could create, in turn, a more divided and therefore increasingly fraught audience.
Indeed, we’ve seen comedy at the heart of the zeitgeisty cancel culture conversation, with Graham Linehan’s comments about the trans community sparking outrage, and arguments about whether Ricky Gervais’ Netflix show jokes about that same ever-discussed minority were justifiable. The politics of freedom of speech has become synonymous with comedy – and whether jokes, however downward-punching, are always allowed a hall pass.
Typically, right-wing thinking will argue the ‘woke’ generation – who they claim are obsessed with ‘political correctness’ – is killing comedy, while the left argues that such an insistence on poking fun at minorities is doing the same. So the political contentiousness of comedians and comedy gigs grows with every passing conversation, potentially leading to heightened gig environments.
Cultural studies scholar and Bristol University lecturer Dr Kirsty Sedgman – who specialises in audiences, culture, human behaviour, and communication – would agree.
‘There is a temptation to be quite absolutist, to say freedom of speech means that anybody should be allowed to say anything, anywhere, without consequences,’ she said.
But even the ancient Greeks knew the difference between punching up and down, and speaking up in order to build and not destruct.
Political chaos and Partygate
Dr Sedgman – who has studied audience behaviour for 10 years – thinks that although it’s ‘undeniable’ there’s been a negative shift since Covid, this wasn’t necessarily down to the social effects of being stuck indoors.
‘When we see sudden societal shifts, or frustrations, they often tend to erupt first in live performance venues. I think that’s what we’re seeing happening here,’ she noted – and it ‘fell apart’ when Partygate was exposed during the pandemic.
‘It would be too simplistic to blame it all on the pandemic,’ she concluded.
Rather than being a cause, Covid was more of a tipping point to this eruption of behaviour: the pandemic simply widened societal angst already growing in the UK. This simmering feeling of societal nihilism is so prominent in comedy, because – uniquely – the art form welcomes some level of audience interaction in its social contract (within reason).
This trend lands hardest on minorities: those who are often caught in the storm of political debate, from topics like immigration to trans rights.
‘This plays out in ways that can often be incredibly abusive and dehumanising,’ she says.
It is undeniable the political gap in the UK is widening – with controversial right-wing figure Nigel Farage becoming an MP for the first time at the same election where Labour won a victorious landslide victory – making camps on either side more at odds, impassioned and vocal.
The scapegoats
Comedian Matt Forde noticed a similar trend when it comes to abusive behaviour towards politicians when he interviewed 150 MP hopefuls ahead of the 2024 election.
‘If you look at some of the treatments of politicians during this election campaign – Jess Phillips, Rosie Duffield, Jonathan Ashworth – some of that behaviour was terrifying,’ he said.
‘People who are doing this are absolutely convinced of their moral purity. And that is really dangerous. The people levelling that abuse are so convinced that the person attacking is a bad person, it justifies them doing anything, and that is very scary.’
Whether stand-up comedy increasingly turning into a politically-charged arena is behind the rise in audience hostility is debatable; how much viral TikTok moments are contributing to the souring atmosphere is hard to say for sure; and although the caveman theory is alluring, its legs aren’t standing up too well against the weight of all the other factors at play.
But one thing is certain: the minorities in the comedy industry will suffer the most from this worrying trend.
‘I think it’s the political climate that’s caused this rise,’ Benjamin, the comedian behind President Obonjo, concluded after postulating why he suffered such a grotesque hate crime while simply trying to make people laugh.
‘If you think about the climate for Britain at the moment, where people blame immigrants and migrants for everything, I think that has also played into the psyche of people,’ he explained.
Benjamin thinks comedy promoters and people who run comedy clubs need to set ground rules to remind people how to behave before shows start, and make sure there is security in clubs that can afford it.
‘Comedians need to be protected,’ he said. ‘It’s not down to us to protect ourselves while on stage.’