Guess what? Some gay audiences are great...

Paul Sinha rebuts claims it's all about drag queens and glitter

Last Friday night, having finished my solo show at the Leicester Comedy Festival, I had a couple of drinks with gay friends before venturing down to The Dover Castle, which lays claim to being the oldest gay pub in the UK.

When with great ceremony a striking drag queen took to the stage, I was intrigued as to what entertainment was about to befall us. Intrigue soon turned to nausea, as the star turn picked out a black man and asked him if he had taken the spear out of his nose, before turning to an Asian guy to ask him if he worked in a corner shop. All around me were happy, laughing faces, sides clearly aching from such wittily delivered pearls. It reminded me of the many reasons I rarely venture onto the gay scene, and I returned to my hotel in a slightly drunken huff.

Fast forward 24 hours, and I was the closing act at the Leicester Comedy Festival's annual gay comedy night at the splendid Y Theatre. An entire theatre packed with people who I imagine had all graced The Dover Castle at some stage of their lives was not an enticing prospect for me. I couldn't help feel that my mix of storytelling and social comment may well flounder. Well it didn't. This particular room of homosexuals listened attentively, roared at the jokes that worked, and ignored the jokes that didn't without too much fuss. Exactly what we comedians want from any audience.

How could two gay audiences be so different? To be honest I hadn't given the issue much thought until I read Danny Hurst's Correspondents piece yesterday, which painted such a bleak picture of today’s gay comedy audiences while simultaneously acknowledging that he had enjoyed many great gigs at gay venues.

The answer is straightforward. The Dover Castle is a hideous time warp where profits are maximised by keeping things simple and pandering to very old fashioned views of what gay entertainment should consist of. The Y Theatre gig is an annual and integral part of the Leicester Comedy Festival which is lovingly curated to try and maximise the enjoyment of a loyal comedy-loving crowd. You can remove the word ‘gay’ from all of that, and the point still stands. There are great gigs out there and there are terrible gigs out there, surely the sexual orientation of the audience is irrelevant.

Danny mentions the pain of having to compromise his comedy for a late-night gay 40th birthday party, sandwiched between a drag queen and a cabaret group. Well, firstly, the pain and the compromise is exactly why these gigs are paid as handsomely as they are. And secondly, a cursory glance at many promoters’ mass emails will confirm that these horror gigs are certainly not the domain of the gays. Blaming a bad gig on gay issues is no more logical than me blaming a bad Friday/Saturday night club gig on ‘The Straights’.

Nevertheless I can understand his despair at what he perceives as the warped and shallow values of the people he played to that night. But I would totally refute that this is in any way the norm.

Danny has already sung the praises of Comedy Camp, I would like to add the Bent Double night at the Komedia in Brighton, which has as knowing a comedy audience as you will find anywhere. I last gigged with Danny at a gay comedy night in Halifax in July, and the audience there could not have been less like the stereotype he describes. I could go on listing my anthology of great gay gigs, but I would just be making the same point again and again.

That's not to say I have never died horribly in front of a gay audience. It is just to say that in an age where an increasing number of large weekend clubs fall prey to the drunk, brutish values of people with a total disregard for civility, it seems frankly perverse for Danny to make such broad, sweeping and frankly inaccurate generalisations.

Published: 9 Feb 2010

Live comedy picks

We see you are using AdBlocker software. Chortle relies on advertisers to fund this website so it’s free for you, so we would ask that you disable it for this site. Our ads are non-intrusive and relevant. Help keep Chortle viable.