Comic Joe White on being booed for the whole of his Fringe set

Comic Joe White has claimed a Fringe badge of honour – getting booed for nine of the ten minutes he was on stage.

The Ethiopian stand-up, now living in Australia, found the crowd turned him when he started swearing at a show entitled Clean Pick Of The Fringe.

He’d managed to entirely overlook the show’s title, and missed the compere’s introduction explaining  it was a clean show. And the rules meant  the crowd should boo anything that wasn’t family friendly – a challenge they enthusiastically took up.

White told Chortle that the room was too dark for him to see that there were lots of children in, adding: ‘I started my set by calling a suburb a shithole and they booed but I thought they were booing cause I was shitting on the suburb so I told them to fuck off and that I’m not scared of them and they booed again.

‘I have lots of clean material but on this particular gig I did all my edgy stuff. I even did a bit about someone getting their penis out and the whole crowd was silent,  but in my head I am thinking, "I am a professional I will not let this silence stop me"  and I made sure I finished the bit.’

He said that the silence was only punctured by fellow comic Matt Grey whispering into an offstage mic: ‘It’s a clean show.’

White said: ‘For a second I thought I had died so hard that I went to heaven and that was God talking to me.

‘Anyway, after the silent stares I still had the nerve to go "so, anyway, I’m doing a show, you should come!"

‘It was the worst gig of my life and it’s been a while since I have felt like this. As the audience left I just sat in one of the rows  and whenever someone made eye contact I would whisper "I’m so sorry".’

Joe White’s show Ethiopian & Still Not Hungry is at the Gilded Balloon at 9pm nightly

Published: 8 Aug 2023