Stand-up comedy is more and more being targeted for the way it deals with difficult topics, such as being woke. How do comedians deal with this increasingly sensitive audience? Stand-up comedian Nigel Williams is known for not being afraid of speaking his mind. On January 4th I spoke with him about his feelings on the topic of wokeness and how he deals with this in his jokes. 

Hi Nigel, you’re a part British comedian, but you only became a comedian after moving to Belgium.  

Yeah, long after moving to Belgium. I’d already been here twenty years when I started doing comedy and it all just went really well. But now I’m downsizing it, I’m not doing as much as I used to do. I’ll be doing a new show, but I don’t promote it too much and I only go and do gigs where I like to do gigs.  

Mostly smaller gigs, or also bigger ones? 

Usually, for stand-up comedy, the more people you have the less good it is, if you know what I mean. A stand-up comedian once said to me “If you’re a stand-up comedian and everybody’s behind you then you’re facing the wrong direction”. He means if everybody likes you then you’re doing something wrong. Because in stand-up comedy you should take some points of view that maybe not everyone likes.  

How did you become a comedian? 

I’ve always loved stand-up comedy, because if you have a point of view, you can get it across much more easily and clearly if you use humour. Politicians like to discuss an opinion by saying they know everything, and you know nothing, whereas with stand-up comedy you can also think about the problem in another and funny way so people will laugh. And by laughing people don’t necessarily agree with you, but they will listen.  

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do. By the time I had done that, I was older than all the other stand-up comedians and I thought “if I don’t do it now, I’m not going to do it at all”. I’ve been doing it now since 1998, so almost for 24 years. And I’ve never done it for the money, I do small gigs, big gigs, but it doesn’t really interest me what the rewards are. The most important thing is that I enjoy doing it and that’s it basically.  

How is English comedy different from Belgian comedy? 

In England everyone is a comedian. It’s the way of life in England. In Belgium people prefer comedy to be the sort of jokes that they really understand and are easy, so they can tell the jokes the next day. But in England it’s more like telling a story or what happened to you or having fun with your friends or just really smashing politicians. So, in England the comedy is usually aimed up, you don’t make jokes about homeless people or poor people or immigrants or people who are on the receiving end of all the violence in society. You just make jokes about who has the power, who has the money, who is an asshole and everything else. So that’s a difference.  

Are you now still in contact with English comedians?  

I have an English stand-up comedy club in Antwerp, we put on one gig a month for the expats, and it’s always full so I’m in contact with a lot of English comedians and I get them to come here and do shows.

https://www.facebook.com/Standupantwerp/

Since you have been a comedian for about 24 years now, have you experienced any major differences in your job throughout the years? 

Oh yeah, certainly. I don’t know so much about Belgium, but internationally comedy has really moved in different directions. Stand-up comedy changes because of its flexibility, it’s supposed to interpret the times we live in and just look at it and give criticism in a funny way. In Belgium there’s always been a little bit of racism in there. And I think people are more and more getting tired of that sort of humour. Comedy in England has become, just to get on subject, very woke.  

There are a lot of comedians that complain they’re not allowed to say anything anymore. What they have to learn is you can say whatever you like, that’s the society we live in, and I’m 100% pro free speech. The only difference is now you have a new generation that says, “you can say what you like, but there’s consequences”. So being a comedian, I do look at the woke scene in a critical way, because there’s also lots of stuff there to laugh at and there’s a lot of humour. 

So, if I understand correctly, you do talk about wokeness and being woke in your shows and in your jokes, but you’re not going to change your jokes according to what people think? 

If I think something’s funny, then it’s fucking funny. It’s like if a headline is wrong, a headline is wrong. I read in the newspaper that Kamal Karmach’s wife is pregnant again. The headline in the newspaper in Antwerp said, “Kamal Karmach is expecting a second child” and I read that, and I say, “oh I thought he was just fucking fat” (laughs). Because his wife doesn’t come into the article. I don’t agree with all this stuff about men saying, “we’re pregnant”, I say “you’re not fucking pregnant”. That’s downscaling what it’s like to be a woman, so it’s actually antifeminist to say that. I can’t talk about other people’s experiences, and I think we do that a little bit too much and I think wokeness is doing that a little bit too much. They seem to think that the only people that are doing things wrong are the white heterosexuals, whereas I got loads of gay friends and they do stuff that’s really bad. What we should say is “we’re all humans, we all have different experiences, can we just try to understand what people are going through and not treat them as if they’re second-rate”.  

Are there any specific aspects around the topic of being woke that bother you?  

It’s mostly the discussions around it. I was watching a television program, from a mate of mine, Philippe Geubels, Taboe. The last one I saw I thought was absolute rubbish. It was about women. The women he had in the program were all pretty well-off. And at one stage he said something about “you all clean the house before the cleaning lady comes” and I thought “wait, nobody says anything here, why is it cleaning lady?” If you’re talking about women’s rights, why the fuck are you talking about a cleaning lady? So, you women are defending your rights, but you’re not looking at the role or the position in society of one of your own, the cleaning lady. When I was young, we were taught how to iron, how to sew a button on a shirt and how to clean. Man, woman, you’re both working so you both help to clean your house. Nowadays it’s like, “if my wife goes to work, then we need a cleaning lady” and I think “why don’t you fucking do it”. So, I think we have to be very careful in the battles we choose and about how we look at what we’re trying to do. You can’t just emancipate the middleclass women, you have to take the whole, the lower class and the middle class. You have to emancipate everybody. That really annoys me. 

Your jokes can be pretty straightforward sometimes, do people sometimes react badly to some of your jokes? 

Oh yeah, loads of them and I just ignore the fuckers (laughs). I’ve had a couple of people walk out of shows and I go “well, okay carry on”. People pay money to come and see you, so their reaction is paid for. They don’t have the right to disrupt the show, if they start shouting that’s bad because other people have paid money and want to listen. But if they just decide to leave, that’s their right. 

And do you also get reactions online? 

Yeah, usually it’s an email where you have to read it by doing this on your phone *pretends to scroll for a long time*. It doesn’t interest me. I just laugh at it and that really annoys them because you don’t bite back. The best thing is just to ignore them, just don’t even look at the mails. Those bad reactions happen, but that’s the life we’ve chosen, with social media, we’ve chosen this life where we’re all online and we think we have to tell everybody about everything we have to say. Social media has made us think we’re all famous and we’re all important. It has made everybody’s point of view just as important. But it’s not, and television does that as well. Television was always inviting me on Terzake to talk about Brexit. What the fuck do I know, I don’t even live in England. I live here and I have a point of view on Brexit but that’s just as important as your point of view on brain surgery. There are people you should listen to and people you should ignore. And most of them on social media, we should ignore.  

Finally, are there any other comedians that you admire for how they deal with the topic of being woke? Or how they deal with what they think they should be able to say or not say? 

I don’t really follow comedy in Belgium. I know all the comedians, but I don’t go watch any because it might influence my own thing. I also know some of them have really prehistoric ideas about wokeness. But there’s a new generation coming, and I think they’re good, they know what they’re doing. There’s a girl Serene Ayari, and then you have Amelie Albrecht who has good ideas about it all, when you talk to her anyway, maybe not in her comedy so much. There are quite a few people actually, but they’re not known at the moment. Whereas, if you look at international comedy, English comedy, from America, England, Australia or whatever, there’s a few people like Stewart Lee, Bill Burr,… Dave Chapelle is a bit of an asshole sometimes, but he uses his comedy to provoke and that’s what people in Belgium forget. The thing is that people in Belgium watch somebody like Dave Chapelle and they forget it’s satire. Sometimes in satire you take on an opposite point of view to what you feel just to make that point of view look stupid.  

But wokeness gets really difficult in Dave Chapelle’s show when he talks about transgenders. Like in New York they say there’s 47 different types of gender, well I just give up. If you tell me in the first two minutes of a conversation, “I identify as a he, or as non-binary” then I’ll say “okay cool, what do you want me to call you”. And then that’s solved. But I think there’s too many people playing the victim at the moment. And it just turns people against the movement, so you get less people on your side if you go through life being like that. What I have trouble with, there’s now a group of people in England who say, “two days a week I identify as a woman” and I think “what? No”. You might do that for opportunistic reasons, but what would you do if you’re identifying as a woman and it becomes midnight, you suddenly turn into a man? I think that’s taking the seriousness out of a serious problem. When you start taking the piss, using stupid stuff like “Thursdays and Fridays I’m a woman”, fuck off. Because you’re reducing the importance of the real people who are struggling with their identity. It’s like with the MeToo movement. If you were sexually assaulted that’s one thing, if you were raped that’s worse, but if somebody just touches you on the arm that’s not the same. And then that’s people wanting to be the victim. So, you take away from the actual bad thing that’s going on and the thing is that people then stop discussing it because they say, “oh it’s too mixed up”.  

I think it’s getting better with your generation, but we should focus on what’s really bad. So you have to be careful what you create, even within your own movement, what you’re actually talking about. And don’t go through life thinking that everybody outside of your movement is your enemy. If we talk to each other in a respectful way, a lot of problems can be solved.