Let’s kill the headline stone dead before we start. The answer is yes. Check out, for example, one of the sell-outs at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, ‘Conswervative’, a stand-up comedy show by self-confessed rightwinger Geoff Norcott. Now, I haven’t seen the show (it’s not a boycott, I promise, I just haven’t had the chance), but the write-ups have been good and I can vouch for Geoff, having gigged with him a few times back when I was pursuing my dream of being a lower-division pub comedian. Plus, we’re Facebook friends, which practically makes us family. So, if you want proof that someone can be lovely and funny and wrong all at the same time, Geoff is your man.
However, much of the press for Geoff’s show presents the idea that being a rightwinger in comedy somehow makes you a plucky outsider, a laissez-faire Daniel in the liberal lions’ den of comedy. But it doesn’t. Admittedly, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the epicentre of stereotypical, right-on liberalism: imagine a city taken over by people who think not having lactose-free, organic Eritrean breast milk on your muesli in the mornings makes you some kind of lumpen scum. But the idea that the comedy industry, or even the Edinburgh Festival, is leftwing is about as believable as a Donald Trump election pledge. Like many rightwing commenters, Geoff is, I think, railing against an establishment that isn’t there.
