Guest Takeover #1 - Sophie Duker
The comedian and writer reflects on the moment she knew she was an artist.
I knew I was an artist when… Liv offered me this ‘the feels’ takeover gig. So now here I am, nesting in your inboxes like a comedy cuckoo. Surprise!
How the hell did I get here? Quite simply, your girl’s a scammer. Joanne, step aside. Inventing Anna, eat your heart out. Tinder Swindler, suck your mum. I am the captain now.
Hello, my name is Sophie, I do comedy - and if you’re not obsessed with me already… start playing catch-up, pls and tenk you.
My ‘art’, if we must call it that - and I do believe I’m now contractually obliged to - has taken many forms over the last five years - I’ve mimed a wasteman thumbing MDMA into my mouth at the Hammersmith Apollo, I’ve sculpted a vulva out of dairy-free butter on primetime Channel 4 and then - predictably - been ordered to eat it. I spat bars alongside Ms Banks and talked stats with Brian Cox and I’ve given white people a whole lot of shit through my microphones.
Whether or not we deserve the title, writing about being an artist as a stand-up comic feels almost funny. Us? Comics? We’re clowns. Actors and musicians send their skill up to the heavens - we pander to the shmucks in the stalls. Great art changes its audience - but a perfectly crafted dick joke - at best - just gives you a little lift. We’re emotional support entertainers. Dealers peddling a centuries-old drug to help people get through yet another bleak week on Austerity Island.
Our job description - showing off in front of strangers?! - is straight up delulu. Our daily grind is rarely romantic or glamorous - my most recent late night wasn’t spent covered in paint flecks in the studio, it was spent on an abandoned train inexplicably held somewhere between Aldershot and Guildford for forty minutes after a tour show. Have you ever eaten hummus with a hair clip because you forgot to grab disposable cutlery and your train doesn’t get in for another 2.5 hours? You’re right, gross, me neither.
Like so many creatives in fields historically dominated by old white men - my career has sometimes felt like a neverending battle with impostor syndrome. An endless series of tables to shake, glass ceilings to break, master’s houses to tear down. Hence the self-imposed scammer title. You shouldn’t be listening to me, I think, when I rock onstage at a regional arts centre and see a couple hundred pale, middle-aged faces staring back. Am I the first woman with box braids you’ve ever paid to see speak?
Is comedy art? All I know is that - for time - I didn’t want anyone to think I thought so. For years I described doing comedy as a purely practical, a craft, like making a chair. I simplified the ting down to its bare bones. Comedy exists to entertain - so I could call myself a comedian without fear of pretension if I reliably made strangers laugh.
But, if I’m honest, making strangers laugh has never been the only aim. I wanted to see and be seen. I wanted my words to be lyrical, and I wanted them to dogwhistle to my people - whoever they were, whatever part of my identity or personality they resonated with. I wanted to create spaces that were safer, braver, where audience members who weren’t white men didn’t have to compromise on their integrity to be part of the joy. I wanted to find a way to immortalise the sublime and ridiculous at the same time. I wanted to be not the comedian the UK deserves, but the one it needs right now. I wanted to be the Janelle Monae of jokes.
And so my night Wacky Racists was born. I created my own comedy club to explicitly platform comedians of colour and amplify all kinds of people normally excluded in my industry. But the night wasn’t about fulfilling a cultural diversity quota - it was about creating a space where the acts could be as silly as they wanted in front of an audience that accepted they were brilliant from the off. Where they didn’t feel any pressure to ‘perform’ their identity - or, feel the slightest bit of guilt about going hard on their oppressors. They could sing songs or roll around in paint or drop unrepeatable secrets about other celebrities they’d shagged (looking at you, London Hughes). And at Wacky Racists true magic happened. I saw more QTPOC cool kids turn up than I could ever have imagined outside da club, an auntie in her 80s sat on the front row and creased all night, white people gleefully agreed to play games like Pin The Tail On The Honky. Wacky changed its acts - who left bolder and braver - but it also changed the audience, who made friends, sang along, fell in love and went home with stomach muscles aching from the joy workout.
Wacky began in 2018. The first show was squished into a basement that could fit 40 underneath a Kentish Town pizza place. It was a hotbox of hilarity but everyone left smelling of doughballs. It’s now 2023, and this month Wacky has its biggest show ever in the Hackney Empire, a 1,275-seater so peng The Guardian describes it as ‘the most beautiful theatre in London’.
Am I an artist? Possibly. Emphasis on scam. But have I created a thing of beauty? Do I think it will change you? And do I want you to come witness it in a throng of hotties who’ll spend the night sipping drinks, screaming with delight and hollering til they’re hoarse?
One hundred percent.
Wacky Racists Comedy Club, hosted by Sophie Duker, is at Hackney Empire for one night only on Thursday 26 October 2023. LIMITED 2-for-1 tickets for “the feels” subscribers with exclusive code: ARTIST
