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Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

ANDREW DOYLE on Satirising the Left

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6863 Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2024

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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How did the best satirists notice the comedic potential of “wokeness” in its earliest moments? And where does the evolution of the Left leave political satire now?

 

Andrew Doyle writes for the fictional parody characters Jonathan Pie and Titania McGrath. He invented Titania as a caricature of social-justice activists (her Twitter bio describes her as an ecosexual radical intersectionalist poet with variable pronouns) but many people believed she was real, falling for her absurdly worthy tweets.

 

Andrew has written a couple of terrific books, "Free Speech and Why It Matters" and "The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World".

 

Andrew and Josh sat down in London shortly before the 2024 U.S. presidential election to discuss satire, free speech, the working class, partisan politics, comedy and the future of the Left. You can also watch this interview in its pretty British glory on YouTube here.

 

To get more content like this and to join the Uncomfy Convos multiverse, hit the Substack page at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

G'day humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and few pursuits are quite as dangerous

0:08.6

as poking fun at sacred cows which powerful elites think are beyond being made fun of.

0:16.1

Andrew Doyle is a man who does just that. He's a political satirist, originally from Northern Ireland,

0:21.3

but in the early days of wokeness, in the early 2010s, he was a man who noticed something

0:27.5

happening on the left that was worthy of satirizing, and he created a parody account on

0:32.9

Twitter of a fictional person called Titania McGrath. Now, this person soon acquired hundreds of thousands of followers

0:41.0

for all of her insanely woke social justice tweets,

0:45.3

but they were just plausible enough to convince a lot of people,

0:48.9

and there was some confusion about whether or not she was a parody account

0:51.5

or a real human being.

0:53.0

She describes herself on Twitter as an eco-sexual radical intersectionalist poet with

0:59.0

variable pronouns.

1:00.8

She became legendary and so did Andrew as a result.

1:05.1

Andrew has also written for the parody character Jonathan Pye.

1:09.4

He's written plays.

1:10.7

He currently has a panel show on G.B. News,

1:14.4

where he argues for free speech and discusses culture war topics. He's written a couple of

1:18.7

terrific books. One of them, free speech and why it matters. The other, the new puritans,

1:24.3

how the religion of social justice captured the Western world. I was recently

1:28.9

in London. This was just before the US presidential election, which Donald Trump won, and I sat down

1:34.9

with Andrew Doyle to discuss satire, free speech, the working class, partisan politics, comedy,

1:41.8

and the future of the left. Please enjoy the one and only, Andrew Doyle.

...

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