Twitter has curdled public discourse, says David Baddiel; it has normalised angry and extreme speech, with consequences for us all to see. He should know: he’s a social media addict, compulsively tweeting witticisms and selfies, and waiting for the likes to flow. But where there are likes, there are trolls – on which subject, Baddiel has created this, the third of his mid-career standup/PowerPoint shows, following Fame: Not the Musical and the indelible My Family: Not the Sitcom. It’s an entertaining primer in social media anthropology, leading us from weird to wonderful to “the absolute worst of humanity” and back again.
If it’s not as memorable as its predecessors, that’s because the internet’s most odd and irate corners have been extensively mined by live comedians in recent years – Dave Gorman prominent among them – and because Baddiel’s insights are seldom revelatory. There are points where the show feels like an elaborate excuse to recycle for a live audience’s benefit all the funny things he’s said on social media. Hence the flexibility of his trolls motif, which allows for sections dedicated to amusing pictures of cats and an account of the banter that ensued when Baddiel started tweeting photos of full English breakfasts.
But online isn’t always sunny side up. Baddiel begins by itemising the responses his tweets elicit, classified by hostility. There’s the piss-take, which he happily takes on the chin. There’s the slightly barbed remark – forgivable if funny – and the “Just Don’t Getters”, who wouldn’t know a joke if it DM’d them. And then there are the trolls, always on hand to shout Baddiel down – for bad language or remainer opinions, for being a “shit comedian and a shit human being”. And for being Jewish, of course.
Why engage with them? Baddiel seems to spend an inordinate amount of time in dialogue with people who are not worth it. His defence is: he’s a comedian, trolls are hecklers, and it can be fun to conquer them with humour. There’s clearly some moral imperative too: you can’t let these people have the last word. And there’s his point about empathy: Baddiel indicates over and again how his aggressors fail to empathise with him as a human being. An observation only slightly undermined by the lack of empathy in some of his own tweets – to Katie Hopkins, say.
But Baddiel admits: “I will not be occupying the moral high ground,” cheerfully ascribing his Twitter use to a narcissistic need for online approval. There are no proposals for how the platform (and public discourse more widely) might be redeemed, just the insistence that, if it can be a cesspit, it’s a site of camaraderie and communion too. He relates several instances where droll dialogues or exchanges of wordplay spring from his innocuous opening tweet. This is, he reports, like “conducting a comedy orchestra”. There are hilarious examples – even if the final quoted tweet, which he asks to shoulder the weight of his optimistic conclusion, can’t quite bear it.
Throughout, recurring characters and running jokes provide structural cement, and our host’s reflective asides (about the unprepared-for spike in writing as a means of communication; about the confusion on social media between winning and being right) add intellectual ballast. One doesn’t envy Baddiel his adventures in the Twittersphere. But they’ve produced an enjoyable show, proving the idiocy – and invention – of the Twitter-using public to be as limitless as the web itself.
• At Cast, Doncaster, 12 February; then touring until 6 May.
