Graham Norton has said there is no “weird comedy police” deciding what is and isn’t funny, and that people don’t want “shock” in entertainment today.
Speaking to The Guardian about his judging role on the UK version of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Norton said that he didn’t miss the dirty humour of his original Channel 4 chat show So Graham Norton as he has grown more sensitive.
“Things shock me now that wouldn’t have shocked me when I was 25,” he said. “Maybe I have become more sensitive.”
He continued, “I always think it’s weird when people talk about jokes and what you can do, or ‘you can’t say anything now’. And it’s like, the only people stopping you are your audience. They decide what’s funny and what’s not funny. There isn’t some weird comedy police.
“If I came out in front of my audience on a Thursday night and did some of those jokes we did [on So Graham Norton], the audience would just look ashen. And they wouldn’t like it. It is partly, I think, because of Twitter and things now, where there’s so much bile and viciousness out there that people don’t want that in their entertainment.”
Asked whether comedy is under threat from “cancel culture”, in which individuals are boycotted or called out online, Norton said it just means comedians “have to be slightly cleverer about what [they’re] funny about”.
“I think there’s nothing fearless about soft targets,” he continued. “It’s actually the opposite of fearless. You’re picking on people who don’t have a defence, who don’t have a voice.”
Norton is one of the judges on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, alongside Alan Carr and Michelle Visage. The competition series, a UK spin on the wildly successful US Drag Race, debuts on BBC Three on 3 October.
