Jerry Sadowitz is planning to vote for the British National Party at the next election. No, really, he is. “The only party prepared to discuss the real issue in Britain today — immigration,” he says, jabbing the table of a cafe in Clerkenwell, central London, round the corner from International Magic, where he works part-time. “The hospitals don’t work, the schools don’t work, the transport system doesn’t work. Why? Too many people. Something has to be done and the BNP might do it.”
As an argument this is simply too ignorant to bother countering. As Sadowitz knows, the desire to shock obeys the law of diminishing returns. He has been a stand-up comedian for more than 15 years, saying unpleasant things about racial minorities, cancer and Aids sufferers, incest and paedophilia. The world’s continuing refusal to oblige him with a career has been met with a considerable ratcheting up of his indelicacy.
It was easy to predict that things would end up like this. When Sadowitz first appeared, in the late 1980s, British comedy had ground to a halt. Inspired by more combustible American comics such as Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks, he burst on to the circuit. He had a brief ascendancy confined mainly to student unions and late-night arts festival slots, depicted as a feral Glaswegian savage prepared to say the unsayable. Then in 1994 he greeted the Montreal comedy festival with the salutation:
“Good evening, moosef******!” and was assaulted by someone in the audience. Things have been pretty quiet since. “My name’s quite famous still,” he says, “but I’m not.”
At this remove it is difficult to recall the majority of Sadowitz’s routines. Largely they consisted of citing a television personality such as Paul Daniels or Jeffrey Archer and attaching a gynaecologically derived insult to their name. His most famous quip is perhaps the one about Nelson Mandela: “I don’t know, you lend some people a fiver and you never see them again.”
The problem with Sadowitz’s act was that, ultimately, he derived more pleasure from his audience’s unease than he was prepared to deliver as a performer. It was one-way traffic — if you felt short-changed you shouldn’t have been so stupid as to be there. These days he performs only a handful of shows a year, such as his forthcoming appearance at the Glasgow International Comedy Festival and a mini tour of Scotland; the business simply won’t touch him.
Most prophets are without honour in their own land because they can do the trick only once, after which their imitators get the knack and seize the advantage. Broadly this is Sadowitz’s story. Once out of the bottle, the genie often finds himself at a loose end. Sadowitz isn’t prepared to live on the gratitude of his peers for having smashed British comedy’s smug and pious consensus. It seems, though, that he has little choice.
So his woes are legion, he explains. He believes his material has been stolen and sanitised by many mainstream comedians. His two television series, The Pallbearers’ Review on the BBC and The People versus Jerry Sadowitz on Five were both cancelled. He is the victim, he says, of whispering campaigns that have rendered him unemployable. “They say I’m difficult,” he rages. “If it’s difficult to want a microphone that works and to get paid then, yes, I ’m difficult.”
He has no manager nor an agent and organises his own infrequent stage appearances. Like Peter Finch in Network, he’s mad as hell and ain’t gonna take it any more, not unless we start being nice to him.
“I’ve never been allowed to have anything I’ve wanted,” he says grimly. “I wanted to perform because that’s the only time life makes sense to me. Can’t do that. I just wanted a nice flat where I could put my books and props. Can’t have that. I have to live in some tiny bedsit in Camden, with all my stuff lying around in bin bags.
“Maybe a girlfriend? Nope. I’d like some relief from depression and illness (Sadowitz suffers from ulcerative colitis, a condition requiring twice-daily steroid enemas). No chance whatsoever. God hates me; it’s just that f****** simple. I accepted that fact a long time ago. He looked at Frank Skinner and said: give him millions of pounds, a television series and a mansion. He looked at me and said: give him some horrible disease and a life of misery. I really wish he hadn ’t, but what can I do about it?”
Although aggressive on stage, offstage Sadowitz is thoughtful and courteous (that is, when he’s not offering loud and lascivious comments about the group of young girls at the next table). He even has time for the notion that his misfortunes are karmic, some manner of punishment for cultivating a world view that is overrun by the weeds of fear and loathing. Like all extremists, he has a tendency to mysticism, one example of which is a belief in the “third mind”.
“There’s your conscious mind, right, and your unconscious mind, where you store all the stuff you can’t be bothered thinking about,” he says. “I believe that when the unconscious gets overloaded there’s a channel into the body where the thoughts go. I think that’s where mine go anyway, explaining why I’m in this state.”
This brings us to a discussion on close-up card magic, of which Sadowitz is a polished exponent. In the past few years his shows have tended towards 80% magic, 20% comedy, the former being a more marketable commodity than jokes concerning television personalities and their taste for necrophilia.
Sadowitz is obsessed with magic. He never leaves the house without a pack of cards and spends every idle moment either studying tricks or devising new ones, though he refuses to perform them on request because it deprives magic of “the dignity it deserves”. His only regular income now is from his job in the magic shop.
The obsession, I suggest, is understandable but not necessarily healthy. Isn’t the magician consumed by hatred of his victims, by their inability to see the trick that’s being played on them? Don’t they come to see them, and by extension the world, as gullible, clueless fools? This has Sadowitz quite worried.
“I don’t think so,” he says eventually. “The magician only cares about the beauty of the trick. Everybody involved knows they’re being fooled, that’s the beauty of it, the willing suspension of disbelief. You only hate the victims when they start trying to work out how it was done. You want to say to them, don’t bother, a genius spent 10 years creating this trick and you think you’ll solve it in five minutes.”
Beyond a routine on the difficulties of self-administering a foam steroid enema, Sadowitz has no idea what he’ll talk about during his forthcoming shows. “The day before, I panic and drag up all the junk that’s been brewing in my head.” He foresees the day when he abandons comedy completely. “It’s just too painful,” he says. “I’m an all-or-nothing person. If I can’t do it all the time, why do it at all? Occasionally someone will recognise me in the street and it reminds me that to some people I’m still showbusiness Jerry, not every-day-in-pain, working-in-a-shop Jerry. It’s too much to bear. I don’t know what I did to annoy God. But it must have been something pretty serious.”
Jerry Sadowitz — Not for the Easily Offended, Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, March 19-21
