Creepy Men in Comedy

Disclaimer: This essay reflects my personal opinions, interpretations, and cultural observations based on publicly available reporting and my own experiences working around live performance and media spaces. Any references to public figures concern matters already in the public domain, and nothing here should be read as asserting criminal guilt where allegations remain unproven.

When I received the single-word text from a close girlfriend—“Finally…”—with the attached article on David Walliams’ pending MeToo allegations, I was glad I was standing up. I’ve never been less surprised by anything in my entire life. David ‘It Was Only a Matter of Time’ Walliams, as he was affectionately known in the industry, is finally having… well, his time.

My lack of surprise wasn’t because I know him in any capacity. I absolutely don’t. But you don’t need to have existed in comedy-aligned spaces for long to know that the abuse of power is more commonly exercised than a Mr Blobby guest appearance when budgets are tight.

We don’t yet know what Walliams has or hasn’t done. And on a completely separate note, people don’t tend to disappear entirely from everything, everywhere, all at once, without reason. Just as they don’t tend to suddenly convert to Christianity, align themselves with the most powerful man in America, and set out on a bible-in-hand pre-court media tour either (a re-Brand we should’ve seen coming a mile off).

I know men like Walliams, and Brand. Not of the same fame, of course, but I know this particular cadence of incremental crisis followed by a damage control clean-up. Growing up in paedo Britain primes you to spot that sort of thing. So, in short, yes: I would put my Edinburgh Fringe savings (albeit £1.56 of it) on the fact we’ll be seeing Walliams in the news again before you can say “Yeah, but no, but yeah, but your honour…”.

False allegations of sexual misconduct are statistically extremely rare, estimated at around 2–4% of all reported cases (1). The system (or as it’s known in the industry: the BBC) already appears to bend over backwards to protect the accused.

It’s worth being very clear here, because these things are often lazily bundled together. There is a vast difference between sexually-promiscuous male comedians who sleep with age-appropriate people (often struggling to regulate their emotions afterwards) and those who abuse power in deliberate, staggering ways.

One is messy, human, often immature. The other is calculated. We’re not talking about awkward post-show validation spirals or consensual bad decisions. We’re talking about three-decade age gap predation. “Don’t go to his house alone” kind of bad. The “everyone knows he’s doing it, but what can you do” breed of man that this particular industry seems to harbour. It’s behaviour that starts with boundary-testing and escalates once it’s clear no one is going to intervene.

A note, before I go further: this essay is my experience, and only that. I’ve worked in retail, in the design industry, the art world, and with publishers— all of which have their own problems with power and men who know exactly how to use it. Every industry comes with its predators, but live performance somehow feels worse.

There are the obvious, practical differences of this space: the casualness of it all, the bar drinks that double as meetings, the lack of clear boundaries between professional and personal. And there’s the fact it’s essentially a personality economy— where access, attention, and approval are currency, and the lines of consent can blur under the guise of charm. But the environment is only part of the story.

I have a theory as to why the abuse of power seems so disproportionately present amongst high-status men in comedy.

It begins with this: fame and social dominance attracting people with early attachment wounds, externalised self-worth, and a fear of irrelevance that never quite goes away. Character flaws we all share— I know I certainly do— but with some crucial differences at play for this specific demographic of predators.

The first component is access. They have the opportunity to act on these feelings every single day. (Or, more likely in these spaces, at night). An audience of, at first, willing participants. Star-struck fans. A barrel of fish, and fame is the gun.

But access would be nothing without the second ingredient: novelty. Women have access too, of course. But the majority of women don’t have a history of struggling to attract or initiate intimacy in the first place (oh, don’t shoot me, we’ve been fielding the abundance of sexual attention since puberty. I’m not having you rewrite history as and when it’s convenient.)

Access is not novel to most women, so it doesn’t arrive as a sudden surge of power. It feels familiar. Normalised. Not intoxicating in the same way. I’ve been fending off men hanging from white van windows since before my first period, so a post show “can I buy you a drink?” is par for the course. For men to whom this influx of opportunity feels new, the urgency to act on it must be palpable. And any sensation this immediate is potentially addictive.

Comedy, as a profession, is specifically worth examining here. These aren’t men who grew up being desired (sorry, but you say it yourselves all the time— it’s literally the premise for most of your shows). They’re not actors or models, nor are they the ‘popular kid’—people for whom attention arrived early and often, and had time to normalise. They’re the ones who noticed everything and were noticed by no one. Frequently outsiders by nature, by neurology, by the very instinct that made them funny in the first place. The joke was always the currency. The presence, and the power? Those came later. And when they did, they arrived without any of the psychological scaffolding that might help someone carry that responsibly.

For a man who spent his formative years invisible, suddenly becoming magnetic isn’t just exciting, it’s completely destabilising. That shift— from the person no one looked at to the person everyone wants a piece of— is its own particular drug. And like most drugs, it’s the ones who discover them late who are most at risk of not knowing when to stop.

Then what?

Maybe having new-found access to these men feels a bit like the Scoville scale. Once an otherwise ‘normal man’ realises he can sleep with a larger spectrum of people than previously possible, maybe it gets boring after a while. Monotonous, even. Once he’s covered off the adoring fans, the fellow comedians, the producers and directors, he finds himself wondering if he could chase the rise he used to feel in pursuit of something more difficult. A model. An actress. Katy Perry, even. And what comes after that? The most inaccessible people in the world. But who are they? The daughter of some guy who wanted tickets? A nineteen-year-old show runner? Perhaps someone who clearly doesn’t want to have sex with you at all? Closer and closer, we edge toward the unthinkable. The undoable.

Of course, you can have all of these ingredients and still end up a fairly well-adjusted person. I’m not interested in pathologising an entire demographic, and I’m aware that’s exactly what it can look like from the outside when a woman writes something like this. But I’m not describing everyone, I’m describing a pattern. And ignoring a pattern, one that we’re being very clearly presented with, is often what proves most detrimental. Isn’t that right, Mr BBC? (allegedly, allegedly, and I repeat: allegedly).

Once the line is crossed, why do they get away with it? And for so long, too?

Would it be outrageous to suggest that the same industry that manufactures these untouchable, adored, all-access men are also deeply invested in preserving them? In protecting the money-making machine for as long as possible? I hate to say it, but once you’ve made someone untouchable, they’re going to be pretty fucking hard to touch. And there they are: the untouchables, touching what they, in turn, shouldn’t.

I’m absolutely sure there are plenty of people within the comedy industry who want nothing more than to take these men down. The only reason I don’t place myself among them is because I’m on the periphery— at what feels like a safe enough distance to say all of this without immediate consequence. I’m not a comedian, I don’t want to be on Never Mind the Buzzcocks or Taskmaster, so upsetting the wrong people doesn’t (in theory, fingers crossed, touch wood, please come to my show) cost me a career.

But for those inside it, the stakes are different. I can’t imagine the number of formal complaints that have been made, the conversations had behind closed dressing room doors, that go absolutely nowhere. Because then what? You lose your job? Your future? You put your livelihood on the line because the guy from the TV can’t keep it in his pants, or his age range? It’s one or two people, more often than not the ones with the most to lose, speaking up against a committee of predator protectors. I know how that feels.

The industry isn’t the only reason these men escape blame. People see themselves in them, too. And empathy, so often treated as a virtue, is one of the easiest instincts to exploit.

I saw myself, for a long time, in sad, broken people searching for a saviour, or a distraction from self.

I’m going to say something you might not like, but it’s an insight that only became accessible to me once I transitioned from audience to performer.

The uncomfortable thing—the thing I only understood once people started doing it to me—is that the dehumanisation of each other is a two way street, of which we’re all implicated.

For years, I related to performers through what they’d made rather than who they were. I’d project a whole interior life onto someone from their punchlines and their Off Menu episodes, and decide I knew them. It felt like connection, and it wasn’t. It was just a very convincing mirror.

There’s a specific loneliness to realising that. To catching yourself mid-projection and understanding that the intimacy you thought you’d found was mostly your own construction. And once I started performing — once people began approaching me after shows with a version of me assembled from my writing and my art and my Instagram stories — I understood it from the other side too. The disconnection of being related to but not quite seen.

This doesn’t excuse anything. But it does help explain how these men might end up feeling justified in the dehumanisation of others. It’s very lonely, being a projection, and I can see how this could be used as internal rationalisation. ‘If you’re not going to treat me as a person, then I’m going to do the exact same thing back.’

It’s no excuse. It’s just something I don’t often see woven into the conversation of famous predators.

I write about these things because they interest me. Because I’ve known them up close and from a distance, for my whole life. Beyond now knowing comedy, and comedians, I know what it is to perform to be loved. I know creeps. And because of this, I’m interested in power— how it moves, how it’s used, and how easily it starts to slip.

Sat across from a man in my first ever industry meeting, he says the words I’ve heard woven throughout the last twelve months: “Truth be told, Harriet, I was nervous to meet you.”

‘Ah good, so it’s working then,’ my mind replies.

“Really?” I ask. Tilting my head as if he’s just told me who’s inside Mr Blobby (it’s The Stig, right?).

A nervous laugh. A sip of water. “Yeah, just your writing and art and all. I didn’t know whether you were going to be so scary in real life.”

Scary.

There are far worse things to be in a room full of men than scary. An industry leaking them—literally frothing at the brim with men. Scary? In this economy? I’ll take it.

For a short while, I assumed it was my writing and my art that scared men into behaving around me. But I’m starting to think it’s simply because I’m thirty now, not nineteen. (And ‘behaving’ feels generous—they’re just not harassing me as much anymore.)

He asks me what happens if my career goes wrong. “What’s the worst-case scenario?” he probes.

Without a second thought I say “cancellation.”

But I’m scared of being cancelled in the same way I’m scared I’ve left my straighteners on when I leave the house with damp, frizzy hair— knowing full well they’re in the box under my bed.

“The people worried about cancellation aren’t the ones being cancelled, Harriet,” he chuckles.

He’s right. It’s the ones loitering in the Pleasance courtyard making eyes across the bar at teenagers. The ones who won the Perrier when it was still the Perrier. The children’s authors we need to worry about— not the ones writing Substacks about them.

I sink back into the corporate throne and make a mental note to write a Substack about this.

I usually like to end these kinds of essays with solutions, but you don’t need that from me, do you? It almost feels insulting at this point, to expect the female writer to suggest ways in which an industry festering in predation can rebrand itself, when so many have done before, to such little avail.

Aside from staying well away from the Russell-style redemption tour, all I can really say is this:

The truth always finds its way to the surface. Humans, as a species, are incapable of concealing anything for an amount of time— both perpetrators and victims. It’s best to have lived in a way that can withstand the curtain call, when it comes.