Asexual comedian featured in BBC Documentary "#CancelKarenDunbar"

[TheAceOfShards]

Hi everyone,

Last year, myself and my safe-space inclusive Comedy show "The Diversity Quota" were filmed as part of a BBC documentary about Karen Dunbar, a Scottish comedy actor who was big in the noughties and wanted to find relevance again in today's contemporary entertainment world but was worried about being "cancelled". If you're rolling your eyes already, don't worry, I am as well. I was immediately skeptical about being filmed for this film but the producers had expressed to me that Karen was eager to learn and improve, so perhaps I was very naive when I thought that perhaps I would be able to show her how it is unsurprisingly very easy to do good comedy without having to rely on derogatory and offensive humour that punches down and mocks vulnerable communities.

Safe to say we didn't see eye to eye, and most of the footage we shot didn't make the final cut, which honestly i'm relieved about because I found her incredibly aggressive, arrogant and stubborn, failing to see why blackface and transphobia was bad and seemed completely unwilling to hear anything to the contrary. 

In the end, myself and 'The Diversity Quota' only appear very briefly in the film, but thankfully our segment was overall framed positively I think. Karen does refer to me as an asexual comedian at one point in the film, and makes a joke about me being a panromantic asexual. In all honesty, I didn't mind the joke really, it wasn't far off something I would say in my own regular stand-up, which is mostly comprised of me talking about asexuality and being self-deprecating, and at least the joke was just targeted at me and not the entire community.

The entire film as a whole I think gives a very tepid analysis on the dissection of offensiveness in comedy, and at some points contradicts itself by previously showing just how distressing it is for trans people to see comedy made at the expense of them, but then later the film acts like people are just being too sensitive, even though it had already displayed the actual consequences of bad insensitive joke-making.

But I digress, I could write 50 pages on my torturous experience of the actual filming process for this film and my rather mixed thoughts on the end product. On the upside, I guess  technically this makes me the first Asexual comedian on the BBC, even if it was for only a minute or 2! If you have a UK TV licence (or VPN), then you can watch my bit at around the 40 minute mark!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0014twx/cancelkarendunbar