Edinburgh Fringe: how I joined a secret political correctness brigade

“We can’t say anything anymore! We’re being silenced,” they scream to packed theatres and from inside their multimillion dollar media deals. “It’s political correctness gone mad! We’ve had the rug pulled out from under us,” they yelp as someone frantically weaves another rug to put under their feet. 

A couple of years ago I was about to hit the road on a stand-up tour so I was doing a few interviews to plug my shows. I was asked by one of Australia’s main conservative-leaning newspapers to take part in an interview for a feature to be in their weekend supplement about PC culture and its effect on our comedy industry. Without any hesitation I said yes, I was absolutely happy to take part.

Why? The same reason I do almost anything. I have tickets to sell and I love money. God damn it, I love money. If I wasn’t so scared of getting a communicable disease, I would eat money. They say it doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure does buy a lot of things that look, feel and smell like happiness, so whaddya gonna do?

So a time was arranged, I answered my phone and the journalist introduced herself. We took part in some small talk and conversational pleasantries about the weather. Both of us agreeing that sometimes it’s too hot but at other times, it can be too cold. Then it was time to get down to the business at hand. I would say within around three minutes it became pretty clear that she was not only completely unaware of my body of work, but also had a fairly basic understanding of the comedy industry at large.

We spoke for around three quarters of an hour and I got the feeling I wasn’t giving her what she wanted. It was as if this woman had gone into the interview certain that I was going to be of the opinion that PC culture was ruining comedy and that something needed to be done. Somewhere she’d taken the position that the nation was headed towards some cultural dead stop and we comedians were furious about it.

Our dialogue got more and more heated as I tried to explain that, yes, you can still say whatever you want these days, it’s just that there might be some repercussions. Back and forth we went. Over and over until through breathless anger she roared, “I mean, don’t you think there is . . . it’s just like . . . I feel like there is a PC brigade out there trying to ruin the careers of straight white male comedians!”

I tried to answer as diplomatically as possible. “Oh, I don’t think that’s true. It’s not like there is a secret underground community of minorities working to slowly and systematically destroy the life and works of cisgendered men in the entertainment industry. Hahahahaha. That would be crazy.” I hung up the phone, looked out the window and thought to myself, ‘We need to be more careful.’

I first joined a local chapter of the PC Brigade in late 2007. I was 17 and had just begun doing open mic in my hometown of Newcastle. One evening, while walking through the venue’s car park, I was approached by a shadowy figure.

“That was great stuff in there,” she said. “How’d you like to serve your country?” She had short, dark hair and wore a long flowing rainbow cape. “I’m putting together a group of like-minded individuals,” she continued.

I would later find out this person would become our commander: the Supreme Leader Hannah Gadsby. She was travelling the world to bring together an elite faction of radical queers and people of colour with one goal: the complete destruction and devastation of heterosexual white men.

When I became a member, our organisation was still quite small. Just a few chapters in major cities and surrounding areas. I trained for a couple of months in the Newcastle office’s set-up in the back room of the town’s first cafe to serve oat milk. Then, when I turned 18, I was stationed at the headquarters in Sydney, where I worked in what was then called “the mailroom”. Three years ago we decided in a meeting that “mailroom” was too masculine so it’s just the “letter space” now.

Over a decade or so, as we’ve grown, I have climbed the ranks and worked in several areas of the Brigade. First in Homosexual Recruitment, then Internet Censorship. For a spell I worked in the casting of crisis actors and I even had a tiny consulting role in a project that would later become known to the public as “World Pride”. Our work was often slow, arduous but always rewarding. For years our growing band of merry sexual deviants, racial minorities, and people living with a disability set up small mechanisms to tap away at Anglo cis men in politics and media. The problem was we always came back to the same issue. We kept hitting the same wall. The reason it had all begun. How were we going to ruin stand-up comedy?

From the outside it seemed so simple, but it just wasn’t. The truth is white male comedians are like a hydra; every time you cut off one head there’s three more ready to tweet #NotAllMen. We have had our losses of course. Some downright bungles, to be honest. We probably shouldn’t have started Twitter. That was a clear misstep. Several years ago a mission, code-named “Honeypot”, went pear-shaped when an agent was specially trained to go undercover and create a space in which we could attract and, through clear logic, debunk some of the most dangerous higher-ups of the straight cultural hierarchy.

We planted them first in stand-up comedy, then the dizzying world of Mixed Martial Arts. Unfortunately we hadn’t anticipated the pressure this team member might feel being in there for so long. In the early days of the mission he pleaded we pull him out so he could return to long-term partner Brendan and their two cats Betty and Joan. We foolishly resisted and they lost their mind, started smoking cigars indoors and went rogue, starting a podcast called “The Joe Rogan Experience”. It was a learning curve for the whole Brigade. We will never forget how we lost a good agent that day. 

It was in a think tank in the summer of 2015 that we had our eureka moment. “I’ve got it!” Zoë Coombs Marr shouted. “We all have to become successful comedians.”

Looking back, it all seemed so straightforward. All we had to do was make it seem like we were good at comedy, win all the awards and then gaslight the public into thinking racism, sexism and homophobia weren’t funny anymore.

By the beginning of 2016 we had a plan. Zoë would win the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s Most Outstanding Show Award (Australia’s most illustrious comedy honour) and, as an assault on the institution of heteronormative marriage, Zoë and I would get married to each other at a large charity event in aid of queer youth. That’ll get those straight white assholes I thought as we handed over the much-needed cheque.

You see, what you need to know is, our work was and never will be about helping people or making them feel included. Sure, it may seem like that from the outside, but no. Our main and only goal is to ruin the lives of men in comedy and their allies. #AllMen.

Look, we just have nothing better to do.

Rhys Nicholson: Huge Big Party Congratulations!, Underbelly Bristo Square, 8.25pm, until 25 August