Roy Chubby Brown: baiting, bare-faced cheek that’s grimly unedifying

Would Roy Chubby Brown actually quite like to be cancelled? The thought arose as I watched the ruddy, motley-suited Yorkshireman, whose eccentric look is crowned by a pair of pilot’s goggles, like some Butlin’s Biggles, and who relishes being outspoken in a Seventies-on-steroids way – contend with a Saturday night ordeal of rowdy fans.

Here he was, aged almost 78, launching his 2023 tour at a surprisingly mainstream venue – which has played host to the League of Gentlemen (who assigned Brown’s birth-name, Royston Vasey, to the setting for their esteemed 90s sitcom) and will see Ricky Gervais stop off in April – battling through shout-outs, mainly his catchphrase, “You fat bastard”. He huffed off for a bit, asking security to identify the worst offenders.

There’s an irony to a perceived free-speech warrior wanting everyone to shut-it. But the mindlessness of some of his following reflects on the indiscriminate nature of much of his (often discriminatory) material. In Sheffield and Lancaster last year, local authorities banned him; whatever one’s concerns about that, with the resulting fresh notoriety comes a small measure of responsibility. But Brown shows little sign of grasping that.

The worst of the evening rolls with the lowest common denominator, not speaking truth to power, just punching down, and courting charges of racism. It’s one thing to voice the sentiment, “I remember when white people made f---ing adverts on the TV”, another to use the p-word and a variation on the n-word, jibe at “flids”, or sing a song, to the tune of Little White Bull, about the Robertson’s Jam “golly”. There are also lines about Muslims that sound like hate-speech, and a Holocaust barb related to today’s price of gas. As for sex and the sexes, “It’s funny how women change their attitude once you’ve spiked their drink” gives you the idea.

The defence with comics of this ilk is that it’s knowingly unsavoury, and that there’s a value to testing what is permissible, via the artifice of jokes – let the audiences decide, and so on. Brown’s constituency, he says in his autobiography, is “the hairy-arsed builder or factory worker”. Fine. But should there be such a gross levelling-down in quality?

Occasionally, as with a rejig of The Grand Old Duke of York (re: Prince Andrew) and this riff about Prince Harry, he hits the jackpot: “‘I killed 25 Taliban”. ‘No, you didn’t...’ He put them in a shed and started to read his book, and they shot themselves.” But all too often the baiting, bare-faced cheek (and he departs having madly stripped and waggled a strap-on) is grimly unedifying.

Touring until May 2024; roychubbybrown.biz