Sloss and Humphries On The Road - Patreon Bonus: Soz God

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Due to our lost luggage setting us back we are releasing this archive Patreon episode as your weekly public ep. If you are looking for inspiration on who to see at the fringe please go see Rueben, he is an absolute delight.  Recorded May 2023 Rueben Kaye joins Muggins in Perth, Australia to dissect the recent events that saw his Sydney show cancelled by the woke right after an innuendo on television was escalated beyond comprehension. After a false finish they come back after the final whistle to cover the coronation, sometimes you're just too busy blaspheming you nearly forget to bring down the monarchy.

Hello to our beloved patrons. Thank you for subscribing to our podcast. I honestly believe you have got a solid return for your investment in this bonus episode because we have a wonderful guest, Ruben Kay, who is on in Daniel Sloss's absence. I interview Ruben. It is like an interview because he's going through so much at the minute. He's going through so much controversy and we're chatting about it, but he unpacks the issue with so much humor, so much intelligence, and so much charisma. And it's such an interesting, insightful conversation that we've just had. And it has everything this episode. It's dirty, it's filthy, it's silly, it's fun. And we even end the podcast and we start leaving the hotel and we're chatting and we'll laugh about something.

And we're like, right, let's go back on and press record and talk about this so there's like a false summit where you think the podcast's over we've done all the plugs we say good night and then we'll come back on and just do like a marvel after the credits bit where we talk about the king's coronation and all that shit so enjoy this episode i hope you have as much fun as i did recording it ruben is an absolute legend and it's been a delight chatting with him for the last hour or so. Go and enjoy it. Sloss and Humphreys on the road.

Muggins and cream, cream and muggins, straight thuggin', livin' the dream. That's our intro. Fuckin' muggles. Ticklin' the clit inside your head that makes you laugh. Woohoo! Ha ha ha! They said it can't be done. Are we in the same seats?

That's hack. Ah, muggles. Accidental rim job in the park. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Or am I just being cynical? Just muggled it up on fucking Mugglepedia. Where have you been since 9-11? Ruben.

Hi. Thank you for joining me on the podcast, mate. It's a pleasure. I've known you just like a couple of days, like three or four days, but we've worked together non-stop since we met. It's been lovely. It's been nice, hasn't it?

Yeah. So we met at the comedy store, done a couple of gala shows out in Perth practically touring together it's it's so funny I think there's an immediacy of when you're working with a comedian it's not just like oh we're we're working together you see each other in quite vulnerable places just before you go on stage, just after you come off stage, and also while you're on stage. It's one of those things I think for comedians, it's a way of masking who you are with your gags, but it also amplifies exactly who you are in terms of what gags you make, what taste level.

And it's that interesting thing when you're with comedians, I feel it a lot of knowing that other comedians are also listening and watching the set, the scrutinising eyes. There's a vulnerability about that, isn't there? Because I'll sometimes stand at the back and even if I love the comic that's on, pull apart the set. Yeah. And you'd be a fool to think that's not happening to you.

It's terrifying. One time we were at the factory in Sydney and it was me, Cassie Workman, Geraldine Hickey, Rosie Delaney, AJ Lamarck, like pretty great names. Geraldine Hickey, Cassie Workman, two people I look up to hugely. I'd only just started working with Rosie Delaney, but she's got this fantastic gag. She's the only one of those guys I haven't met.

Oh, really? Yeah, I've never seen Rosie. Trans comic, and she walked out on stage and says, you can try to give up smoking. I'll butcher this gag. You can try to give up smoking. You can try giving up cigarettes. You can try giving up dairy.

But has anyone here ever tried to give up male privilege? It's really great. It's really good. But we bombed. I think everyone found the room really hard. Very small room. Everyone was having a rough time. And what city was it in?

Sydney at the factory. But the laughs were coming from backstage. Yes. Suddenly you heard like Geraldine Hickey laughing or Cassie Workman guffawing. And those are two comics with pretty high standards. Yeah. And suddenly we all realised we were kind of performing

for the other comics more than the audience playing in the back of the room yeah yeah that's the salvage isn't it it's like i can take this gig down in flames all right gonna make the comics laugh yeah they're the two options it's like making the crew laugh yeah you know there was a great moment um brady snook had a joke at the at that gig we were at um shazam and your song at a funeral and it didn't get a great response but i yeah i lost it you come up to me after that and you're like that's just three words that go great together shazam song funeral yeah perfect i don't need any more from a joke yeah it's also it's because i'm a dirty comic i work a lot and you know shit piss cock bum poo whatever when i find

someone who's made a joke that's clean that's really good yeah love it that's why i love that guy john crookshank yeah yeah he's just got such fun silly victimless clean jokes i know i have so much envy and i don't think i could write one of them if i tried i don't know i think your wife comes off really great in that bit you do. Man, if you met my wife, she is the most dignified, wholesome, beautiful woman. What does she do when you do that set? Just make sure that her mother never sees it. Essentially, she's just like head in her hands, just, look,

I have to give him full creative license. You know, I have to give, I can't hold him back on what he wants to talk about. That's lovely. i'm behind this wholeheartedly but let's just put my head down and hope not to be recognized in the crowd because my family all have opinions and notes on my act continuously that actually oh you get grief for it or not? Yeah. My mom, I had to take a strict boundary of like 24 hours after a show, you cannot give me any notes. Because she would come up and be like,

has everyone told you you're great? Fantastic. You do this little thing in the second half, I think you should switch it to this part of the show. I think this joke belongs here. Direction. Oh, that's different. That's good. That's good. That's welcome. Is it?

No, no. If it's good direction. I don't have a very, I'm not good at being told what to do. So I'm like, get away from it. Why are you trying to put my chaos in order? Correct. But also, like, I admire people who are much more easily collaborative. And they go, oh, yeah, yeah, what do you think?

And they don't have that boundary of being wounded. The first thing that happens to me is I take it personally. I'm quite sensitive. I'm so vulnerable. I am. Why would you get me now? Exactly right. Right when I've just exposed myself on stage and you just see the open flesh wound

and you're just in with a salt. That's it. That's exactly it. So I try not to censor myself at all. When it comes to my family, my wife, my mother, my father, they come see my shows always and I don't want to censor myself. No.

I'd rather they be upset than me compromise. And have they ever been upset? Well, there was one time I did change the words of something, right? I've got this bit where I'm a teenager and I fell out with my mother and she's not telling me off, but she's doing housework angrily. And she's angrily hoovering the stairs, right? And even though she's saying nothing, I can hear her internal monologue screaming in my direction.

And she's just like, look what you made me me do you made me run on the carpet with outdoor footwear on and i just go out and pack the whole thing where she's like nobody wears shoes on the carpets in this house i've got to keep it looking like a show home the whole time even though we're going to live here for two decades as a family it's got to look like nobody's ever lived here it's in case we invite guests but we'll never invite guests because they make a mess right and she's going through that and the conclusion she comes to she's like actually the more I think about this

the more I think I'm doing it for my own mental illness and that was the line all through the show and then my mother came to watch and I was like I can't do it this is where I shouldn't have been doing it

in the first place yeah because I'm like I can't do it so I changed it the more I think about this the more I think I'm only doing it for my own OCD.

That's what I changed the lane to. Sure. And my mother would come up to us afterwards, like, I just had a banging show, right? She'd just watched us kill for an hour at the Fringe, and she'd just come up and went, do you think I've got an OCD? And I'm like, oh, I'm glad you weren't here yesterday. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right?

Because at least you can go, no, no, no, it's just a joke. It's just a punchline. It's just a punchline. But mental illness, there's no way to hide that. And also it's like everybody, like Natalie in my set that you saw, my mother in the set that I done then, the characters. Yeah. It's not quite them.

No. I know for a fact that I don't think my stepmom's going to listen to this but i love my stepmom i'm really lucky i've got um amazing you didn't want to hear that i know right no no she's not gonna listen i've got some jokes i do i do in case just yes but i do and um we get along great but there are some jokes that if she's in the audience i'll pull from the set about my dad who died six years ago um because there's a lot of tropes there's a lot of tropes in queer comedy about fathers you know and uh i work within those tropes but i know that if she were in the audience she would find those upsetting yeah uh and you know out of sensitivity for that

i'll pull those jokes yeah people like that are in the audience yeah people have a different boundary for it's disrespectful don't they correct well i don't it's a difference between like disrespectful and and she would she wouldn't find it disrespectful she just i could feel that she would just go oh that's that's upset her because it brings back painful memories and things she she loved my dad, I love my dad. Yeah, but you just deal with it in different ways. You can use humour and stuff. Yeah. Whereas she'd rather be sombre.

Exactly right. And also I guess there's also an element of, you know, 70-year-old middle-class women in my audience or it's like the queer community and the stories that we hold in the queer community part of my audience and the answer is yes there's both so i tell different stories for both yeah it's decorum isn't it that's what's strange about this job is right i operate in decorum if i'm at my if i'm at my wife's parents house you'll not see me swearing one might slip out but it's an accident yeah and

i hold myself in a different way it's and then when I'm on a stag do with my friends, you'll see a completely different side of me. And then every now and again, both those people are in the same room. And you're like, oh, both of them people are me. This is why I do not let my friends mate. No, do you not? I get so anxious when my friends mate. Because I do feel like I put slightly different versions of myself

within different friendship groups. And when they meet, they start talking about me. And that's when I go, oh, God. Some of your friends really respect you and some of them have seen you at your worst. Yeah. And they're just ruining any respect you've gained with that group of friends. Well, all the different stages in the friendship. Some of them have met me being like, oh, yeah, he's the planner.

He's the one who cooks. He's like the nurturer. And I go, no, he's the hot mess who we had to pull out of the middle of the road. Yeah, people cook for him. Yeah, people organize for him. He doesn't know how to do anything. Yeah, that's funny. I like your opinion counts for something amongst a certain group of friends.

And then you meet your friends where you've fucked up with your opinion too many times yeah you've showed too much hypocrisy you've changed on a day and your opinion means dirt to them friends and then they meet the ones who think that you've got wisdom yeah yeah we have a bunch of friendship groups and some of us are like oh well he's the wise owl of the group and i'm like no no he's he's the one who does who's functioning with oral gonorrhea half of the time. Yeah. And then they've got to meet your church group. Yeah. Yeah, I really get off on my friends meeting each other and getting along.

That's nice. I love that. I've got friends from Newcastle that live out in Liverpool, Manchester, and comedians that stay at their house when they're gigging in that area. And they in that area and they don't need me I didn't have to facilitate it I didn't middleman them hanging out for the weekend they've just met on various occasions that I've been doing I just look at this go look at that friendship friendship blossoming that's between two people from completely different walks of life the fuck was that that was like a doorbell do you have a doorbell i know um was it your phone did your phone let off some kind of alert oh yeah it was that was my um that was my virgin

australia app telling me it's time to check in not a plug sorry i'll turn that on silent i'm a professional yes it's all right we had Bart Freeburn on the podcast the other day and his heart rate monitor went off five times, saying his blood sugar spiked. He was having a diabetic coma and he was just styling it out. He was like, oh, no, I'm really sorry about this going off. He doesn't just slow, like, bring out a syringe and start tourniqueting his thigh and just going,

I just need to give myself a little shot. Yeah, amputators too. That's fantastic. So I wanted to talk to you about everything you told me last week about your dramas. I've had so much drama. Because me and Daniel talk on this podcast a lot about cancel culture being a bit of a myth.

It sells tickets. No one really gets canceled. And just like people are like trying to get canceled. And then something really peculiar happened with you. The right who defends free speech and try and make it so that like everybody, nobody can be deplatformed. They managed to actually physically deplatform it. Yeah.

Can we unpack this? Sure. So for anyone who's, I just went on The Project. The Project is a TV show here in Australia that started off as a sort of a larrikin news parody show, a bit like The Mash in the UK. Can you explain to me the word larrikin? Is this an Aussie term or just a word? I don't know, but I've seen it a few times since I've been here.

Larrikin. It's sort of like, oh, he's a prankster. He's a bit of a drunk. He's maybe a bit of a public nuisance. It's part of the Australian worshipping of the outlaw. Yeah, okay. That kind of thing. It's a bit, oh, he's just a bit of a mess.

He's what we would call problematic, but adorably so. Uh-huh, great. So we like larrikins. Yeah, we like a larrikin. Is larrikin a noun? It's a person. Is a larrikin like a... No, it's a noun and possibly an adjective.

Right. But I would assume that like comedians would be called larrikins, like Sloss or you would be larrikins, adorable, cheeky. Optimist deeds getting away with it. That's it. Exactly. And it started as this show, the project started as this sort of slightly lefty, let's say, humanist news parody TV show

and was really popular. And then it's obviously it's transformed and its audience has transformed to a slightly more mainstream or incredibly mainstream and increasingly slightly conservative, I would imagine, audience. And as such, the material on it has also sort of the edges of it have necessarily have been a bit dulled in my personal opinion so they kind of they kind of changed to where the audience was coming from and leaned towards it rather than just sticking true to who they are

and letting the audience develop did they yeah i think it all just sort of so i think as tv became more more risk averse you know i think you can see that in a lot of television programming. As TV audiences have dwindled, they've gone, well, we don't have the finances or the resources to take big swinging risks or make edgy stuff that could result in less viewership. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

So it's become a bit less risky. And I was booked on it. And on it I told a joke that I've been telling for 10 years. Yeah. It's one of the first jokes I've ever told on stage. I think I told it in London in 2011. Oh, really? Yeah. And it was, did you knock the cobwebs off it because it was Easter

and it came it was Easter? Yeah. And it came for this joke. Well, basically, I had been, we'd been trying to get some jokes on TV for my own, like, I just want to, if it's on TV, I want to get this joke on it. I think it'll be funny. Yeah. Right? And in an age where you can clip stuff and get it on socials and, like, anything that

you can package in a short form and put online. Absolutely. So the project booked me. I met with the producers. We went over everything, and then we were on air, and I said the joke, and the joke is I was talking about hate I receive online because I did this thing with Channel 4 where I interviewed kids, and it's one of the biggest things Channel 4 has ever done digitally or

broadcast and within 24 hours I think it had 10 to 20 million views and it's huge and that was before the pandemic so now it's massive but because it was a drag queen sitting in front of kids yeah a whole bunch of right-wing American sites got on called me groomer all this kind of stuff uh and i just said on the project because they asked me what's the reaction to your work because it is very um well they use the term naughty which i think is hilarious on a an adult tv program to be using the words naughty that tells you a lot about the mentality yeah yeah oh it's naughty oh spanks oh yeah because i i'd like you've seen the material i did about my wife i hate it if people call me naughty for that naughty naughty this is what are we the lollipop guild yeah shut the fuck up carry on company it is it is and what it is is

it's focusing and i said to them this is a funny thing that I think, on the program, I said, they said to me, what's it like working in risque material? And I said, well, it's interesting working in taboo subjects because working in filth and politics and religion, et cetera, it's interesting because it gives people the opportunity to think about what's really offensive. The words you're using or the subjects you're addressing. And that is where I love to go, right, here's a dick joke and here's a joke about the current political system. Smash them together and let's see which one you're really offended by and why are you really offended by. A dick joke more than you are offended by jokes about, excuse me,

the fact that there's more food banks than McDonald's in the UK right now. And that leads to why are we so obsessed with filth as taboo when really filth is about sex and love and joy. And also filth is the global language. Correct. It's like there's nowhere in the world you can go where like nobody, like anything that's bodily function.

Correct. We can all relate to it. Like let's just say in the last couple of things like Nick Kroll, who's one of the, I think, most fantastic comics, the topper of his comedy special is a story about shitting himself. Great. Fantastic. And it's similar in a whole bunch of different comics.

Their topper is a story about them shitting themselves. So I said, first first off when you're working in filth it allows you the audience to decide what's more offensive the language you're using or the ideas that you're conjuring up or discussing and then i said they said what's the reaction and i said well the audience loves it but online i tend to get a lot of hate specifically from religious people saying that if i don't accept Jesus' love, I'll burn in hell, which is a ridiculous statement because I love Jesus. I love any man who can get nailed for three days straight

and come back for more. Amazing. Fine. Great joke. Standard. And they laughed. Uh-huh. So you did the joke on the show.

I did the joke. Everyone laughed. And then overnight it all started to gain momentum. We started to see articles come out. We started to see messages on the project and on my social media. And was all of it outrage? No, no. Lots of it was hilarious.

Lots of it was love. It was a small amount of outrage and it started to grow. It started to grow as the Daily Mail articles came out. Yeah. So I guess the Daily Mail is the same over here as it is back home. Absolutely. And it's loaded language. Not just giving people the news, but pushing them in the direction.

It was all queer comic makes disgusting jokes. It was queer comic takes name of Lord in vain. It was, you know, blasphemes or makes crude, crude Jesus joke. Yeah. And you know in your heart that it's an agenda from them because if Daniel Sloss, if Ricky Gervais done any of the things they've said about religion. Oh, it's not about the joke. It's not about the joke. It's about who's telling it.

They are looking to bring you down because you're wearing makeup and you're flamboyant. I also think there's another thing that happened, which is interesting. I think it was at the tail, it was in the middle of Mardi Gras that it happened. And I just think there's a lot of people, a lot of homophobes, who don't want to say anything during Mardi Gras about queer people. Yeah.

But when I, if one of us comes for religion, a lot of it was, you demand that we have to respect you or tolerate you and then you come for our religion. I'm like, no, no, we just want safety. Queer people just don't want to be killed in the street. And if the worst thing that you think is going to happen is I can make a joke about a small subsect of your ideology. That's not the same. They're not equitable.

And also, like, to make fun of religion. Yeah. It's there to be made fun of. Absolutely. If it wasn't so absurd. It's everybody has their own little fairy tales. Exactly. And the rest of us live in a world where people are fucking so stuck to their fairy tales that surely we can make fun of it a little bit if your religion is

2 000 years old uh-huh surely it's it's robust enough to take a little poking uh-huh yeah from a poof you know in australia on a tv show it's and again robust enough to take a poke and from a puff. Yeah. Such a good sentence. I just want to appreciate it. And a lot of the hate that I receive is always religious, but a lot of it is also why can't you be a real comedian like Ricky Gervais, which means they love Ricky Gervais.

That's a different word he said. No, no. But what it means is, again, a straight man can say whatever the fuck he wants and then claim to be a victim you can't say anything anymore but when a poof does it someone who's visibly queer raises their head above the parapet and doesn't want to be the butt of a joke who wants to make a joke um then silence that voice immediately they want us to become invisible and sorry queer people have spent too much time being invisible and to be fair there are cave markings representing queer people from 9600 bce so we predate any idea of religion and alexander the great absolutely he was robust enough to take a poking from a puff exactly and

conquered half of europe and that's next on my agenda and And a leather skirt. Yes. So this escalated and you had a show on at the Endmore. Yep. Amazing venue. Great venue. One of my favorites. A dream venue. Uh-huh. And there was...

I don't want to say too much because I don't know what you're allowed to talk about. Even I don't really know what I'm allowed to talk about. But if you want, you got intelligence that it wasn't going to be safe to do the show. We, so, and it wasn't present in any other state in Australia, but it was just because of this. This is also interesting. So there's a small subject, and I think this is, and I think this is interesting because the timeline of this is very clear to me. I made the joke in Mardi Gras, so people who were looking for a way to push back against queer people found a target

because they had come after religion. Can I ask what Mardi Gras is? Because I noticed that leg, you know, the necklaces and girls gone wild. That's what I see Mardi Gras is. It's like that, but for queer people. It's Sydney gained lesbian Mardi Gras, Pride. Yeah.

And it was World Pride and Sydney gained lesbian Mardi Gras. And World Pride happens every two years at a different city around the world. So it was huge. World Pride in Sydney was amazing. I was performing at the Opera House. It was incredible. So all of these right-wing hate groups are already bristly and like, why am I?

Yeah. Even though like when they think of religion, that's something that's just on top of everybody all the time. There's religion. Think about it all the time. Christmas and Easter and do all these things. And the minute you just go, hey, our thing, they're like, no, quiet. It's very funny to be told that queer people

are sex obsessed when religious people have been shoving it down our throats for centuries in every marketplace as well it's not just oh in churches or we just keep it to churches no it's part of society it's part of capitalism now and that's why when queer people enter capitalism it's such a strong like position as we are now and And isn't Easter a fertility festival? Absolutely. With eggs and bunnies. But like all the Bible is about sex. Sex and blood is exactly what the Bible is built on.

It should be a lot cooler than it is. Well, didn't you see that amazing thing in I think it was Texas or perhaps Florida where they're banning books because they're too licentious and then someone said, well, if you're banning books based on sex and violence, we should ban the Bible. They ended up burning Bibles off the room. Wouldn't that be the fucking best? The irony, never been the purview of the bigot.

And so I do the joke in Mardi Gras, all these homophobes who want queer pushback, want to push back on it, find a target because I've come after religion, I've stepped out of line. There was a boxer called The Spanion who made a very homophobic post during Mardi Gras calling us faggots and pedos, got dropped by his management. This is a professional boxer? Professional boxer.

Yeah. He then saw the project or got latched onto me and latched onto me as sort of a cause celeb to gain clout and marshaled all of his followers going, this Ruben K, it's a double standard, and these guys. And it's all part of, specifically based around the Maronite Christian population in Sydney who are at the centre of the Christian Lives Matter movement. That title, like why does it have racial connotations?

Oh, it absolutely does. It feels like it does, right? The question is why? We know why. We know why. We know exactly what that, three little words. It's like, what is it? Shazam song funeral.

You get it. Christian lives matter. And they started, I was doing the gig at the Enmore at the Laugh Out Proud Gala before my solo show at the Enmore. And 50 men in black from the Christian Lives Matter movement charged down Enmore Road around Newtown chanting the Lord's Prayer and intimidating queer businesses outside while I was performing. Then they started doing a prayer circle, in inverted commas, outside my agent's office, waving crosses, chanting the Lord's Prayer with a huge banner saying, Ruben, come to us, we want to forgive you. And this was all reported.

It's not just me. It's reported on the 730 report on ABC. And they all have prior form or a lot of them have prior form and their intimidation tactics through my social media and to my agents. What do they look like as a group? Are they young? Are they old?

Are they mixed? Are they men? Women? From what I've seen, it's mainly men. And they all look like they have problematic OnlyFans, but they kind of all look like my type, if I'm honest. They're kind of burly men with beards who all look like they bought their vapes from a shop called Statutory Vape.

Does that make sense? I'm not going to lie. Some of them are real cute, I'm not going to lie. Some of them are real cute, which is very au fait for sort of queer sexuality and straight worship and fetishization, right? Do you think a lot of these guys are confused? No, I think a lot of them have been brought up in a church, a very strict Orthodox church, and I think part of the remit

of any religion when it gets to its fundamental core is about removing a person's ability to critically think because how else can you accept the fundamental ridiculous sort of absurdities of religion? It takes indoctrination. It takes indoctrination. It takes cultish. Well, I just think there's a difference between like, I mean,

look, we all say, oh, no, in cults you chant and you drink weird things and you only follow certain rules and you exclude yourself from society. I'm like, that is religion. I was raised in Judaism, right? Orthodox Judaism to me is just as insane as Orthodox Christianity. Religion itself is just, it should be in its purest loving form should be just a little teddy bear you hold when you're scared at night yeah if you need it it's the same and that's the same as anything for me it's julia roberts movies for you guys it's

jesus yeah like in a like if it's hard to accept that when you die it goes dark yeah it's gone right so it is nice to just have a little fantasy in your head correct that like oh i'm just going to explode into this kaleidoscope of colors and like fucking because that's my that's my idea is that you have a big ass dmt dream yeah i think penile gland bursts and you have a big ass dmt take some lsd and viagra and get a hooker yeah i can't recommend it enough in zurich we did we did it. It's great. Anyway, so they, all of this stuff started. My social media, by the way, is my phone,

constant degree, 63 degrees Celsius every day. It's like a coddled egg. You'd pay seven bucks for it on toast in sort of a ritzy neighborhood. And I messaged you about doing this. And then I was like, he's not going in his Instagram DMs. What a fucking cesspit that must be. The week after. I was just going through all the fucking here and there

to find my phone number. So what happened was, as it was going on, my phone, my team took my phone away from me. Right. Because I completely non-communicado. No, I couldn't take it. took my phone away from me. Right.

Because I completely non-communicado. No, I couldn't take it. I was scrolling and spiraling or I was not going outside. Or if I was going outside, I was starting to like get panicky about just being anywhere. And recognized by any of these people. Yeah. And it's not that I think I'm famous enough to be recognized. It's just this in the back of the mind, fight or flight thing.

The people that have been like obsessing over here, they've been looking at pictures of their face. They've been watching the clip. So you may not be recognized by a great deal of people when you go out, but the people that do are going to be dangerous. And it's getting tagged. It's getting tagged in things.

People are saying, come out, you dog. Show us with your face. If I see you in the street i'm gonna drag you out by your hair like quite violent stuff um they were threatening my parents um through me um my parents were under instruction not to open anything that came addressed to me it was pretty crazy um the um i'm still i love that i'm still going through the timeline of all of this. So my phone was taken away from me and then the police, the Vicpol South Australia Police and New South Wales Police were involved. I had to have security at gigs because we just didn't know

what we were dealing with. We really didn't. And one night in Adelaide someone snuck into the show and luckily they just pulled out of their bag a sign. Luckily it was just a sign. Assailant protester. Yeah, right. You know how Pish was written on the scene?

Oh, just Ruben must apologise to my God. There's a hashtag, Apologise Ruben, that's gotten about 100 little tags, which I think is adorable and I think I want to put it on a T-shirt. Just imagine me. Sos God. Sos God.

Sos but lol so it's God you should do this I was going to well I've had the sauce God well the next show is called World War me which I quite like but so it's God maybe World War me in the log line I think that should be the title of this podcast now there's so it's God so it's God I mean I'm sold i'd listen to that um and and then they said they were going to protest it was the bell so then another sorry i'm scatting about here that's all right the there was a pro there's a mark latham who is an was an australian politician it's now i think he's he's out um he made a speech at a sydney church in bellield and he's quite far right. Were you brought up in sermons?

Huh? Were you brought up in sermons at churches? Me? I was brought up Jewish. Sorry, man. Was the issue of you brought up by priests in church? I hope it was. I hope they started sizzling when they said my name in a consecrated ground.

The holy water just started bubbling. No, it just turns into sort of Pinot Noir. It just turns into a nice Sangiovese. And he did this speech and there were about 15 protesters, LGBTQ protesters, because he's pretty hateful speech, and these Christian Lives Matter guys marshaled 250 men and beat the shit out of these protesters. And it was a pretty big deal over here in Australia. So it was actually like actual violence, not the threat of?

No, no, no, no, actual violence. And where is this on the timeline? Is this last year? No, no, this is recently. This is maybe a few months ago. Fuck. And so they made this. And the guy, the lead guy, was on Instagram being like you go to

Belfield you tear these people out by their hair you punch you beat them up blah blah blah he then so that happened and then the threats were we're gonna protest there were 200 people were protesting outside the projects TV officers saying cancel the project, right? Excuse me. And then my management. What were you feeling at the time? Were you just like, fucking look what's happened? Yeah.

Such a small domino. You know, Jesus got nailed for three days. They got the joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then boom, boom, boom, boom, fucking. It's ridiculous. It's also so funny because it's not a joke that hasn't existed before. And it's a pun.

It's a dad joke. If I'd used the word hammered versus nailed, they wouldn't have cared. But the fact that you're making Jesus sexual, which is ridiculous because Christians have been sexualizing and fetishizing Jesus for centuries. So hamada as in drunk, if I could get drunk with Jesus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they wouldn't have cared. They wouldn't have cared.

And if you don't want us to sexualize Jesus, stop drawing him with cum gutters. Yeah. Why is he so buff? He's got an absolute unrealistic ghoul's body, doesn't he? Correct. He's got an anytime fitness fucking. I can't go to church without being body shamed. So, yeah, it was very scary it was a lot i can't explain to you because i'm still working through it with a therapist um i can't explain to you what it was because it kept coming in waves like

some days i would feel okay or i'd forget about it uh and some days i would just sort of disassociate and so and spiral and it's my my fight or flight response this adrenaline surges will just come through and i'd be shaking going all right what what what's happening what do i do yeah so you've got that fate of flight and you're seeing the hit and like it's like a pendulum swinging one way and then you've got all of the love that's coming your way and all of the support that's coming your way and, like, comedians rallying around you and managing your fans. And comedians did. Comedians came forward publicly.

Emre Sciano tweeted, which was amazing. On my Instagram, Rosie Jones came out swinging, which is amazing. Yeah, amazing. It's fucking incredible. And I felt amazing support from comedians, which is so funny because I'd always felt a bit of an imposter syndrome with comics. Yeah, because I've been raised with, oh, you're cabaret, not comedy. Excuse me.

Even when I was nominated for Most Outstanding Show at Melbourne Comedy Festival, people went, oh, well, it's cabaret, not comedy, Ruben. But I think we've got a very inclusive industry anyway where if you're making people laugh, it doesn't matter which means you're doing it there was a great moment in brisbane when something went wrong in one of my acts and the curtain that was meant to like be the kabuki drop reveal didn't reveal so i lifted it up to go under and the whole thing fell on me and my it was a farce of a set just a farce of a set but i was on the bill with some amazing comics so i really looked up to her so i was putting a lot of pressure on myself um and the set kind of got there in the end but when i got off stage every comedian was like side stage cheering and hugging me going yeah you

ate shit yeah and it was it felt really nice yeah it was inclusive there's something inclusive about being roasted isn't it like i want friends that I'll never see anything came to my face, but they'll defend me behind my back. Absolutely. This is what I want. This is what I want and what I have. Not the other way around. There's something, as you say, not just inclusive,

but beautiful and exhilarating about being roasted by people and roasted well because it shows how well they know you and how much effort they're going to put in. And how comfortable they are in your company. How much they know they can get away with yeah and you just take oh we've just like we've pushed boundaries to the point that just isn't any now that's good yeah no that's great uh so let's get onto the timeline again so the timeline again i know it's such a long fucking timeline um and then i think we're up to the valence in Sydney. Yeah.

Oh, well, this is kind of where it got real. This is where my agent called me and said, look, we've had to have a meeting. Were there arrests? They've arrested two people as far as I know in association with all of this. I don't actually know where that's at. Yeah, and you probably won't find out like they don't really share i also think my management i say my management being quite smart about what they tell me and what they don't protecting my mental health uh-huh which is probably necessary like great like i've been

working with all those guys and they're great guys and they'll do the right thing by you i feel very supported very very supported by them the so then they had a meeting with me and they said look um if you want to if we want to do the show on the night that we say we will for sydney comedy fest it's going to be very difficult for us to safeguard the safety of the audience and the band and remember there are eight other comics on at the Enmore that night. So that's their audience and them. And closing the streets. Well, they said, yeah, they said to us,

we would be looking at closing Enmore Road, which is a pretty huge street to close. Which would take mounted police. Mm-hmm. And there would be, I wouldn't be able to even safeguard the businesses on Enmore Road. It's so funny how much is threatened by these people. It's going to affect Marcella's, the butcher's.

Yep. It's going to be affected by it. Right. Front room coffee shop. No, and remember, these people aren't about peaceful protests. They're out for blood, I think. And also it meant that Enmore Road is one of the arteries to the factory theatre, Sydney Comedy Festival.

How many shows are at the factory theatre? How many other comics incomes am I going to interfere with or possibly disrupt? How many other people's safety am I going to endanger? And I have, contrary to popular belief, not a lot of ego about this kind of stuff. I've got a pretty firm idea of what's important. And I was like, just postpone. not a lot of ego about this kind of stuff. I've got a pretty firm idea of what's important.

And I was like, just postpone. I don't lose anything by postponing a show if it just means that other people are safe. It's the same as wearing a mask in public during a pandemic. You do it. You get vaccinated. I'd rather not, but I will. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd rather not, but I will.

Look, there is definitely a psychological point where we all went, is this losing? Is this giving up? Is this giving in? And, look, the thing is, maybe if I was quitting the business, but I've got a full career ahead of me. I've got years of shows and millions more people to piss off. You're still doing a bunch of gigs there.

Scarlet Pimpernel. Catch me if you can. I'm at this gig. I'm at this gig. Where's he going to be? So what ended up happening was at Sydney Comedy Fest, I was the secret guest at multiple shows. So I was running around and I was just like.

And you're like, I've got nothing to plug. They're like, oh, when's your show on, Ruben? It's not. I'm here instead. So I got to go and do a surprise gig at the Sydney Opera House and jump on the bill. I got to go to the comedy store. I got to host at the factory.

I got to host at the Enmore. You know, I still got to do a lot of things, but my solo show. And pork and fun at the Consuelo on stage. Well, I mean, that was the best part. Yeah. It was a really interesting time to feel like an outlaw, you know, but this real kind of – yeah, it felt dangerous, which is what I love because cabaret itself, what I do,

comes from a societal pushback. Cabaret really cemented itself in the 30s, in the Weimar period in Germany, as a response to fascism, rising fascism. So doing it in this sense suddenly felt very real and very exciting and it felt like I was on the coalface of something. Yeah, I mean you really were. Like you were really like fucking pushing against the enemy. Yeah.

Essentially like you're fucking front lane. I love the idea of like the Scarlet Pimpernel's fantastic just scooting around it was and then so we postponed the show we postponed the show we made the announcements and um we're going to postpone it to a date when the theater is all mine as well just easier simpler i don't have to worry about any other comic any other people's audience. And do you think because you've pressed snooze on it then it'll have the heat of what

the momentum had built for them as a front? Like for the right-wing groups, do you think that'll have fizzled out a little bit and it'll be less of a... Yeah, I think it will. Less of an opposition because they'll be angry at something else by then. They get angry at stuff.

It's what they do. And when will this go out? When will this podcast go out? Thursday. Thursday. Yeah, I think there's an element of that. I certainly think, you know, in the same way that dogs chasing cars will chase the next car that comes along. Yeah. I think there's an element of that i certainly think you know in the same way the dogs chasing cars will chase the next car

that comes along yeah um i think there's an element of that i think it'll also be a much less difficult and costly procedure to lock down the end more theater and make sure everyone's safe and check everyone who comes in and you know it won't be a matter of closing a street. Yeah. Or worrying about eight other comics and 10,000 other audience members. Yeah, of course. Because that's what that, those were the numbers. The end was what, 1,700 seats? Yeah.

Eight other comics. Yeah. That's a massive impact. 16,000 people going in and out of that venue in one day. And then you've got the street yourself, you've got the evening yourself. It's so huge. Uh-huh. And is this the, is that the only out of that venue in one day. And then you've got the street yourself, you've got the evening yourself. It's so huge. And is that the only city that that happened in? Are you having any?

Yeah. It's the only city it's happened in. Nothing here in Perth? No. No, no. It's great. We had the show last night. Sold out at the Regal and it was.

Oh, great room. Standing ovation, just fantastic. room standing standing ovation just fantastic and in adelaide uh sold out standing ovations one protester on the last night with a cardboard sign and to be quite frank the audience started to boo him and thank god we had security there because they went no no hang on that's not going to happen and the security could safely escort him, this lovely protester, away to somewhere where he was safe. I'm like, he can protest. Yeah. I believe in free speech.

He can safely protest. You better rate the protest. Absolutely. It would be hypocritical of us to just go, I don't believe in that cause. But also, he went to the effort of putting a Sharpie to a piece of cardboard. I don't want that to go to waste. He even spelt it right. He got out of his single bed in his mother's house,

went over to his little inspiration station, just a single square table pushed up against a wall with no windows. Absolutely. A lot of red thread and maybe a Live, Laugh, Love poster. Maybe a little cat hanging in, hang in there poster. That's it. Oh, that's what Jesus. Why isn't there a picture of a crucified Jesus with hang in there, baby?

Hang in there. That's fantastic. Great. So, yeah, no other city. And in fact, the sales have been great. But in Sydney specifically, and I think it's because of this group, this specific group. So are Christian Lives Matter specifically in Sydney? They're not like, they're just there.

What do you think they do? Do you think they have a clubhouse? Oh, the church. I think they definitely do have a clubhouse. I think the snacks are awful. I think it's always drafty. That's one of the reasons they're grumpy they're always on the verge of catching a cold do you think we're a little

sticker name tags oh yeah can you imagine uh all of them all them written in blood i um i i look the thing is i'm not one to openly how do i put this i don't think there's anything gained by me being openly disrespectful of these people because i don't think that they're the kind of people who are interested in joking about it like they can send me as much hate to me as they want i'll have a sense of humour about myself. And I'll be able to go, well, I'll take that and actually I'll put that in the show. Yeah. You know, one of the messages was just like, hey, drag fag to me.

And I'm like, that's funny. I'm putting it on a T-shirt and selling it. Thank you. I'm going to get a tote bag saying drag fag bag. Like the Pits and Perverts T-shirts. You know what that? Yeah. Where the Mainers, the gay community helped the Mainers in Wales.

What? you know what that yeah where the the miners the gay community helped the miners in Wales what because the miners were getting ostracized and fucking villainized by the right wing media

when they were closing the mines and the gay community saw what was happening to them and just went and started doing fundraisers

for the miners for their families amazing and there's I think the film's called Pride actually okay and it was made

in like 2015 that I've never it's terrible I haven't seen it it's so good yeah and uh and basically they had this this um like a kind of festival where they had because they got called the pits and perverts was a headliner headline on the newspaper right like as if these two these two villains of society had joined and they just made these amazing pits and pitch pits and perverts t-shirts for the pits and

perverts night and all the miners and the gay community went went uh oh i love partying and making money that's fantastic and i managed to get a vintage one for my wife so i got one of the actual ones from the 80s how much did that cost you not even that much just like the price of a t-shirt like maybe it's like 20 quid or something amazing i love that i just love that it's so interesting um it's so interesting where intersectionality comes into it and you just go it doesn't feel like there's a lot of intersectionality on the right and then the left comes through yeah this stuff because they're always into the right just interested in division it's always interested in division it's the only way to conquer yeah i always i always have found that that and i mean

it's it's kind of a cliched opinion anyway but the right really stick together and the left are kind of against each other a little bit so they they like it doesn't matter where you are on the sliding scale of right wing though that if you're bigoted that's good enough for me it doesn't matter how bigoted right yeah if you're just training wheels bigoted well i just think it's because they don't have any um they don't have any interpersonal ideals they don't have any care about feelings right they're just moving forward on an agenda yeah i love when like you have the gay agenda i'm like do we you have an agenda you have not stopped moving on for centuries uh and on the left people are more caring about feelings which is one of the reasons why it's

a good thing but it does mean that we stop in and check we stop in and check and we check ourselves much more than the right does yeah that's i suppose that's what's happening but sometimes it goes too far yeah absolutely goes too far and we get bogged down in the minutiae of it and checking is everyone okay are you being offensive are you problematic out of fear that we're not the right yeah you use the right knows it's right. It's not burdened by that. They just go, well, let's keep on fucking shutting shit down. Exactly.

And then, like, also the left sometimes don't leave you room for growth. So if there's something you said 10 years ago that you've changed on, they'll dig that up to bring you down. And it's so funny. All the right has to do is just, just like drop a little pebble like that. Oh, well, in 2020, you said this in a tweet. And then the left just go on. But also, can I say this?

We say this happens. The output of outrage from the Daily Mail, right, or press like that, is what that is. It's the distraction method. It's the distraction method. It's the outrage machine. It's that. The rise in hate for what I said is calculable by the amount of Daily Mail articles that happen. They fuel the outrage of, and I don't know if these people do think

of themselves, sorry, I don't know if these people do view themselves as the right, like these Christian Lives Matter, or Christians in general, let's say, view themselves on the right, but the press that they read are pulling strings. Pulling strings. Because your Sky News out here is more like Fox News, isn't it? I'm told. Whereas Sky News back home, it isn't like right down the barrel of the lens,

this is how you think. It's just a lot more subtle. It's like, for instance, when I was at the Black Lives Matter marches in London, it was just such a friendly occasion. It was such an occasion of love. There was absolute love and support and that in the air and like if anybody had dropped litter somebody would pick it up if anyone knocked down a road cone somebody

would put it back because everybody knew all eyes are on us they want us to fuck up they want this to end in a riot right and then and then i was there for like what like four hours or something and then hanging around and chatting to people and there's people with megaphones like educating and talking and uh and everybody else listening and it was just such a it was such a like wholesome occasion despite the anger towards what was happening towards black people and um and i went home after that and watched sky news just to see how it was being broadcast and there was this 15 second clip of when it got dark a little bit of pushing and shoving with some police and the police chasing some people down an alley yeah right and they must have had to go through hundreds of hours of footage to get that 15 seconds yeah and then go got it got it show that up north so i'm down in london i've been on the march

i know how it was and now i'm watching on tv and then i'm looking on facebook of everybody going mad yeah it's there yeah absolutely and it's so interesting because uh another thing that occurred was and this was covered as well was that all of these Sky News and Daily Mail and right-wing pundits, all of them 6.30 p.m. news stuff. Like how disgusting this queer comic told this disgusting joke while children were watching at 6.30 p.m. when people are having dinner with their kids and then they play the clip. Every single one of them played the clip. Like, oh, so you don't find it that disgusting?

The clip is still up all over the place because it gets some views and just in case your children missed it yeah here it is again exactly right uh and you know what's good a lot of them children would have been telling that joke at school absolutely because the children weren't offended by it the children would have thought it was fucking hilarious because it was dirty and it was mocking god a lot of them were like how do i explain this joke to my kids i'm like don't why are you watching tv with your kids while you're eating dinner are you afraid to talk to them yeah you're not telling your kids anything yeah plus your kid probably already knows like at what age are you are you really watching a news program with a five-year-old and if you are they're not going to know what this means or you just say oh it's a joke about having sex why Why are you afraid to talk to your kid about sex?

Don't even tell them about the euphemism. No. And just go, well, he got nailed to the cross for three days. You can absolutely brush over it. Exactly. It's a sacrifice. A lot of the comics that I work with in Melbourne work in the writer's room at the project.

And in the project, the comedian in the writer's room gets the job of answering a lot of the Facebook messages as well. Don't know how that job got there. But one of them was like, first off, we got like 6,000 or something messages in a day. And one of them was, this has affected me more than anything in my life. Oh, my God. What a vanilla life.

I know. Have you just been sat there the whole time? Yeah. Have you been in stasis? Have you been in an isolation tub? Have you been in Plato's cave? Have you been watching Shadows on the Wall? Yes.

But yes, I have. Yes. Yes, I have. But that is what fundamental religion is. Yes. It's Plato's cave. This is one thing that I do respect about reform Judaism, which is what I was raised in. And I don't respect a lot about religion.

Two things. One, when I was 13 and I said to my rabbi, I don't think religion is for me. He said, I respect that. All you have to do to be a good Jew is treat others as you would be treated and you can go off on your life. was like great fantastic it respects the idea that being a basic human is not is not solely the remit of religion it's not the only thing you get and then yeah to be able to just go okay be kind yeah like i sure love yeah sure empathy yeah right and yeah you're doing you're doing everything by the scriptures as far as i'm concerned if you're if you're showing kindness and the other thing about jud about Judaism that I like is that it is a religion that is based on not the blind faith in God but a struggle with God,

and it's about education. It values education, and education outside the church, outside the synagogue. And education also involves questioning authority. Questioning. There's so much questioning of God. And within a lot of this Torah, a lot of the religious figures, and they're apocryphal.

You can say that they're fictional. It's all up for debate, you know. But at least, at least a lot of them question God and struggle with God and have a real tussle with God. And it's not about blind faith it's one of the small few things about any religion that I truly go that's that's cool yeah I think because if you're if you're struggling with God and you're questioning God like it it's actually takes a lot of faith to still be with him at the end of it because

the minute you start questioning anything like that, it unravels. Yeah. And look, I'm an atheist. I'm totally up for, I'm totally science-based. You know, I don't believe that there could be a God. And as Stephen Fry said, if there is, God is a fucking asshole for making a world like this, right? But if you're going to try and make a religion,

at least let that religion be grounded in some kind of debate. It should be fertile enough and robust enough. Yeah, you're right. The reason that everyone's so rigid in their protection with it is because they know that the minute you blaspheme is the minute it crumbles. Create a human shield of brainwashed people around this silly story that we've all agreed upon and fight them.

Yeah. Fight them if they try anything. It just feels like trying to make a sandcastle on a wet day. Yeah. It's going to crumble. It's falling apart, isn't it? You know, we were here before. Every human being was here before God and we were fine. It's falling apart, isn't it? Well, you know, we were here before. Every human being was here before God, and we were fine.

Yeah. All religion got built as a form of financial and educational control. Of course. For wealth. Yeah, and it's like maybe it was needed a little bit. Well, we didn't have science. I'm not going to say there wasn't a use for it. Yeah.

Right? Because people might have, like, broke the laws and committed crimes if they didn't think God was watching. If they weren't superstitious beings, that didn't have more answers than that. Do you know a lot of religious laws about food are just because we didn't have fridges. Yeah. We didn't have refrigeration. Oh, yeah.

Don't eat selfish. Don't eat pork. Sensible when you're in. Don't eat pork in the desert where you can't. Refrigerate it. Refrigerate. Of course. Yeah. Yeahensible when you're in. Don't eat pork in the desert where you can't. Refrigerate it. Refrigerate. Of course. Yeah.

Yeah. That's not a. Don't boil. Don't boil. Don't cook meat and dairy in the same dish. Not because you would be boiling a calf in its mother's milk, which is a lovely kind of idea. Also delicious.

Veal and dairy with a cream sauce. Gorgeous. But it's just about the fact that we didn't have proper hygiene. No soap, no antibacterial no nothing washing your hand there are prayers for washing your hands three times it's hygiene rules yeah and also just not even religion putting your shoes on the table that's bad luck is it bad luck did your whole family get food poisoning last time you put dog shit on the table exactly and like opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck what because you knocked your vase over

grandma's ashes got knocked off the fireplace because you fucking opened your umbrella and don't break it. Don't break your mirror because it's bad luck. No, you'll just get glass in your foot, you prick. Yeah, and like, don't walk over three drains. Okay.

Do you know about that one? Don't walk over three drains. Where are you living that you have three drains in a row? And what do you need that much drainage for? We live in Britain

where it rains always. London, right? My wife would run to work when you get the three drain covers, the common three drain covers. If you walk over two, you have to kind of jump to one side. But sometimes she'd be jogging to work

and there's people pushing prams and that, and she's diving into people pushing it. That's very funny. And I had to just, right, what we'll do is we'll go out, we'll run over the drains a bunch of times, right, and then if anything bad happens, we'll deal with it. But you need to get this.

It's exposure therapy. Yeah, we need to get this out of your head so you can live your life. That's very funny. But, yeah, there's people, like, listen to this, muggles that will not walk over free drains. They simply won't. I still go over, like, when I'm walking along a pavement, I'll still like not step on a crack if I can help it.

Oh, really? Which is really stupid because I'm 38 years old. My mother's had two hip replacements. Her back is the least. She smokes. She's a 75-year-old who smokes. She'd love a lie down. Yeah.

And I would love a house. Could you hurry up, mum? Have another cigarette. God, imagine like the one time you stepped on a crack and then it's down she was just like she just physically broke her back that's what that app was actually it wasn't my virgin it was just i've got it linked up to my mom's neural pathway yeah so the drains the drains the three drains in a row yeah of course that would have been unsafe 50 years ago, 60 years ago. Yeah.

Before health and safety, before people started suing the council. That was unsafe. Before we had litigators. That's not a superstition. You fell down a well. Do you know my mate, she's actually the producer of my podcast, Come to Daddy, available where you get all good podcasts. she's actually the producer of my podcast, Come to Daddy.

Available where you get all good podcasts. She's devoted part of her life to operating a pug hospice. Great. So while we're recording the podcast, we used to have several pugs in different forms of decay. Specifically pugs. Specifically pugs because she's like, they've had a hard life. They've been the victim of human kind of genetic interference,

eugenics for dogs. They can't breathe good. No. And when they get older, no one wants them because they're full of health issues and shit. So she had like two 15-year-old pugs in prams. One of them had no eyes because the eyes are the first things to go in pugs because they either pop out or their faces are so shallow that they get poked out by running into things.

And Velma, this pug would just be like snoring and wheezing while we're trying to record a podcast little abominations they really are uh and but velma would go taken up for walks where we were and that's just letting velma off the leash in the street and letting her just stumble around but every so often velma would try accidentally to walk over a grate and fall into it but just her legs because her body's too fat to go through and she'd just sit there just looking like this little wiggling fur sausage. Just a little punk slug.

Yeah, yeah. Just a little punk slug on the drain. Just there. And her tongue would hang out the side of her mouth, but she also had a hemorrhoid. So because she had no tail or eyes, you really didn't know which end. She just had a bum grip in the tongue. Yeah, the grape of wrath.

Just like a hot dog. You didn't know which one was which in the tongue yeah the grape of wrath just like a hot dog you didn't know which one was which until you got too close to it really and she would just sit there on the grate just wiggling and snuffling and kind of going could someone help me please oh that's adorable so my uh i told i've told you that my wife's running a dog soft play no i'll tell you about this everybody knows about the dog and bone on the podcast But it's an indoor dog park for people to walk their dog outdoors As I mentioned it rains a lot in the UK It's muddy, specifically Scotland

She must be making a million dollars You know what? She does well off dog birthday parties I bet she does People are insane People love putting balloons up for their dogs Getting doggy cakes And coming and hanging out

I mean it's more healthy than having kids isn't it? And probably cheaper getting doggy cakes and coming and hanging out. And she's... I mean, it's more healthy than having kids, isn't it? And probably cheaper. Yeah. And she can take her dog to work now. Oh, yeah. Can she?

Yeah, it's just... What kind of dog is it? Peggy's a Cavapoo. She lives in Disneyland. She's got a ball pit. That's awesome. A sand pit. Can I...

Can I come and volunteer and be your dog for a week? Yes, you'll be my dog. You're great. You can come out and hang out at the dog and bone or you can actually just be my dog. Fantastic. Yeah, you and Peggy getting jealous of you.

I've got a leash. It's mine. I'm totally trained for the most days. She's been told, because we were concerned about the summer coming up, but we don't have long summers, but we might have to endure a couple of weeks weeks of sunshine where we compete with the parks you know um but somebody came in for pug club we had a pug club where it was full of pugs and they're like this is going to be great in the summer because pugs struggle with their breathing and the heat you just pump ventolin into the vents what's

ventolin again which one is that the inhaler, the thing you use. Oh, right. It's a steroid. Yeah. Ventolin plug-ins. Yeah, a pug-in. A pug-in. Ventolin pug-ins. We're going to be rich. We're going to be fucking rich. We've invented Ventolin pug-ins to just put Ventolin around the house of pug owners.

Sloss is furious he missed out on this. Yeah. This is great. Well, man, thank you for replacing Sloss today because this has been a fantastic podcast. We've it now and you've got a sound check oh shit i do actually yeah so plug some stuff right so you're coming to the fringe i'm coming to edinburgh fringe uh i'm there for the whole month with my show the k-hole come in and then my we're doing a victory lap of the butchers back which sold out last year so we're doing the last two weeks. Great. And is that your solo show? That's my solo show. Your cabaret show is The K-Hole?

The line-up show. The cabaret show is The K-Hole and then the solo show, The Butchers Back. Just look me up. They're on sale now. And then actually we're about to announce a UK and Europe tour. Amazing. Of The Butchers Back. Great.

So keep in… Are you going to come to Glasgow? I would fucking love to come to Glasgow. Are you going to come to Glasgow? I would fucking love to come to Glasgow Are you going to stay at Maine? Yes, I absolutely am I'm bringing a leash and a ball pit I'm going to bring the ball pit Do you know I used to gig in Glasgow in Candle Reeks?

Candle Reeks? I'm not familiar with Candle Reeks Candle Reeks, it's the street That little cobblestone street just near the rooms What's that gay bar? Is it called Rooms? The Rooms? Riding Rooms

Riding Rooms Near the Riding Rooms You've got to come to the Riding Rooms They'll tear Rooms. Riding Rooms. Yeah, the Riding Rooms. You've got to come to the Riding Rooms. They'll tear you apart. It'll be great. We'll go to the Riding Rooms when we're in Glasgow. I wonder if it's still there. Anyway, I'm on tour.

You can find me on all the social medias, Ruben K official on Instagram, at Ruben K on TikTok and Twitter and Facebook if you're still on Facebook. You relic. And if you're still on Facebook. You relic. And if you are still on Facebook, you're probably more likely to be on Christian Lives Matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Find me on Christian Mingle. Thank you so much, mate. That was wonderful. Hey, it's a joy. Thank you. I'm going to try and come to a short note. I think I've finished my last gig as you start, but I'm going to duck in the back.

We'll go up late. I'm going to claim in the back of the day hall. We're back. We're like, oh, bye, plug some stuff. And we're about to go for lunch, start talking some more. And we're like, let's just talk some more. Well, one thing that we didn't talk about was in terms of free speech and getting cancelled, it's this thing of the writer's always the first person to say you can't say anything anymore and we have to have free speech. Everyone's getting cancelled. It's this thing of the right is always the first person to say you can't say

anything anymore and we have to have free speech. Everyone's getting cancelled. And the thing is it's always the irony of we want free speech for us. For us. Yeah, we want free speech. We want to be able to make fun of you. Yes. We want to be able to make fun of black people, homosexual people,

trans people. Disabled people. Yeah, disabled people. Women. You can't say anything. of black people, homosexual people, trans people. Disabled people. Yeah, disabled people. Women. You can't say anything. You can't call midgets midgets anymore. And I'm like, for fuck's sake, guys, move on. Does that bother you so much that you can't say midgets?

But the minute they come under any kind of scrutiny, the minute they come under, oh, we're victims, we're victims, it's a very great bait and switch. We're saying, oh, you're the ones with the agenda. They have the agenda. You're the ones who are victimising us. Yeah. You know?

It's so funny to be like, oh, Christians have been under attack for years and this is too much. I'm like, what? What? What? Christians have owned the land, murdered people for who they are for centuries. Fiddled with children.

Yeah, exactly. And it's very interesting so that um daniel has a bit about um people that hate the idea of people being triggered yeah burn a flag in front of them yeah they're just triggered by different things yep they don't realize because they're when they are outraged by something they don't realize that they are being triggered no because they think their outrage is legitimate exactly and your outrage has no substance i think there could be a lovely thing to try which is when everyone says i'm offended it's you don't use the word offended use the word challenged challenged i'm challenged by that i'm challenged by that because these people are so built into masculinity as an

ideal that they will not back down from a challenge yeah uh-huh and that's a very different word to oh it's offensive it's offensive offensive means outrage a challenge means you have to grapple with the idea of it and i think that's a really i would love to do that i'm challenged by that and i'm pretty convinced you won't win us over but give it a shot right yeah right i'm challenged by that how do i deal with the challenge i've got a i've got a i'll try and be open-minded to this challenge i'm disagreeing with it right now yeah with the plugins that my software has yeah offended is a shut off so you can do what you've been trained to do which is fight yeah essentially which is violence which is i don't want to i don't want to use my words i want to use my fists i'm

going to defend my opinion like a sports fan. Yeah. I'm not changing theme. Yeah. I support this through thick and thin, even when it's losing. Yeah. Even when this opinion is losing. But also, like sports, often it's about something that doesn't affect them, and they don't have skin in the game.

People love sport because like, oh, I get to do everything and get the adrenaline spike and the dopamine spike while not actually playing the game, while not having any skin in it. Do you know what I mean? And the same for religion. You know what I love with sport is that there's still a bit of primal tribalism in us because we evolved really fast in the last 10,000 years. So there's still a bit of that's my tribe. And what I love is I just get to vent that. I get to go and stand in a stadium and cheer on my team yeah right and then i don't take that into the world but people but

people do they take it into the world and it becomes their identity and the same for religion religion is just fucking soccer hooliganism with better wardrobe and possibly nicer music yeah because again it's also about funneling huge amounts of money away from people who need it most. Yes. And it's about tribalism masquerading as community. And that's another reason why the queer community actually has community.

Yes. And they're royalists at the moment. Oh, my God. Fucking coronation is embarrassing. Again, it's football hooliganism. And you see all the people going, I don't want to talk about the Republican, the Republic, sorry, I don't want to talk about the anti-monarchists. I don't want to give them any oxygen.

I'm like, have you seen the boos? Charles going out and just getting booed. Even Liverpool with Not My King and huge fucking. And it's so ridiculous. At taxpayer expense, this dick is going to get crammed. It's so expensive. There's people starving in that country right now. There's people that can't pay for their heat.

Hundreds of millions of pounds it's going to cost. They can't keep the house warm over the winter. He didn't pay inheritance tax on $1.6 billion worth of inherited wealth from his mum. And you've got poor people that are saying, well, they're bringing in more money. They're bringing in more money than they spend. And you're like, how about you bring in all that money, spend less, and you won't be as hungry.

Imagine if Charles said, hey, look, the $100 million that we would have spent on this coronation, I will give to food banks in the north the north of england or i will give to that funding and someone just put the fucking thing on my head we'll go to the crown we'll film it like a netflix stand-up special a selfie coronation i would have more respect all of us having to tune in and swear allegiance to a piece of sunburned play-doh with no chin oh man how's that the king because i've always i've been saying this about like when when alpha men start talking about i'm a king right and then you're not thinking of that

guy no he looks like he shares genetic material with a half-shaved spaniel. Like, why is he? I don't understand it. What did you say on stage about the spunk, the text? Oh, my God. I said, I have this bit. I have this bit about the fact that he's getting crowned not by an assessment of merit or capability or an electoral process, just by the divine right of kings, which just means it's hereditary. It just means that seed was involved.

And you know it's going to be that old English thin watery load, like when a room temp egg white can't hold its shape. And it's very different from me because I like a man so butch when he comes I have to chew. I want it like a shotgun full of gnocchi. Because you said that and I was like you you just said it once and i'm trying to memorize what you had said so that what i'm doing the wounded deer the wounded deer is so graphic it's so shockingly awful when you said it a chill ran through my body because i

all i thought of was bambi oh yeah like bambi's mom when she disappears into the bushes and you hear the gunshot and the silence and bambi's are going mom that's what i thought of that's why that's what natalie was becoming that it was so good so do you know um i've got this thing that i hadn't heard of until i realized i had it called aphantasia it's a mind blind i don't have a visual imagination i can't conjure up an image. Like I saw a tweet the other day about, do you know that you can just close your eyes and rotate a cow in your head? Nobody can stop you doing it and it costs you nothing.

That's my disability. I can't do that. That's the best thing. I can't do that. That's the best thing. I can't do the maned cow. I'm done. I'm out. Everybody has the maned cow, right? That's the best thing.

That's so joyful. I can't do it. There's nothing there. There's blackness and darkness. You can't think of a cow, like even just one angle? Mate, I can't think of anything. How did you come up with Wounded Deer? I create so much theatre for the mind without

having a theatre in my mind. I create so much imagery. That's so funny. I read books, right? Yeah. And I'm not having the fucking vivid hallucinations that you guys have on your stories. I've had memory wanks over darkness. To be fair, that sounds great. When got no i've got when i close my eyes there's no images that's what i love about lsd actually because it fucking peaks the colorful explosion oh

fucking yeah like you when you take lsd also do you get very horny um i've only done it a couple of times Every time Every time I wasn't around stimulus when I was on it I was spiked in Benidorm Which we talked about on the podcast recently So I won't go over it but I was just fucking running around the streets Not knowing I was on acid The only person who thinks Benidorm is amazing

Because you could see it in five different dimensions Yeah It was crazy I finally gave it some life. I took LSD in Zurich and we were in a five-person fuck pile and as we were doing it, there was a girl in the middle and a guy in front of her and she was bent over and there was a guy behind her and I was behind the guy

and we were standing in the middle of the room and all of our suitcases were on tour blah blah and as she came um she squirted into her own open luggage did you you hate it when your cat does that you get angry at your cat for that and we all just kind of went oh no except she went more fantastic you're like come on carol it was in a different room yeah Oh, no. Except she went more, ooh, more. Fantastic. You're like, come on, Carol, it was in a different room. It was just like, well, sorry, but tomorrow's a travel day.

You've got to dry that stuff out. Oh, man. Sorry, I just looked there because this seemed like it was a lot louder than before. This is an edit point. I thought I was recording off a different mic, but I'm not. I thought, you know how sometimes that... No, I think I'm just... Now we're talking about sex, I've leaned into the mic instead of religion

when I was like far back here. Yeah, that's good though. It's good that it's recorded. I'm just going to check. Wait, nine minute 50. I'll give an edit point for that. Yeah. The correlation, I want to get back to this.

Yeah, get to it. The amount of people that I've seen on Vox Pops, people videoing and asking about Prince Andrew and everyone's so forgiven, but all the royals, all the Union Jack waving flag shaggers are really forgiven about Prince Andrew being on Epstein's Island and an underage sex worker and all the fucking... It's interesting.

...deportory that comes with him. It's interesting because also the defence of it, it's so funny, the defence of it is... Oh, well, so is this left-wing person or so is this other person. Yeah, and you hate them, so why can't you hate him? Yeah, exactly right. But it's the instant turn on a dime about Prince Harry when he gets brought up, how disdainful they are

and how unforgivable his actions are for loyalty and family. Because the hierarchy of priority for them is the monarchy because the monarchy ties them to an England that existed or that never existed but they think existed that they tie themselves to as a proprietary, not proprietary, what's it called, like a fetishisation of old English values, right? And fucking kids is part of the old English values. Like, oh oh Prince Andrew

No he's just a nonce He's just a little I've seen a guy On one of these video Like interviews Of people that are Queuing up and camping out I've seen a guy just saying

He was just born In the wrong century Yeah if he was Pope We wouldn't have a problem With it guys You forgive You forgive his nonsense By saying like

Oh you could do it back then When people died at 40. I also think there's an element of these people fetishise class. And if you have class, not money, class, then you can do anything. Because Harry married, in their mind, beneath him and is separating from and rejecting class. He's a traitor. He's a traitor to English roads and an american as well and they

already have history with wallace simpson of hating the abdication of people who marry into an american simpson again wallace simpson was an american divorcee who married oh fuck it's gone out of my head i want to say albert i have to google this so i don't fuck up your podcast and seem like an uneducated prick yeah i mean we are known on this podcast for the education that we provide. Yeah. It's less of a podcast and more of a public service. Yeah. So she married King Edward and he abdicated because she was a divorcee

and it caused a constitutional crisis that led to his abdication. And this is in the 30s, I think, and great jewellery and fashion collection, which is how she kind of is a bit of a queer icon. But again, it's about a king marrying beneath him. Right. Or a prince marrying beneath him and rejecting the monarchy. This whole looking up to an authority that is bloodline is archaic and absurd and

ridiculous and so we've just got to accept that we're still living in the past yeah we all live like like in the future this period of time will be laughable. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully, hopefully. But I also think that there's a, because of the way social media works, and yes, we're starting to police social media more, which people are taking as censorship, but look at what social media has done. Yes, it has connected us all,

but it has also enforced rigid bubbles around all of us, which reinforce our views, which divide us more. And it's also muddied the waters with information it's it's give everybody validation for whatever their opinion is however far-fetched it is there'll always be some quite well produced documentary that looks legit that'll fucking oh my god netflix's constant craving for content uh means that stuff gets put on there that you go what the fuck is this but by the fact by virtue of the fact that it's a netflix documentary it has legitimacy you go what what's going on here what am i watching yeah i watched i started watching

this like high budget like um ancient aliens ancient ancient apocalypse is that what it was i think it is is it that guy, Graham Hancock? Who's been debunked several times, right? He opens with, am I a historian? No. Am I a scientist? No. Am I an architect?

No. But I ask the questions. Oh, my God. It's essentially another white man with a podcast. Who gives a shit? We're with a Netflix budget and we can't get Netflix specials. You're pretty much just doing what we do, but trying to make it look like you have an authority.

Correct, and no jokes. We should learn from him. Take away the jokes, add some authority. You're Joe Rogan. Yeah. Oh, man, I think we actually do need to get your sound check now. Yeah, I've got to get to my sound check. Thank you very much.

But thanks for the little post-credits as well, because that was fun. It's a pleasure. We've got to fucking roast the coronation and also tie up the loose ends about the censorship that we're talking about. Yeah. What a blast, man.

Of course we met the French.