Some comedians like to say that we can’t talk about anything anymore, thanks to cancel culture and political correctness. Hopefully you’ll agree with me that this is obvious bullshit, but plenty of comedians – even at a professional level – repeat this grievance as though it were an actual fact.

They’re referring, of course, to cancel culture and political correctness. Or whatever they call it this week. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade and don’t know what they mean by this, let me explain. But first, please let me know where this rock is, because I feel like I might enjoy spending some time there myself.

What they’re referring to is a plea for basic decency. It’s a request to do our comedy without resorting to T.R.A.S.H. (that stands for transphobia, racism, ableism, sexism, and homophobia), domestic violence, or sexual assault.

Easy, right? There’s a whole world populated with topics and things that can be spoken about. You’d have to be a pretty fucking lame and unimaginative comedian to look at those seven exemptions and complain that it leaves nothing to talk about. If you’re one of the comedians who says this, take a look at yourself because you’re either very stupid or extremely dishonest.

I say “dishonest” because, despite your whining, you actually can say those things. Comedians do all the time. Tony Hinchcliffe just got paid crazy Netflix money for his abysmal “Man of the People” special. The amount is undisclosed, but since the only time Tony takes a break from being racist and talking about how awesome he thinks he is it’s to boast about how much money he has and how much he gets paid, you can safely assume that they paid him a lot to say objectively shitty things for an hour.

I mentioned last month that it’s bad, but don’t take my word for it. Check out the 4% approval rating and mountain of reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes, and then try and tell me it’s just sour grapes.

Netflix knows and doesn’t care. When they were confronted with how abysmal it is, they calmly let us know that it got 2 million views in a short amount of time and that’s all they care about. You and I might think that quality and satisfaction are more important than engagement, but Netflix fucking doesn’t, and neither does any social media platform. They will never choose your satisfaction while your anger is more profitable. Fuck those guys. But I digress…

People ask me what to write about, probably because I spend so much time talking about what not to write about. I’ve said before that it’s not just t.r.a.s.h and assault that should be on your blacklist, but you’d also do well to avoid the unholy trinity of shitty open mic premises: Prostate Exams, Stool Sample Collection and Shitting Your Pants.

The reason is because they’re hack. I mean “hackneyed” as in overdone, already covered too many times by others, and used only by unimaginative comics. I’ve also pointed out the structural issue, the trap of choosing a premise you think is already funny when your real job is to take a premise that isn’t and make it funny. If you think of all the topics we consider “hack” in 2026, you’ll quickly see that there’s a lot of things you can’t talk about anymore.

There might even be fifty things you “can’t talk about anymore.” That’s the bad news. The good news is how math operates. Infinity minus 50 is still infinity. It’s crazy how that works. Other good news is that you still can talk about it. Whiners like Tony and his hack friends prove it by doing it.

But I’d like to talk about the real good news, the part that never gets mentioned even though it’s the most important part: It doesn’t fucking matter what you fucking talk about.

That’s right. I said it. Premises don’t matter that much. Your perspective – that’s what matters.

Your perspective, your unique point of view, is what makes you funny, what makes your jokes work, and is the part that people actually want to hear.

You could do a really boring TED-talk style presentation on veganism and watch everyone’s eyes glaze over. You could do a comedy set about how annoying and moralistic vegans are and get to see first-hand what it looks like when an entire audience simultaneously decides you’re a hack.

Or you could bring a perspective to it. You’ll discover that we already know about veganism; we were just waiting to hear your take on it. You can tell us that you only resent them because you know they’re right, that you hate having to sit around Church for half the day on your weekend and still feel shitty because you don’t actually change anything, while those guys spend their Sundays at home, eating hummus and jacking off to hentai porn, and still get to act like they’re better than you.

It’s not your premises that make you funny. It’s your perspectives. It’s your amusing and counter-intuitive takes on it. When you realise that you can take any old premise and just talk about how you feel about that topic, and that the more mundane it is, the less set-up you need, you realise you’re free and that you’ve just discovered an easy cheat code to generate comedy.

On Sunday night I did a show and had two 15-minute sets. Instead of crying about how there’s nothing left when you make racism off-limits, I looked at two pretty ordinary things from my own life. Because when it;s from my life, it comes with my perspective baked in, so it’s easy, honest and authentic. I chose two things. I had my 58th birthday this week and I’ve been learning to shave with one of those single-blade old-timey razors.

Here’s an exercise for you. Actually, I hate that shift, so when I say “spend ten minutes writing down…” I’m not instructing you do do any such thing. Just think about it for a couple of minutes, and you’ll get my point. You can do the writing exercise if you want, but I’ll suggest think about those two topics – birthdays and shaving, and I think you can imagine easily generating a few of minutes of jokes and material about those. It’s not hard.

So I started with “I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months…. bleeding!”

I talked for 15 minutes about my unearned level of shaving confidence that comes from using disposable razors for 45+ years, the cost of living crisis that makes me resent what disposable cartridges cost now, how it’s hard to make ends meet and I can’t just keep paying more just because they’ve squeezed 5 blades, a lubricating strip, fins and contours that are ribbed for her pleasure into their cartridges. I talked about how we never asked for all these extra blades and features, and next they’re probably going to tell us it’s got fucking AI in it too.

I discussed the “cheap handles, expensive blades” marketing strategy pioneered by King Gillette. I said yes, his first name really was King (Google it), so you know he’s going to be an asshole in this story. I mentioned that this shitty trick is now talk in economics class and another example of it is printers.

I said that we all have a printer because printers are cheap, but the moment mine asks me for more ink that relationship is over and I’m getting another printer because printer ink is the most expensive liquid on the planet. I said to the audience that we all have a printer at home but the similarities end there – because if they can casually print a page they’re interested in, we live in very different tax brackets and probably don’t vote the same.

I talked about learning to use this thing, that it’s taken me months to shave myself without looking like a trauma victim, that the slightest twitch results in geysers of blood and my bathroom looking like a crime scene. I said that I’ve already saved fifty bucks on cartridges but spent double that on paper towels and styptic. I explained what styptic is and how much it fucking stings, so now I’m paying to hurt myself after I already hurt myself. I said that using a “proper” razor was a bit of a vanity flex, but there’s no pride in looking like it’s my first day and I’m bad at it.

And so on. you get the picture. The point is, I selected something from my life and spent an hour writing 15 minutes of brand new material that people laughed at.

And it was easy, Like, ridiculously easy. Don’t listen to all that hustle-culture effort-bro bullshit about how hard it is to write material and how you have to grind and feel the burn and be disciplined. Fuck off with that bullshit. It’s easy. Almost effortless, in fact. It was so easy I then did exactly the same thing to generate another 15 minutes about my birthday.

Don’t let anyone tell you writing comedy is laborious and difficult. It doesn’t have to be, and the claim is even more fallacious than the suggestion that there’s nothing to write about.

The secret is that it’s not about the premise. It’s about the perspective. What do you think about shaving? What’s your relationship with shaving? What other parts of your existence does it (pardon the pun) bleed into? When you realise that the real question is “What do I personally think?” the whole thing gets really easy.

Which brings me to another point: Substance.

At the beginning of the year I watched a comedian bomb with a set filled with racism, homophobia and other shitty offensive premises. After making the whole room silent and awkward he went off to get rotten drunk while I performed afterwards and thankfully managed to turn the situation around.

But after the gig his feelings and drunkeness compelled him to bail me up and pick a fight, to try and turn it around by attacking me with the general suggestion that he was doing the important work of social commentary while I and the other comedians were pandering and playing with lightweight inoffensive material that didn’t challenge anyone.

Apparently his self-talk about it had been so loud that he never heard me tell the audience that if they supported Pauline Hanson and her party that they’re fucking stupid, so he felt perfectly fine accusing me of being too cowardly to offer a political opinion.

I doubt he’ll remember any of it, but I told him what I’ll tell you, which is that repeating a bunch of racist stereotypes challenges nothing, that the job description is to be funny and that offensive is occasionally present but often isn’t by-product, not the other way around, that if he didn’t hear the philosophy and social commentary I’d woven into my act he might need to take a break from being edgy and learn to listen better, that I’m just as confident about my chances competing with him in a “who’s more philosophical” contest as in a “who’s funnier” one, that funny and deep aren’t mutually exclusive and that you don’t need to be a cunt to invoke either of them.

For the record, I didn’t invite or want that confrontation. I’d have been just as happy to shake hands and go home, but he insisted on it.

But I’ll make some of those points here. You don’t have to be an edgelord to make people think. If you want people to have an inner dialog with themselves about class or society or gender or differences and similarities between people, or whatever, you don’t have to announce yourself as a truthteller and be cunty. Talk about something else and Trojan Horse that shit in there. Your ideas can’t infiltrate when you get stopped at the gates.

I haven’t described it explicitly, but I managed to include plenty of political and social commentary into my shaving bit and also the birthday one. That’s easy to do when you realise you’re really writing a perspective and not a premise. Arguably, it’s what elevates a mundane topic to a think-piece.

Premises don’t matter. They’re just the surface-level subject anyway. It’s the perspective that determines how deep or shallow your bits are. Sure, you can talk about the weather in mundane terms. People do. But you can also talk about the weather and explore climate change and its causes. You can talk about seasonal affective disorder and depression. You can talk about the phenomenon of “feels like” in the weather reporting and what that implies. The weather might be a hack premise for conversation, but when you realise that you’re really exploring your perspective on it, the writing becomes both limitless and incredibly easy.

---

The Self Made Stand Up is available as a paperback or e-book from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and lots of other places.

More than a how-to book, The Self-Made Stand-Up is an essential resource for developing yourself as an effective comedian. If you’re a comedian, or looking to become one, The Self-Made Stand-Up is the emotional support animal you need.

---

You might want to consider joining my mailing list (I promise I won’t spam you)