Comedian insists on an all-male audience

A comedian says he’ll ban women from the audience of his next Edinburgh show.

Mark Silcox says women have ‘made my life miserable’ – and wants to explore his relationships in a ‘safe space’ that only an all-male crowd can provide.

‘I want to express my pain, find some comfort and possibly develop some strategies to cope,’ he said. ‘I am not stating that all women have made my life miserable, but I want to dig deep into the core of the problem.

Silcox added that he wanted to see if other men could relate to his plight, adding that he would incorporate their stories into his show. He said: ‘It is my moral duty to offer some comfort to the men who are going through the same experiences as I have been and do not know how to get to the other side.’

And asked if he feared any repercussions from his decision to bar women from his audiences, he said: ‘I do not care about the backlash, I am a free man and am lucky to be in the country where I can stand and express my view without any fear. ‘

Silcox said the ‘experimental’ show he would perform in Edinburgh this summer, No Women, Plenty Of Cry, would be based on ‘the women I met during my working life in the past 26 years here in the UK and in India and how they made my life miserable’.

Like his usual stand-up, his 50-minute performance will be ‘character-based’, but drawn from his own experiences – ‘exaggerated with some hints of truth’.

‘It will be all from the point of view a man who got picked on by women who did not see any value in me and deliberately sabotaged me to make themselves feel important,’ he said.

The comic – who has previously made the finals of several new act competitions, including the 2013 BBC New Comedy Award and last year’s Leicester Mercury Comedian Of The Year – added that he had a ‘moral responsibility to spot bullshit and confront people’ over their actions.

He says that his free show will not be in the official festival programme, ‘and I will only advertise it through leaflets and hand-pick my audience.’ When quizzed further, he relented that he might let women in – but only if they adhered to a Taliban-style dress coden.

‘I will allow women only if they prepare to remove all their make-up, hide their hair in a baseball cap and bosoms in a thick coat and sit in the back of the room,’ he said, ‘That's would be fair and no one would be able to blame me for being sexist.’

Although the comment appears steeped in irony, Silcox – who has been married for 24 years and has two children – insisted that he was ‘completely’ sincere about his plans.

But he might fall foul of the law. The Equality and Human Rights Commission said that it could not comment on this specific case, but explained: ‘It could be a breach of the Equality Act 2010 to only allow men to attend an event like this, unless it is covered by a specific exemption under the act.’

Published: 8 Jan 2015