The golden age of Twitter is long gone

In the aftermath of the Liverpool parade crash, comedian Andrew Lawrence tweeted words to the effect that, were he to find himself in Liverpool, he too would be willing to drive through crowds of people to get out of there. The online outrage was instant and loud. Yet, now a week and a bit on, it has already begun to evaporate, like breath steam on the shaving mirror of social media. You have quite possibly forgotten about it now, too, and so perhaps you should.

Lawrence himself has doubled down, posting a series of ever more disobliging assessments of Liverpool’s charm and of Scousers’ capacity to take a joke at their expense. They have in return responded with a series of ever more explicit threats to his physical safety should he ever wander into Liverpool.

Liverpool’s most famous comedy club, Hot Water, joined in, declaring that Lawrence ‘is not welcome at any of our events or venues’. It claimed that his ‘vile attempt at a joke about a tragic incident’ went ‘against everything this industry should represent’. The Comedy Store in London, the UK’s principal live-comedy venue, re-posted the Hot Water statement and vowed to ‘stand beside’ the comedy club and the people of Liverpool.

I have written about the kerfuffle here, and I posted a tweet in support of Lawrence at the time. Not for the joke per se, which I thought pretty unremarkable in quality, sentiment and wit. But for his right to miss the odd shot, and also against the barely veiled threat in the Comedy Store post against not just Lawrence, but also any ‘promoters and comedians who continue to book or share a stage with him’. Fuck that.

It is particularly galling coming from the Comedy Store. The club that gave birth to the modern British comedy scene. The club that used to be the most vital, daring and original in Britain. That broke acts like Alexei Sayle and Rik Mayall. And it’s now happily telling comedians what this ‘industry’ should ‘represent’, and is No Platforming humour that virtually every bloke’s WhatsApp chat in the country would recognise as pure bantz.

It’s not really so dissimilar to a routine performed by Sean Meo, live on stage at the Comedy Store in 2020. He suggests that Streatham is – like Manchester, like almost anywhere – a violent shithole. He would likely have regarded Lawrence’s joke as well within range, if perhaps not quite finished. It still needed the killer line, the topper. It reminded me of Jack Dee’s gag about the old lady next door, which did have the killer line. ‘In this cold weather, the government are forever telling us to check in on our neighbours. I’ve got an old woman living next door to me, alone, and do you know, she hasn’t been in to check up on me once? [beat] Lazy old cow hasn’t even taken in her milk bottles for the last five days.’

So yes, I push against the creeping authoritarianism of comedy management. It’s the growing HR department in an ‘industry’ that is nothing of the sort. We stand-ups are in fact a loose affiliation of wandering minstrels and dysfunctional ne’er-do-wells that rock up from time to time in your local town and try and wring a laugh from consenting adults anyway we know how.

All that aside, what really struck me about the whole episode, now the dust is settling, is just how little was heard on X either way from other comedians. Even by the standards of the yawning silence that greeted Jerry Sadowitz’s Edinburgh defenestration, or Graham Linehan’s treatment. And I think the reason is not so much indifference to the principles at play, or to Lawrence’s already sidelined live career, but because most comedians have pretty much abandoned X altogether.

It has dawned on me in the past few months that this is one of the many ways that X has declined in the past few years. When Elon Musk took over what was then known as Twitter in October 2022, the signs for those of us on the side of free speech were very encouraging. The vast majority of right-leaning accounts that had been suspended were restored. Some came back fighting fit and ready to engage, but others seemed to have lost interest.

Many had lost access to Twitter for cracking pretty harmless jokes – at the expense, for instance, of the gender ideology that made it a banning offence to ‘dead name’ or ‘misgender’ someone. Most notoriously, the Babylon Bee was banned for referring to transwoman Rachel Levine as its ‘Man of the Year’. Many valuable dissident voices, some mischievous and ironic, others deadly serious, were back – and were able to speak clearly, without stammering to avoid the tripwires of cancellation. I rubbed my hands in delight. It’s back on!

The release in 2022 of the ‘Twitter files’ – internal documents circulated among Twitter staff – showed the extent to which Twitter’s moderators had demonstrated palpably left-wing bias when suspending users. They had even sought to silence very substantial, authoritative voices. This included the New York Post, which was suspended for reporting the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and therefore endangering Joe Biden’s hopes of being elected in 2020. The timing of these revelations, just as it was becoming apparent to anyone with eyes and ears that Biden was barely competent to remain in office, could hardly have been more damaging. It undoubtedly contributed to Trump’s decisive victory in 2024.

But since then, there has been a deterioration of the ‘user experience’ on X. Perhaps it’s down to the side that used to play with the wind at their backs being sore losers. But so many of the left-leaning accounts with whom I used to enjoy cross-party banter have gone – fellow comedians chief among them. The saloon bar of online discourse is much less rich now than it was. Every time one logs on, one is directed automatically to the ‘For You’ feed, which is dominated by algorithm-promoted slop, designed to hack your defences and waste your time in exactly the way that social-media sceptics have always warned us about.

Boy, is it hard work finding the stuff that actually enriches your day now. And the really inventive apolitical jokes, the hilarious and original oneliners that you couldn’t imagine existing anywhere else, are gone.

It is possible to draw some grim succour from the fact that Bluesky – to which so many of those complaining that X had become a ‘sewer’ had decamped – seems to remain as futile and asinine as ever. Dominated by cat fluff, bland self-promotion and internecine quarrels between self-appointed hall monitors about how much pro-Israel material should be allowed on the platform, it offers no plausible alternative at all.

It seems to me an awful shame. But even now, no doubt, a new golden age of comedy is emerging somewhere else.

I think about golden ages a lot. It is an important life skill, to know when you are in one. I remember knowing in the Eighties that it was a golden age of comic strips – The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and Doonesbury. I remember registering in the Nineties that the American sitcom was having a moment, and British TV comedy, too – Vic and Bob, the Fast Show and Absolutely. I have a horrible feeling that Twitter / X has also had its golden age, and I must cultivate gratitude to know that I was, at least, as Max Boyce would say, there.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.