Becky Lucas Is Actually Pretty Happy About Being Booted Off Twitter

While many would consider being banned from social media to be a bad thing, comedian Becky Lucas sees the positives in a reduced online presence. 

“I’ve always sort of resented the fact that people look to comics to have an opinion about something,” she says. “Like, what the fuck do I know? The smartest comedians, the ones that do real political jokes and stuff, are still sort of the dumbest people. We don’t have any real-world credentials, and there’s a weird irony in that no one takes comedy seriously, but as soon as you have a ‘wrong’ opinion about something in the news, people take everything you say so seriously.

“Part of me never wants to comment on anything important ever again, because people will always find a way to make you sound awful. That’s what I’ve learned since being off Twitter – it’s the best! I don’t have to immediately know what’s happened and quickly formulate an opinion of a really complicated issue. I just sit back and let one of [my] friends tell me what to think.”

This reflective process led Lucas to pen her new show, Um, Support Me?!, which sees the comic shunning the topical in favour of the personal. 

“It’s just different now,” she says of the transition out of current affairs. “Now I tend to save my opinions for people I trust, and I’m less inclined to discuss things in a nuanced way on stage, because it just feels like people don’t want to engage in that stuff in the same way anymore. If you say anything that remotely critiques the left or the right, it feels like you’re leaving yourself open to be attacked. So, I am still being myself on stage, but it’s been really fun to write about trivial stuff and not attacking anything that I honestly don’t know anything about. I am kind of stupid, truth be told.

"If you say anything that remotely critiques the left or the right, it feels like you’re leaving yourself open to be attacked."

“I think comics have a different way of being intelligent. There are people who know all about policies and factual events and stuff, and then there’s comedians, who are good at releasing tension and making comparisons. Or even just lightening the mood, you know? Being able to read the tone of a room and go with that is just a different form of intelligence. I don’t understand why it has to be both – that you have to have a PhD-level understanding of everything and also work hard to be funny.”

Lucas also says that there’s a freedom to her new approach, and that, for better or worse, she’s done with trying to change people’s minds about her. 

“It can be hard because you can never control someone’s perception of you,” Lucas admits. “Even someone you know quite well might get it wrong – you know, you know yourself and your friends have a pretty good hold on who are, but even then there are inconsistencies. So it goes out further and further the more exposure you get, and suddenly there are people who see one snippet of you somewhere and they’ve completely made up their minds about you. It’s really bizarre.

“You just have to be ok with it; you have to go, ‘Ok, this person is going to hate me based on this one thing I did on stage and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ I used to be really quite obsessed with it: I wanted to sit people down and be like, ‘Listen! Listen to what I’m saying! You will like me!’ But you just can’t do that apparently.”

Whatever the case may be, Um, Support Me?! is clearly a turning point in Lucas’ approach to writing and performing. “There were times when I’d resent stand-up, and I think it came across on stage. But at the moment I’m into it... It’s just dumb shit I’m doing at the moment. Dumb shit is fun.”