Janey Godley: New briefing room is homage to Irn Bru

I get this comment at least twice a day, it must be from people who have never seen the image of me welcome Trump at Turnberry or heard my Big Theresa videos when she was down at the caravan last fair fortnight.

There seems to be, very recently, a big push on shutting women up. Especially women with a decent following and a sarky voice. When did it become acceptable to tell women to just do ‘Funny things’ and not speak about events that affect them or their own lived experience?

It’s the online equivalent of the real-life comment that many women have heard throughout their life “you look lovely when you smile”, which is loosely translated as “don’t talk back, just look nice” two things I am not capable of.

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It makes me wonder why a wee stupid woman like me can scare people so much when I mention how I feel about Priti Patel’s latest policy or how Matt Hancock has very cool pals who get multi-million-pound business deals.

It’s not just men, women say it to me as well. But unlike men, women don’t tend to tell me on Twitter that they would rather attack their own genitals with cocktail sticks and boiling hot tongs than listen to me when a theatre posts a message about my forthcoming show. I have no idea why some men can be so verbal and descriptive about all the horrific things they can do to their groin area rather than attend an online cultural event.

Maybe they should go see ‘Puppetry of the Penis’ and get some tips on how to fold their ‘boaby’ into the shape of the Cutty Sark and at least make their obsession fun? That’s an Instagram account I would maybe look at once.

I am not saying I should be exempt from criticism, far from it, but to have people either insist you are not funny at all and to just stop or tell me to be less political and more funny or they’re ‘jamming their haw maws in the washing machine door” is just strange, to say the least.

I just don’t know why people would follow a comedian online to constantly tell them how to live their lives or how to do their job. I would never think of going on Twitter and telling Beyonce to wear flatter shoes when she’s dancing or explain the musical scales to Lady GaGa. Why would I?

It’s the equivalent of you standing beside the bake goods of your local supermarket and telling everyone who came near “I hate doughnuts, they should stop selling them” and when challenged that other people like them, repeatedly screaming “This is MY FREEDOM OF SPEECH how dare you tell me to shut up”

You can say you hate doughnuts (I don’t, clearly have you seen me lately?) but you just can’t shout it in someone else’s space. Go stand outside your own front door and scream it there, I am sure your neighbours would love that.

I block people that annoy me, so then they email my website to complain about their opinion not getting heard and we read out their emails in a crying voice for fun. It’s utterly hilarious and I am thinking of putting those videos on Instagram.

So much of the political landscape is spewed out on social media and it’s ramping up with the forthcoming Scottish elections. An anti-independence party raised money and paid for a sky message to fly over when many people were in lockdown, they had to take images and enlarge them for effect. Maybe the SNP will buy yellow kites and people can throw them up into the windy skies in the hope seagulls will get their message and stop shitting on canvassers? Who knows?

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A huge swathe of the Scottish voters are not on Twitter or Facebook, so the vitriol and campaigning are lost on them, they just can’t imagine a man in a purple fedora hat who once mimed being a licky cat on tv, calling another man a ‘poseur’ is actually a thing that happened. They are probably better for not knowing.

Equally those same people don’t know that a daft comedian is pretending to be an angry owl and then voicing the first minister shouting about pies and doors, it’s all relative.

There is no answer to the anger, hatred and madness of social media that can really hurt people and leave folk frightened. I guess #bekind didn’t go the way we hoped.

We didn’t have Twitter when I was a teenager, if I wanted someone to know how I felt about them, I would go up to their tenement close and write in chalk “Gary is a bampot and I don’t fancy him anymore - Bay City Rollers forever” and then get two buses home. It was exhausting and I don’t know if his mum washed it off when I left the street. To be fair other than the carbon footprint of the buses, it was an organic way to insult a boy you really fancied.

Life online for me is a fair mixture of voice over videos, talking penguins, sausage dog photos and scathing attacks on how millions could have been spent on Downing Street’s briefing room.

The Russians who designed and created it must have been laughing their heads off that such fools and their money could be so easily parted. The image we were shown had enough lightweight shoogly chairs for Matt Hancock to practice his parkour (why does he keep doing that? Like an overgrown milk monitor showing off his skills to the lollipop lady) and the colour scheme of the new room is homage to Irn Bru with a lonely Henry the Hoover winking in the corner, that’s if he is an actual hoover?