Jerry Sadowitz has given his first published interview since the second of his two performances of his current show, Not For Anyone, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer, was cancelled following complaints about his first show.

Sadowitz was interviewed by The Guardian's Brian Logan but was reticent to go into too much detail about certain issues around the subject of cancellation or about allegedly using the P-word onstage when talking about Rishi Sunak. He told Logan that there was a whole routine about the P-word/Sunak in his show, which is coming to the Eventim Apollo on November 15, his biggest-ever solo gig, and he did not want to give away the material.

This was not necessarily a tease to get people to buy tickets. Sadowitz said that he did not expect the venue to be full on the night and that people who bought tickets out of curiosity might walk out. He didn't want to sell tickets on the basis of the publicity about the show being cancelled in Edinburgh in August. "Do you not think I’d prefer to have been given the opportunity because I’m a good comedian?” 

Sadowitz has already offered a defence/explanation of his performance in Edinburgh in a statement he issued at the time: "I am not J** D*******(1) folks… a lot of thought goes into my shows and while I don’t always get it right, especially at the speed of which I speak… and I don’t always agree with my own conclusions (!)...I am offended by those who, having never seen me before, HEAR words being shouted in the first five minutes before storming out without LISTENING to the material which I am stupid enough to believe is funny, sometimes important and worth saying."

As for cancel culture, Sadowitz said to the Guardian: “It’s not a culture. It’s a diktat that’s been imposed upon us. Not from the public, not from the Government," adding that as he talks about it in the show he did not want to elaborate in the interview.

Logan pressed him on whether he thought his audiences appreciated the irony of his onstage persona or whether there was a risk of some of them taking his offensive remarks at face value. Sadowitz said: “I wouldn’t continue performing if it was just an audience of Nazis. But I’ve been performing for 37 years and that’s not happened – so surely I’m doing something right.”

Read the background to this summer's Sadowitz controversy here.

Read the full Guardian interview here.

Buy tickets for Jerry Sadowitz at the Eventim Apollo show here.

(1) In case you haven't worked it out I think he means Jim Davidson.