Jerry Sadowitz

Jerry Sadowitz (born 4 November 1961) is an American-born Scottish stand-up comic and card magician, known for his frequently controversial "sick humour".

• Nelson Mandela? What a cunt. Terry Waite? Bastard. I dunno, you lend some people a fiver, you never see them again.
  • Undated, quoted in GQ, 2 February 2010

• Hello moose-fuckers! You know what I hate about this country? Half of you speak French and the other half let them.
  • To an audience in Montreal, quoted in The Guardian, 9 November 2011

• How do you give a woman an orgasm? Who cares!
• My mother thinks I'm at Kings cross right now buying drugs off a prostitute. If she knew I was on the BBC, she'd kill me.
• My idea of Comic Relief is switching Victoria Wood off.
• I only hate two things - living things, and objects.
• I'm actually a bisexual necrophiliac - I'll shag anything that doesn't move.
• I used to think I was great in bed until I discovered that all my girlfriends suffered from asthma.

• Sadowitz is a very different act from Gervais and Carr: low status, stubbornly niche, the connoisseur's misanthrope. I dislike boorish comedy that punches down for kicks, and I appreciate it can be hard to spot the difference when an act only seems to be doing so – especially when they're quoted out of context amid a hysterical media storm. But writing about the offensive comedy debate, Sadowitz has long been my go-to exemplar: if you're as skilful as he is, if you take the pains he takes to contextualise the material, you can be as brutally unpleasant as you like without censure.
  • Brian Logan, The Guardian, 16 August 2022