After moving to London from Belfast to train as a classical musician, Vittorio Angelone made the less-than-obvious switch to stand-up. The Italian-Irish comedian has since performed all over Europe and enjoyed sell-out runs at festivals including the Edinburgh Fringe. He’s currently on tour with a new show that pushes boundaries – and buttons. “I sit in a funny place wherein old people call me a woke snowflake and on Tiktok young people call me right-wing,” he tells Monocle.

Angelone is at the coalface of comedy that pushes boundaries; it’s a challenging position to be in at the moment, as puritans are policing what we say and even the most mundane celebrity can find themselves publicly humiliated for a mistimed joke. Here, he explains his philosophy behind making comments on society through comedy. If you don’t get it, maybe that’s your problem. 

Have we got too precious about what we can and can’t laugh about?
Some think that this is the case but I don’t agree. It’s good that we’re a bit precious. Comedy doesn’t work unless there’s a sense of preciousness because all jokes are a simple formula: tension and release. For something to be funny, you need people to think, “Are we comfortable talking about this?” As with any other art form, there needs to be a little discomfort for the pay-off to be worth it. If nobody was ever tense or concerned about any topic, nothing would be funny.

But a bigger concern, more than individuals being precious or getting upset, is that people might be laughing at a joke for the wrong reason. An audience, for instance, might be laughing because they agree with the thing that you’re trying to poke fun at. When you’re making fun of bigoted ideas or racist ideas by highlighting them in a certain way, some people might laugh thinking, “Finally, somebody said it.” That means that you have to be strict with yourself and know that not all laughs are the ones that you’re going for.

Does a comedian have a responsibility to make sure that a joke is received in the right way?
This is one of the big frustrations that I have with some big-name Netflix comedians. These comics – and people do it beyond comedy too – say trigger words that make certain audience members think, “Yeah, they’re poking the wasps’ nest.” But they’re not actually saying anything transgressive. They’re just saying the words “immigrant”, “black” or “gay” but none of it means anything because they’re pandering to this false idea of transgression. It frustrates me when comedians say, “It’s just a joke,” or “I’m not making that joke,” when they use these words. You know what sort of laugh you’re getting.

Take Michael McIntyre. There’s a bit in one of his Netflix stand-up comedy specials where he talks about the Northern Irish accent, which I don’t find funny. I grew up in Belfast. He impersonates a Northern Irish person, putting on an accent and going cross-eyed, painting all Northern Irish people as stupid.

Context matters. If someone like Anthony Jeselnik, a US comic who has branded himself as offensive, made that same joke, it would be funny. That’s because the whole point of Jeselnik’s jokes, the reason why people go to his shows, is that he says things that are awful, wrong, offensive and bad. In contrast, McIntyre’s shtick is his presentation of things in a way that suggests that what he’s joking about is something that we all agree on – and that’s why his Northern Irish joke landed so horribly with me. He wasn’t getting a laugh because he was saying something that’s funny for its offensiveness. Rather, he’s getting it because lots of people in the audience think that Northern Irish people are stupid and an accurate representation of them is to be cross-eyed and make noises.

So are there topics that we can’t joke about?
I don’t think there’s anything that I’m allowed to talk about that other people aren’t. That’s not a very interesting way to make art. A broader cultural conversation, with more voices, is always a better one. I’ve seen comedians make jokes about Northern Irish people and be very funny. I’ve seen comedians make jokes about Northern Irish people and be very offensive. It depends on what angle you’re coming from – and this applies to making jokes more broadly, not just stand-up. You need to understand where your perspective comes from and how that comes across to people.

Often, when I make jokes about contentious issues or about groups of people, I’m the butt of the joke and it’s my misunderstanding, my getting it wrong, that is the point of humour. My job is to joke about topics in a way that isn’t mean, nasty or bullying. Whether you’re a comedian or not, a good rule is to ask yourself: would you tell the joke if the people it was about were in the room? If that stops you from making the joke, you shouldn’t go ahead. 

What’s the best way to deal with a joke not landing?
It’s important to remember that you can’t determine whether a joke is funny based on one person. I have jokes about broad lgbtq issues and I have had hundreds, if not thousands, of queer audience members laugh hard at them. Still, I’ve had friends in the queer community say that they don’t like the jokes. That’s to be expected of any group of people. No social or cultural group is a monolith. Just because one queer person dislikes my joke, it doesn’t mean that they speak on behalf of the whole community, in the same way that if one person from that community does like it, you can’t assume that making the joke is OK – because they might both be idiots.

Why tell jokes that might push a crowd’s buttons?
People are at their funniest when an audience is taken to a place in their mind where they might be uncomfortable or nervous. It’s exciting when they think, “I’m not sure how I feel about this topic,” before having a big laugh about it. That’s what I’m trying to do. I try to take audiences to places where they might feel discomfort before making them feel good at the end, so that they can maybe think about those things with less trepidation in the future. It means that, hopefully, they’re more comfortable the next time they think about race or gender or sexuality or any number of things where they were once uncomfortable. Through comedy, I can show them that it doesn’t have to be scary and that you can get out the other side without getting it all wrong. But it’s a very hard thing to do and, as long as you’re not deliberately trying to upset someone, you need to have permission to get it wrong.

What role does an audience play when it comes to finding what’s funny?
The audience needs to have permission to get it wrong too. What I love about stand-up comedy is that it’s one of the only art forms where the audience takes the same risk as the performer. For example, if I say a joke that might be deemed controversial, maybe about something that most people wouldn’t admit to thinking or wouldn’t admit to experiencing or wouldn’t admit to being concerned about, then I am opening myself up to embarrassment. If nobody laughs, then I feel like an idiot and I’m ostracised in the room but if everybody laughs, then my making that joke has made the whole room go, “Oh, thank God, someone else feels like that. I was worried that it was just me.”

However, if only one person in the audience laughs, which is the risk that every audience member is taking when they laugh, there are two embarrassed people in the room, me and that person. It’s risky because by laughing you’re saying, “Yes, I agree with what you said,” which means that the person laughing is taking the same risk as the person telling the joke – and that’s what makes telling a joke so exciting and why we need things to be precious about. Without this tension and release, none of it would be very fun.