Liam Mullone: A Land Fit For Fuckwits

Hello Mr Mullone. So, tell us about the show?
It takes as a starting point David Lloyd George's promise of building "a land fit for heroes" and compares it to what we've actually created for ourselves - a Britain where we're ashamed of our past, alienated by our youth and too polite to ask other people to stop kicking us in the bollocks. And then a stuffed raccoon tells us how to end racism.

Are there more fuckwits in the world today? Or are we all just growing increasingly intolerant of each other?
My friend Henning has a line that what we in Britain call tolerance amounts to nothing more than lazy cynicism. Certainly the word is becoming a meaningless liberal whitewash. A female friend is very hot on 'tolerance', but she picketed Nick Griffin from speaking at Oxford. I've always thought that tolerance means letting everyone have their say, however misguided, because people know truth from fuckwittery and we must have faith in that. Society never collapsed because a bigoted prick spoke bollocks to a clique of pampered wankers.

Who would you consider the king (or queen) of the modern fuckwit?
I am always very careful to position myself as the Christmas fairy on any such tree.

What advice would you give to someone having difficulty coping with fuckwits?
Well, they can always write a show about it.

Do you think British satirists are doing a good enough job right now?
There is very little satire in Britain. I think we have forgotten the difference between satire and sneering. Satire requires an ideology, and a set of values, and consistency. Sneering doesn't. People said Jimmy Carr was a 'hypocrite' by having a go at tax-dodging corporations while doing the same himself. But he wasn't satirising them, he was just sneering. I've seen 'political' comics sneer at both sides of an argument in the same set, because they don't actually give a shit one way or the other. Look at the state of Private Eye, once the bastion of satire. Now it devotes whole columns to sneering at people who didn't go to public school.

What's your stance on the Jimmy Carr debacle?
Tax law is a beautiful bit of British fuckwittery. It doubled in its intricacy under Brown and the present lot show no willingness to simplify it. When the government sets up a game like that it can't say it's 'immoral' when people play it. As a libertarian I would love to see a twenty percent flat rate, with no get-outs, and all the unemployed number-shysters that will create. As a comic I avoid tax by playing the Fringe, which takes my yearly earnings to just below fuck all.

What's your Fringe regime? Gym and fresh veg, or booze and kebabs?
On the first day I join the gym under The Scotsman building and then religiously avoid going anywhere near it. Each day I walk three miles in the pissing rain with a backpack full of sodden promotional ephemera. Then I drink five cups of coffee, do my show, go home and stare at a photograph of my baby sons while crying uncontrollably into a musty pillow while calling myself an irresponsible, self-obsessed, useless cunt. This system worked really well for me last year so it seems silly to change it.

And who else are you planning to see at the Fringe?
Loads of people. For starters I will see Tony Law, Jo Caulfield, Mary Bourke and a bloke called Sergeant Buzfuz who sings incredible 14-minute songs about the Medieval papacy.