reacting to Frankie Boyle

I thought I knew quite a lot about British culture before I moved here. I’d watched British films and TV and listened to British music. Then I arrived in 2015, put on shows like Mock the Week and discovered that I didn’t understand the politicians, the references or half the jokes. Spoiler alert, I did not know nearly as much as I thought.

Nine years later, watching Frankie Boyle was a very different experience. Viewers had suggested him when I asked which British comedian to try next, and I already recognised bits of his work. I’d never been to his stand-up or really watched his specials, though, so this was a chance to get beyond the bits and pieces.

Dry enough to keep going

The thing I notice about Frankie is how level he stays. He can say an incredibly dark, unhinged thing and then simply continue. There’s no big change in energy to announce that the awful bit has happened. To my ears, his humour is dark and dry, and that delivery makes it feel even darker.

I’d recently watched Jimmy Carr’s most offensive jokes, and in my head Frankie was a notch above that. Jimmy can be excitable, with his energy going up and down. Frankie seems to stay on the same level while he says something devastating. That’s my comparison from these clips, rather than a claim that one is objectively more offensive than the other.

One of my favourite moments is the pause after a joke, when the audience is still considering what he’s just said. Then comes the reaction. I loved that little delay in the older Mock the Week compilation, because you get the sense of people catching up with him.

The old news I missed

Those older panel-show clips were a time capsule for me. I knew Mock the Week and loved it, but I’d mostly watched episodes that were on television during my own time in Britain. Seeing a much younger Frankie was unfamiliar too. I tended to picture him as the larger man with a big beard.

The compilation includes the kind of quick panel-show game where the comedians receive an answer and suggest possible questions. For the answer ‘tired, lost and confused’, one joke turns those words into a terrible choice for your CV. You don’t need to know a particular politician to understand why that one works.

A lot of the other material does lean on British politics. In a Brexit-era routine, Frankie complains about people holding strong opinions with very little information, then makes a comparison with ancient Rome and immediately admits he hasn’t bothered to check it. I enjoyed that. I was living here during Brexit, although looking back during this reaction it felt like a different world, even further away than the pandemic.

Learning the references the slow way

When I first moved, I hadn’t prepared by watching expat YouTube channels. I just moved. While I was applying for jobs, daytime television became a way of finding out what people were talking about. I watched Would I Lie to You?, Mock the Week and even Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away!.

Have I Got News for You was another big one because it dealt with politics and current events. Early on, I had absolutely no idea what was happening. Gradually, those programmes helped me understand the pop-culture references, and they did it in a funny way. Watching these clips years later, I could actually follow them.

That doesn’t mean all the footage belonged to the same moment. I was watching old routines in late 2024, after the Conservative period I’d lived through and with Labour in government. Seeing jokes about Boris Johnson and the other politicians from that period had a different feel when I was looking back at it.

Brutal, and still my cup of tea

The longer New World Order monologue was closest to the Frankie I pictured. He compares Theresa May hanging on to power with a climber clinging to a rock face, stretches the comparison into apparent admiration, then describes tenacity with no warmth or empathy. His apparent admiration ends up as a portrait of someone who simply refuses to let go. It was monotone, devastating and really dark. That was exactly the combination I’d been trying to describe.

I think he’s great, but I know he won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I’d also never read one of his books, so a viewer mentioning them left me curious. For now, these clips gave me plenty to laugh at and a look at older British comedy that I hadn’t caught when it first appeared on television.

Watch my video, Reacting to Frankie Boyle | Best of British Comedians.