Fuck you: Pay Me

Fuck you, pay me.

Quite a few comedians will, this week, have received an email telling them that their payment for a festival they performed at will not be remitted by the deadline.

Fuck you, pay me.

I’m a lucky man. I have a decent amount in savings and last year I earned 5x the average touring comedian’s turnover (2025 figs) from amoral hustling. That doesn’t make me 5 times better than you of course, I’m probably only 3 or 4 times better. As a result, I’m afraid that the non-arrival of a few hundred pounds hadn’t registered. But now it has.

Whether I particularly need the money or not is irrelevant.

Fuck you, pay me.

I drove 3 hours to a dismal gig in Plymouth that I’d been booked to MC. On arrival, I was greeted somewhat surprisingly by the MC. I messaged the promoter. “Oh mate, I fucked up. Can’t believe it. Sorry mate. I can’t pay you but you can have another gig.”

Fuck you, pay me.

I do, on occasion, attempt to put on shows and, as a result, I semi-regularly deal with people who work in the Arts full time. Now I’m a fair man. I must make an allowance that these are not wealthy organisations and many of their employees are good and passionate people who give up their time for a pittance. If you worked for me, I would sack you all tomorrow.* Fuck you all, pay me.

*(I have managed teams. I was a pretty relaxed manager who cared about the welfare of my staff. I would cut off your income in a heartbeat and wrestle you, your union representative and HR in the mud).

A few years back, I went to a finals day at Goldsmiths University where MA Grads showed off their creations. Somebody did a live waterboarding. Everybody found this very moving or powerful or evocative of something. Unfortunately, as a died in the wool philistine, I found it funny. My friend later told me that he’d been approached by the same torture practitioners troupe to see if he might be waterboarded every single day at the Edinburgh Fringe as a live piece of performance art. It was an unpaid position.

(Incidentally, many years ago I once took my brand new girlfriend to her first Fringe show at 1am below a pizza restaurant. A man got on stage, took a hammer and nail and trepanned himself in front of us. But at least he got a split of the bucket.)

Fuck you. Pay me.

I am, this summer, making my own trip to that haunted dreams mausoleum, the Edinburgh Fringe. I don’t mind being open about the fact that I have more than enough cash to support myself in doing so. I’m a happy, rich, amateur and, as a result I can pay for a nice (well, yet to be seen) flat in the centre of Edinburgh, for a load of students to gossip and vape as they pretend to hand out my flyers, for someone to check over my press release and to risk simply never seeing a penny of my investment come back.

But it shouldn’t be like that. This stuff should be for dreamers and weirdos with a glint in their eye and a brain suffused with ideas that fall, like jazz, just outside the spectrum of your lived experience. That’s what I love seeing and what I love experiencing, and it is heartbreaking knowing that these delightful, joyful, silly people are being exploited, whether by pervasive vampirism of rent seeking, or simply not being paid their pittance on time.

So if I can, as a ruthless capitalist and therefore everything you stand against* offer some advice it is this -

*(Well listen. I’m sorry if I didn’t do it right and I’m sorry if you assume that I eat red meat and don’t necessarily think money or Tony Blair are a bad thing, but if there isn’t room here for people who stand against everything you believe in, then what sort of a hippy free-for-all is this?)

I need you, to your core adopt the following mantra: Fuck you. Pay me.

I pursue payment like my cat pursues the idea that 5am is time for breakfast. I don’t care that your invoicing is slow. I don’t care that I’ll never work in this town again. Actually, I continue to work and I will be paid in the end. My invoices contain late payment terms and I do enforce them. I will, years after small claims fails, have a bailiff sent to your shitty little office. It won’t do much, but I’m petty and it will make me happy.

To my fellow writers, comedians and silly people, I know how desperately you want this. I know that within you, (aside from two wolves and maybe a secret third one), there’s this thing. You can’t describe exactly what it is but you need to express it - to offer it up on a little plate to people who’ve come for their amusement in the hope that they see it and say, “Hey, me too! I feel like that!” And they laugh. And for a second, you connect, and then you look at the thing you’ve offered and you think, “No wait, that’s not quite right.”

I know you need to do it. And I love whatever way you express that. (Unless you’re a clown who has decided that nudity will be their medium. Lads it’s grand I’ve now seen more clown cocks than most women will see lovers). But fundamentally: fuck you pay me. Because I promise you, everybody else is. And you deserve to be too. And if you don’t, it’s corporate hustlers with the kind of mental health that has been described as “Concerning”, or the failsons of arms dealers who’ll never make the family business from here on out.

Fuck you. Pay me. Pay all of us.