— Reginald D Hunter (@reginalddhunter)
August 15, 2024
He concluded by expressing that he regrets “any stress caused to the audience and staff members,” but did not address the Israeli couple, one of whom is disabled, who were hounded out of the venue after remonstrating with Hunter and the audience over his anti-Israel joke.
Hunter’s Fluffy Fluffy Beavers was given a one-star review by The Telegraph writer Dominic Cavendish, who called it “the most unpleasant comedy gig I’ve ever attended.”
According to Cavendish, most of the audience laughed in response to Hunter’s joke about Israel, but a couple in the front row shouted, ‘Not funny” and prompted jeers from other audience members when they said they were from Israel.
Speaking to the JC, the Jewish man who wished to remain anonymous, said, “It was just a heckle because it wasn’t funny, it was poor, he was nervous and sweaty. He put on a bad set. When he told this joke about an abusive husband leaving the house but it was really the husband being abused by the wife, I just said: ‘That’s not funny’ and then he really started.”
Hunter, 55, doubled down on his joke, telling the couple: “I’ve been waiting for you all summer, where the f*** you been?
“You can say it’s not funny to you, but if you say it to a room full of people who laughed, you look foolish,” he continued.
According to Cavendish, the Israeli women “remonstrated with the audience”, to which Hunter responded: “Look at you making everyone love Israel even more.”
The man, who uses a wheelchair, said he was reluctant to leave the auditorium as “it takes me a while to stand up and walk down the stairs,” but the shouts from the audience were overwhelming.
“The audience were really abusive and [Hunter] told us to get out and the people working at theatre told us to leave. The people working there, mostly young students, were trying to help and got us to leave, I don’t think they knew what to do.”
Hunter reportedly gloated after the couple left the auditorium: “That tells me that I still got voltage.”
Cavendish said Hunter, who has appeared on various BBC programmes, also made a joke about accessing the Jewish Chronicle’s website: “Typical f---ing Jews, they won’t tell you anything unless you subscribe,” he said. The JC does not have a paywall.
The recent “unfortunate incident,” as Hunter called it in his post on X, is not the comedian’s first brush with accusations of antisemitism. In 2006, he joked that he should go to Austria, where it is illegal to deny the Holocaust, get arrested for denying that the genocide happened, then tell the judge he was denying the Rwandan holocaust, not the Jewish one.
Hunter told Reuters at the time: “The joke isn't about the Jews, it is about freedom of thought and freedom of expression.”
