Comedian Connor Burns pleads guilty to ignoring the ‘fun police’

adrian.peel@iliffemedia.co.uk

Published: 09:00, 18 February 2025

In a recent interview with the Cambridge Independent, Canadian comedian Tom Stade suggested that the days of a comic feeling scared of saying whatever they want to on stage, for fear of getting into trouble – or ‘cancelled’ – may finally be coming to an end.

And that this revolution, if you like, is being spearheaded by a number of younger, up-and-coming stand-ups whose sole focus is on making people laugh.

Tom listed a number of examples, among them 30-year-old Scot, Connor Burns, who will be bringing 1994 – his second touring show – to Cambridge at the beginning of March.

“I’m very close with Tom, and I’ve always seen him as a beacon of… it’s very easy to say ‘I don’t really care what people think of me’, but he’s one of the few people who lives his life like that,” says Connor, whose debut show Vertigo had its lengthy run extended due to it being extremely successful, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from near his home in Edinburgh.

“I do think there’s lines; I don’t think you should be upset when you say something absolutely unhinged and people get upset by it, but I do think there is a slight swinging of the pendulum in the other direction now…

“A lot of people are just getting slightly annoyed with the ‘fun police’ element of comedy, and I think my audience seems to really value the fact that I don’t try to change their minds politically, or preach to them, and I just make them laugh for an hour.

“So I think there’s definitely a resurgence of that amongst my generation.”

Watching some of Connor’s live material on YouTube, it’s refreshing to see that he doesn’t tend to hold back.

“No, and I think genuinely the best moments I have on stage are the times when I let that stuff fall by the wayside and just… ‘I’ve got this thing, it’s maybe a bit too honest’ and then you pluck up the courage to say it and the rest of the audience goes ‘Oh my God, I thought it was just me that thought that!’,” observes Connor, who first had the idea of doing stand-up after his best man speech at his brother’s wedding went down well.

“And it’s like this beautiful shared thing of going, ‘Yeah, we should just say this stuff out loud because then we can deal with it and it goes away, rather than having it fester’.”

As Connor is good-natured, affable and looks quite sweet and innocent, are people surprised by some of his more ‘risqué’ jokes?

“I definitely get a bit of that,” he admits, “but I’ve started to build a really interesting audience…

“Last night, we were in Inverness and I had from [age] 14 up to couples in their 70s – and it was really cool.

“So I’ve got a broad spectrum of fanbase, which you can’t really anticipate but I like it.

“I know some people just want their audience to be unbelievably young and cool and hip, or some people just want the middle-aged couples, but I love the fact that I’ve got a bit of everyone in and I need to figure out how to make stuff work for everybody.”

Connor, a fan of fellow stand-ups Billy Connolly and Norm Macdonald (he particularly admires the wide-ranging appeal of the former), believes there’s “right and wrong on both sides” of the whole ‘you’re not allowed to say that/laugh at that’ argument.

He says: “I don’t really subscribe to this thing of like ‘You can’t say anything’ because really that’s just what skilful writing is – is you learn how to say the risky stuff in a way that’s clever and palatable.

“But also we do need to be honest and it does get silly when you’re pulling jokes out of context from a comedian’s set and cross-examining them like it’s a politician that said it.

“People get sick and tired of that aspect of it, and I think there’s definitely just a big kickback of people going ‘I’d love to just scratch the funny itch for an hour and not be talked down to by someone who’s telling me what I should think and how I should vote’ and all the rest of it.”

As mentioned, Connor’s latest show is titled 1994, which is the year of his birth.

“I wanted to make a show about my first 30 years as a millennial,” he explains. “My dad’s 72 so we compared his first 30 years on the planet to my first 30 years.

“And I started pulling apart all the massive cultural changes that have happened in that time.

“It just became a really fun topic and it kind of sprouted from there.

“I think that’s why I’ve got a broad spectrum of audience, because I spend a lot of time talking about my parents and growing up with that older generation – so I think that’s why it works.”

Connor will be bringing 1994 to the Cambridge Junction (J3) on Saturday, 1 March.

He is looking forward to coming back to Cambridge and reflects on a memorable experience he once had while trying to get to the city.

“Last year, we got stuck in a horrible storm and we were trying to get to Cambridge from London,” recalls Connor.

“They cancelled all the trains and it was just total chaos. I was trying to get a taxi and we met a couple of strangers in the queue.

“We were like ‘Look, there’s four seats in a taxi, this is a big journey, why don’t we all jump in it and save a bit of money?’

“So we found other people and slowly but surely it unfurled that one of them… we were like ‘So what do you do?’ and she was very secretive, and it turned out she was lady-in-waiting to the Queen at Windsor Castle!

“So I think we were all trying to wangle an invite back to the castle but it wasn’t happening...

“She was on her way to Cambridge, I think she was going there to visit family, but it was good to know that we had a back-up plan of where we could stay!”