[GiRTh]

Confirmed. Staged.

In this show, I staged a racist argument between two plants in the audience – an Indian actress (Sajeela Kershi) and her partner (Steve McNeal) – and me, simultaneously satirising hypocrisy and bigotry.

The back story for Sajeela's character was that she turns up to the show specifically to be offended by everything I say, because she has seen a poster with me mocked up in different guises depicting what we in comedy would call "the big four". (We wouldn't, in fact, but then we would never refer to ourselves as "The New Offenders" either, as we were so neatly monikered on Monday.)These guises were:

1 Me as Christ on the cross.

2 Me in a wheelchair.

3 Me in a fairy outfit.

4 Me in black makeup, dressed as a Zulu. These posters were a huge part of the set-up to the final punchline. The title of the show itself was a little winking giveaway that not all was as it seemed. The poster showed me * saying in cartoon speech blurb, while rolling my eyes: "So I Suppose THIS is Offensive Now!"

Contrary to Logan's contention that 10 years ago I would not have got away with "blacking up" (no mention of the other images, I might add), the actual reason no one has complained about the marketing of the show is that the butt of the joke is people who thought the images weren't offensive. In the show's final reveal, we discover that . . . no, wait, I've explained too much. And anyway, you can see the whole thing for yourself on YouTube: type in Brendon Burns versus Heckler.

Standup comedian Brendon Burns responds to attack on 'the new offensiveness