Pat Condell

Patrick Condell (born 23 November 1949) is a British writer, polemicist, and former stand-up comedian.

Condell was born in Dublin on 23 November 1949.

He was raised in England as a Catholic.

His father was a compulsive gambler working in a betting shop until he was sent to prison for stealing money; he subsequently died of leukaemia.

The Condell family in consequence was impoverished, moving repeatedly from home to home.

Condell was educated in several different Church of England schools in South London, saying of this time, "I found myself segregated in assembly and shunted into another room while everyone said their morning prayers. The whole pantomime seemed hollow to me even then. Once you become aware of the gulf between what people profess to believe and how they actually behave, it's hard to take any of it seriously."

Condell left school at 16.

His first job was as a dish-washer in the revolving restaurant on top of the Post Office Tower, now known as the BT Tower in London, for five shillings an hour.

He became a vegetarian in 1976 after watching a deer being butchered.

Condell did a number of jobs including working in a furniture warehouse, as a welder at the Ford Transit plant in Southampton, as an office clerk for a shipping company, volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel and then doing six years of logging in Canada.

In his early career, he wrote and performed in alternative comedy shows during the 1980s and 1990s in London, winning the Time Out Comedy Award in 1991.

He was also a regular panelist on BBC Radio 1's Loose Talk programme.

After moving back to the United Kingdom from Canada, Condell performed alternative comedy shows during the 1980s and 1990s.

His first performance on stage was at the age of 32 in a comedy sketch called Mountbatten's Plimsoll.

He also wrote poetry and appeared in the Poetry Olympics at the Young Vic Theatre in 1982, which led to a job writing weekly poems for the Time Out magazine.

Condell was described at the time as "a manic gimlet-eyed, crop-haired poet" in Drama: The Quarterly Theatre Review book.

He then performed on the London alternative comedy circuit for several years (originally under the name Eddie Zibin).

He also performed at the Tunnel Club, next to the Blackwall Tunnel, where he describes the audience as a "nightmare;" bottles and glasses were thrown at him, and one person attempted to cut the microphone lead with a pair of garden shears.

During the mid-1990s, he was performing over 200 times a year.

Due to the late nights and regular travelling he decided to start writing for other comedians, while still doing the occasional performance.

Condell was a performer at The Comedy Store in the Cutting Edge team, with whom he performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1991.

That year Condell was the winner of a Time Out Comedy Award.

From 1991 to 1994 Condell was a regular panellist on BBC Radio 1's Loose Talk.

In 1991 he performed comedy sketches with other comedians at the Duke of York's Theatre in a show put on to raise funds for Amnesty.

Condell's 1996 play Barry Sorts It Out was given a negative review in the Financial Times, which described it as "a sordid East End comedy" which "repeats ad nauseam the same gag."

The reviewer concluded that it is "a play with all the bite of a set of joke-shop fangs."

His 2006 stand-up show Faith Hope and Sanity, subtitled "A Few Jokes About Religion Before It Kills Us All," was a platform for his comedy and atheist beliefs.

"This is the first time I've set out to write a show in order to say something, rather than just as a vehicle for stand-up" he said of the show.

He performed the show at London's Etcetera Theatre.

Chortle gave Condell's 2006 show a negative review, noting that Condell is covering familiar territory but "is not quite up to the job," and observing that Condell's material was delivered "with very little variation in pace or tone, ... with the feel of a lecture" and "no structure, no building up to a passionate, climactic conclusion, no ebb and flow of storytelling."

Chortle concluded that "Condell is still going through the motions."

In early 2007 he began uploading to the internet short filmed monologue polemics primarily about religious authority, authoritarianism in government and left-wing politics, and the societal effects of Muslim immigration into Europe, which have featured on the front pages of websites such as YouTube and LiveLeak.

They have also been published on DVD, and also as a book of video transcripts.

As of April 2023, Condell's YouTube channel has over 338 thousand subscribers, and his uploads over 70 million views.

Condell's first video, uploaded to YouTube on 8 February 2007 was his participation in The Blasphemy Challenge, an Internet-based project which aims to get atheists to declare themselves.

Condell had posted more than 100 video monologues on various video sites as of August 2011, which together had notched up over 35 million hits, Eight of his videos are in the top hundred most commented on videos in the UK.

Most of his YouTube videos chastise Islam and Western appeasement of Islam.

His videos have caused Condell to receive hundreds of death threats but also a significant amount of support.

Condell has spoken favourably of Dutch politician Geert Wilders and has described the Qur'an as hate speech.

Condell has been described as part of the counter-jihad movement.