Jerry Sadowitz

Jerry Sadowitz (born June 1961) is an American-born Scottish stand-up comedian and magician.

Notorious for his controversial brand of black comedy, Sadowitz has said that audiences going to see a comedian should suspend their beliefs.

He has influenced a generation of comedians, but states that "politically incorrect comedy: it's me, and it's been ripped off by loads and loads of comics".

Sadowitz was born in June 1961 in New Jersey, the son of a Scottish-Jewish mother named Roslyn and a Jewish-American father who worked as a scrap metal merchant.

His parents split up when he was three, and he moved with his mother back to her native Glasgow when he was seven.

Sadowitz attended Calderwood Lodge Primary and then Shawlands Academy.

He took an interest in magic at the age of nine, and by the age of 11 decided that he wanted to become a magician, acquiring books from Tam Shepherd's Magic and Joke Shop.

Sadowitz was encouraged by his mother to research magic at his local library, and he was once kicked out of a school exam after the examiner discovered his deck of cards and thought he was cheating.

He has suffered from ulcerative colitis since childhood.

Sadowitz made his comedy debut in 1983 at a Glasgow club and secured a regular stand-up slot at the Weavers Inn pub on London Road in Glasgow.

The pub was run by future comedian Janey Godley, and he got the gig after her brother Jim begged her to put him on.

Sadowitz began travelling to London to perform at The Comedy Store every two weeks for two years, making the 400-mile journey via Stagecoach express coach.

He moved to the city permanently in 1986, living with his mother in Hampstead until 2005.

There, he began his first job working in Selfridges.

In the early days, Sadowitz was managed by comedian and club proprietor Malcolm Hardee.

As a bet with fellow comic Nick Revell, he produced one of his most famous lines of that era: "Nelson Mandela, what a cunt. Terry Waite, fucking bastard. I dunno, you lend some people a fiver, you never see them again."

For a time Sadowitz was considered part of the alternative comedy movement, but his act proved too objectionable with The Guardian stating that Sadowitz "shook up the right-on values of the 80s alternative comedy circuit with his willingness to say the unsayable".

Sadowitz has described Bernard Manning as "the good cop" to his bad.

Sadowitz's 1987 Edinburgh Fringe show Total Abuse was filmed at the Assembly Rooms and also released in audio as the album Gobshite.

The album was quickly withdrawn from sale due to fears of being sued for libel by Jimmy Savile as Sadowitz references rumours of the TV personality being a paedophile.

After a brief run as a columnist for Time Out magazine, he embarked on the Lose Your Comic Virginity tour in 1989.

At this time he was being managed by Jon Thoday's fledgling Avalon Entertainment Ltd. The tour culminated in a show at the Dominion Theatre in London, at the end of which he appeared from the rear of the auditorium wearing a kilt and a huge plastic phallus from which he sprayed the audience.

In 1991, Sadowitz was knocked unconscious by an audience member during a performance at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, where he mocked French Canadians, starting with the greeting "Hello moosefuckers! I tell you why I hate Canada, half of you speak French, and the other half let them."

The rarely quoted follow-up line, which Sadowitz claims is what actually led to him being attacked, was "Why don't you speak Indian? You might as well speak the language of the people you stole the country off of in the first place."

In 1992, Sadowitz appeared in his own television show The Pall Bearer's Revue.

In the same year, he appeared in the music video of The Shamen's UK number 1 hit "Ebeneezer Goode".

Sadowitz later expressed regret over his appearance in the video, stating that "it shows how stupid I am. I didn't even know that song was about drugs. I don't take drugs and had I known I wouldn't have done it".

He also befriended Derren Brown, who he met while working the International Magic shop in Clerkenwell, London.

He helped Brown in his early career by putting him in touch with H&R publishers and Objective Productions, a production company founded by the television magician Andrew O'Connor.

Between 1994 and 1998, Sadowitz performed as part of the double act Bib & Bob with Logan Murray.

His work with Murray took the form of sketches aimed at alienating almost everyone, with the duo stamping on a blow-up doll of the recently deceased Linda McCartney, and tipping Murray, dressed as Superman, out of a wheelchair into the audience (a reference to the paralysis of Christopher Reeve).

At one show, Sadowitz spat in the face of a drunken heckler who was constantly interrupting the show.

His final act was to strip naked and run across the stage, prompting a mixture of disgust and hilarity from the audience.

The Herald described the show as featuring "Pyrotechnical swearing. Lavatorial straining noises. Wanton foodstuff-smearing. Simulated sodomy. Gratuitous adoption of Indian accents, plus spitting, shouting, and penile dismemberment".

In 1998, Sadowitz joined the newly launched Channel 5 network, hosting his own panel show, The People vs. Jerry Sadowitz.

which led to his breakthrough show Mind Control in 2000.

In 2007, he was voted the 15th-greatest stand-up comic on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups.

In the 2010 list, he was voted the 33rd-greatest stand-up comic.

Sadowitz is also widely acclaimed as one of the best close-up magicians in the world and an accomplished practitioner of sleight of hand, having written several books on magic and invented several conjuring innovations.

Following Savile's death in 2011, hundreds of reports of sexual abuse by him became public.