DON’T SHOOT! I’m a vegan .. the show

I love making people laugh and I love being vegan. Now I’m trying to do both at the same time.

I created the Vegan Smythe character in 2012, soon after becoming vegan. I’ve been a professional Variety Entertainer (yes, they still exist!) since the late 90s and I wanted to see if I could combine my professional skills with my new passion and create a world first: a funny show about being vegan.

It was a huge struggle at first. How can you create comedy out of a blinding awareness of the atrocious plight of animals in our society? But I love a challenge. I like that old saying “The difficult we’ll do immediately, the impossible may take us a week”. And I also believe that humour is the best way of telling the truth without getting punched in the face.

Seven years later my answer to the challenge is finally this: laugh at myself! How did it take me so long to work this out? Laugh at my own problems and issues. Laugh at my own high-and-mighty militance. Laugh at my own ignorance and at the foibles of my fellow vegans. Even laugh at gluten. Seriously, if one more person offers me something gluten-free when I tell them I’m vegan I may just go into anaphylaxis. When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you but when you cry you cry alone. And crying alone isn’t going to help anyone. OK, maybe Kleenex.

So with seven years of brewing and stewing behind me, seven years of meeting & greeting the “vegan community” and seven years of watching veganism move from a fringe foolishness to a hot topic I’m pushing into a new era with a thriving embryo of the show I wish I had when I first started. I’ve performed this show for an all-vegan audience, a zero-vegan audience and mixed-veg audiences and every time they’ve laughed, and laughed hard. Every time people have stood up at the end. For me this is the first step of an exciting new journey. Its like I’ve finally found a song worth singing. Now I’ve just got to find places to sing it, people to listen and maybe a few friends to help carry the gear and spread the word.