^{Picture: Sarah Harry Isaacs}

Newly crowned Taskmaster champion and about to become part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sophie Duker seems far more established than perhaps she is. Despite only one full hour of Edinburgh Fringe stand-up to her name (2019’s Venus, which earned her a Best Newcomer nomination), Duker already feels like a UK comedy fixture: a favoured commentator on Frankie Boyle’s New World Order and familiar booking on the panel show and podcast carousel where upcoming comics build their profile.

Baselessly attacked by the right-wing press and social-media trolls for a throwaway joke on New World Order in 2020 (for which she received death threats) and having walked off Comedy Central’s female-led topical panel show Yesterday, Today & The Day Before last year when protesting at cuts to her Israel-Palestine monologue, it’s easy to forget that Duker has only been doing stand-up for six years. Naturally, she was wary about what Taskmaster’s ‘visibility can do to you’. Alongside experienced acts such as Bridget Christie and Ardal O’Hanlon on the hit Channel 4 show, she ‘intuitively felt like the baby’.

‘They’ve had so long to soak into who they are as performers,’ she notes. ‘They were so impressive because it’s hard to be yourself on telly. Knowing how to handle yourself when you’re so visible is a skill that, for better and worse, performers need more and more nowadays.’ She admits to having been traumatised by the death threats and muted ‘Taskmaster’ from her Twitter mentions, knowing that with any television show, ‘you don’t get ultimate control on how you present yourself and you don’t get a right to reply. I see minority peers and colleagues coming under fire in a way that’s disproportionate, that they wouldn’t get if they were men, white and middle-class. But I don’t think I’m particularly radical as a concept of who should be on television.’

Fortunately, as it transpires, everyone who ‘watches Taskmaster is either a legend or a massive nerd’, so the response that has filtered through has been generally lovely. Even so, and echoing a central theme of Venus, one of the tasks involved licking an ice lolly for ages and saw her being ‘sexualised, not in ways that were within my control or that I necessarily want’. Consequently, performing stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe is where Duker feels most free. 

^{Picture: Sarah Harry Isaacs}

‘I don’t believe in cancel culture, in censoring yourself,’ she explains. ‘If you’re a good comedian, you’ll have thought about what you’re saying and be able to stand by everything. You’ve produced something to be seen in its entirety, and audiences know you’re at your most vulnerable. Whereas if people just pull a line or a quote off the internet, all they see is an arrogant prick making a joke.’ She rolls her eyes: ‘As if I’m part of a woke agenda.’

Duker’s second show, Hag, pays homage to her late, Ghanaian grandmother (‘a formidable matriarch and bad bitch’) who raised her for two years. It also signals the ‘Black and queer’ stand-up’s growing acceptance and sharing of her intersectional complexities.

‘As we know, “hag” is a word for an ugly, old woman. But, as I found when I actually looked the definition up, it’s also a word for someone with magical powers. Shows are like babies: you’ve got to check these things before you name them. Still, I think it’s ambiguous. It could be about my grandmother, it could be about me having the temerity to turn 30, or a formative lesbian cruise I went on. There’s something really beautiful and terrifying about finally taking control of your own destiny and making your own decisions, something I definitely did not do in my twenties. It’s something the hags of lore like Maleficent do [in Disney’s 2014 reimagining of Sleeping Beauty], taking control of the narratives in their own stories. Instead of just floating in a soup of millennial angst and bisexual uncertainty, accept who you are and take on the weight of who you can be.’

Duker, who is also hosting two shows of Wacky Racists (her regular night which platforms comics of colour), won’t allow herself to grow complacent from feeling she’s arrived because that breeds hack comedy. Plus, coronavirus gave her space to think, away from the mayhem of Edinburgh. ‘There’s been more chance to explore what I find interesting about myself, to defeat the big boss of imposter syndrome.’ 

Citing Rosie Jones and Jack Rooke, she suggests that ‘the fullest performers, who kind of emerge box-fresh and are so essentially themselves, have been able to embrace different parts of themselves or have done the work to be like that. It makes them richer, funnier comedians, firing on all cylinders.’ 

Embarking upon a debut UK tour next year (‘because I’m excited to slowly lose my mind while doing something I love’), she’s enjoying the idea of audiences seeing her in her entirety and hopes to ‘create worlds’ with a couple of sitcoms she’s writing. Meanwhile, she’s just shot her first film, superhero blockbuster The Marvels, in which she plays an alien. ‘I feel like my part might get cut or it’s a delusion that I had. But the director, Nia DaCosta, recognised me from Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back. So now I’m just chilling with Samuel L Jackson.’ 

Sophie Duker: Hag, Pleasance Courtyard, 3–28 August, 7.30pm; Wacky Racists Comedy Club, Assembly George Square Studios, 14, 21 August, 11pm.