Comedy

Last year, when I decided to call my new show ‘I’m Worried I’m Starting To Hate Almost Everyone In The World’, two questions came up a lot: ‘Why such a long title?’ and, ‘Isn’t that rather an unpleasant sentiment?’ I conceded the first point, but I continue to contest the second. A faculty for hatred is an important part of the active intellect. Like ketchup, it shouldn’t be thoughtlessly doled out, but it can make things easier to swallow. Also, red is the traditional colour of both hatred and ketchup. It’s almost amazing the parallel hasn’t been drawn before.

‘Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action,’ wrote William Hazlitt. Admittedly, Hazlitt followed this principle so thoroughly that he lost nearly all his friends, but he had a point. Hating things is as instinctive and necessary as loving them. God, in the Bible, hates all manner of things. Even Gary Lineker probably hates something. Are Lineker (never booked in his career) or God (creator of the universe) to be reproached for this? No.
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Only by hatred can we hope to identify, and purge, what’s wrong with society. If no one had taken the trouble to hate The Darkness, they’d still be peddling their screechy, not-quite-ironic-enough rock today. If, instead of hating Paris Hilton, the world were to regard her as a harmless nuisance, she’ll continue to offend good taste forever with her horrid face, vacuous existence and crappy little dog. If 50 per cent of people didn’t hate Marmite, its creators wouldn’t work so hard to keep improving that beefy taste for the 50 per cent of us who appreciate it.

OK, hatred has been given a bad name by certain tyrants. But, in the hands of sane amateur haters like me, who use it as the impetus for jokes rather than genocide, it does us all a service.

Mark Watson takes ‘I’m Worried I’m Starting To Hate Almost Everyone In The World’ to the Soho Theatre from Thur to Sat.