"the ways you can be subversive in a place where there’s so much history and power are really a once in a lifetime opportunity."

Those with a keen ear should listen out attentively on Saturday the 22nd of February to hear a familiar tread on the cobbled streets of Turl Street. Like a self-professed ‘gladiator returning to the arena’, Taskmaster Champion, Comedy Award Best Newcomer Nominee, Pink News Entertainer of the Year 2023 and Wadham alum Sophie Duker is bringing her stand-up tour, ‘But Daddy I Love Her’ to Oxford.

I caught up with her this week during her tour to reflect on her time at university (including memories of the occasional end-of-bop Mandela-ing), our 50 years of women at Wadham celebration, and how to succeed as a budding creative in 2025.

Let’s not get it twisted- I feel like if you study a humanity degree the likelihood of your degree being directly relevant to what you do is kind of tiny. This is my first international tour, and I am going to Paris; I expect to do a horrible franglais every five minutes. But also, various experiences of my degree have helped me be a comedian. Obviously, you are telling stories, and you are trying to communicate, and you are trying to do that very fast and under pressure, like you are in a tutorial.

I think what is really freeing is having a very expansive mindset and training to have a brain that fills out lots of different areas, because then that gives you the freedom to open it up into whatever universe you choose to inhabit. For instance, as part of the show, in every single city I go to I name-drop whatever is a w*nky, middle-class, posh people destination in that city [I can leave you to decide what we determined fitted these criteria in Oxford]. The show changes everywhere it goes, so I have to figure out what exactly I’m trying to say and adapt, making each audience feel like the show is just for them.

Right now, in the big 2025, and, let’s face it, since the global panna cotta, things have been pretty bleak-looking, it has felt like the end of the world multiple times. I know that a lot of people, myself included, have had a really difficult, weird and unprecedented few years. We all love to romanticise the various horror-shows and trash-fires of our lives, but I think that that power of imagination that young people have- that everyone needs to have now to keep going- is something that actually can be brought into the real world. A lot of the joy and a lot of the laughter of the show were inspired by how surreal and bleak life can be.

I think that a lot of mainstream comedy audiences, at least, are used to thinking about race, talking about race, even though it might be something that makes them uncomfortable. People are gaining literacy on how to talk about topics such as queerness, and trans people, but I think that there is still a long way to go because comedy clubs and comedy gatekeepers have been so dominated by cis-men, and there still isn’t a lot of space for that.

I think that there will obviously always be topics that feel taboo or feel incredibly sensitive at any given time, but I think that changes as people get to know each other and demystify these subjects. I don’t think that there is anything that should not be joked about and explored and exploded through comedy, but it’s about audiences catching up.

Because Oxford is hard to get into, you are told that you are special, and of course you are, but this can be internalised in a way that is not necessarily helpful. There’s so much commonality, not just between people who identify the same way as you. I’m so for community in your particular niches in which you identify but I think that people can put themselves under enormous pressure. When I started comedy, it felt like if you were a woman who was visible on-stage doing improv, or at the start of my career telling jokes, that you had to represent something bigger than yourself. I think that increasingly, as the industry, society, audiences and our colleagues get more educated, that pressure starts to ease.

Even though anyone who’s had a 4am essay crisis will argue against it, the most dangerous thing you can think at Oxford is that you need pressure to thrive, or survive, or to achieve great work. What you need to achieve greatness is to be in a context, and around people, that inspire and uplift you. It’s about the great resources that we have, whether that is our community, or what a college offers. I think that what I want people to do, particularly if they’ve been taught that they are the ‘model minority’ or exceptional, is to not think that they have to create based on scarcity. I think that even though things are bleak politically, we are in a time of great richness, and we need to be able to access and exploit just how many opportunities we have.

Right now, the creative industries are f*cked, but not permanently f*cked. I think people feel a little desperate, and if you are looking at launching yourself into an industry that doesn’t seem to be rolling in abundance, or where the money resides, that can be quite scary. But something that I would stress is that you have so much to offer. Just because the pool that you are about to jump into doesn’t look welcoming to you, doesn’t mean that you are the one that needs to change. I don’t think people need to replicate what has come before, or harp back to different times. Even though it is the plot of every single superhero movie, the newness and the innovation reside in the next generation.

I wasted a lot of time trying to do things the way that people I admired had done them. But it doesn’t matter that you are looking at an industry that is f*cked, because it is the old people that f*cked it. The power to unf*ck it comes from the next generation. If you are coming out of Oxford and you are looking to contribute creatively to the world in some way, that’s where you find it, not in your idols. Before coming to Oxford, I had a real idea in my head of how I wanted to do things, but I think that some of the people I met, the times I had, and the ways you can be subversive in a place where there’s so much history and power are really a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Interview conducted by Megan James (Eng and Mod Lang, 2022)