Tough Decisions

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message Here, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Armandia Unucci, somewhere in London.

And it's Helen Lewis on the campaign trail in the United States.

And this week, the week of the budget, we've taken the very tough decision to talk about the phrase tough decisions.

Are there any other kind when it comes to the budget?

I don't know.

Has anyone ever stood up on the budget and gone, the thing is, we've actually got loads of money.

I was really surprised.

I went out back and it's just like, everything is free.

No.

All parties use it, tough decisions.

But are the decisions labeled tough decisions?

Are they tough?

Or are they meant to sound tough, but in fact, are usually the first thing they decide to make cuts on?

Well, that's a very good question because I think if you look at the last kind of 14 years of Conservative government, you know, the fact that they tried as hard as they could to protect pensioner incomes when there's also their voting base suggests that some of the decisions they were making around austerity were not the toughest possible decisions, but were in fact actually politically rational ones about their supporters and protecting them.

And there is something about that phrase that politicians, when they trotted out tough decisions, you're meant to be quite impressed by that, but tough decisions imply that they are decisions which you won't like.

So fundamentally, the politicians who use the phrase are saying vote for me because I pursue the policies that you don't like.

There's a kind of

logic flaw that we're not meant to see in that when they basically tough it out by using the phrase tough decisions where as a fact there are all sorts of other questions we could be asking them about their decisions.

And that phrase to me kind of seals off that conversation for a while.

But there's also, I think, a dynamic that you often get with prime ministers and their chancellors where it's a kind of good cop, bad cop.

I'm thinking maybe Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is an obvious example of this.

But the idea that, you know, you've got one, you know, front man, and it usually is a man, to say, well, actually, I'd love to do all this stuff.

I'm giving you an hope and aspiration and rolling foothills of desire.

And then, you know, the chancellor comes along to say, we haven't got any money for that.

Sorry, you can't have it.

So I think that dynamic is quite prevalent.

And I wonder if that's why they make a sort of fetish of the idea of tough decisions, because it's kind of, you know, now it comes on the bank manager to tell you, you know, you really can't afford the mortgage.

And there is a kind of play, I mean, we're seeing it at the moment when the use of the phrase tough decisions to signal cuts that will affect many people, but also the phrase working people who aren't going to be affected.

And again, there's a logic thing there, because if you're making tough decisions, but you're drawing a circle around working people, that therefore should tell you that the decisions are going to be about either those who can't work or who can afford not to work.

So there is a kind of algebra with those words lying underneath it if you want to probe them a little bit more yeah and i think if you think about chancellors nicknames you know everyone wants to be the kind of iron chancellor don't they no one wants to be the marshmallow chancellor and rachel reeves has has leaned into that i think and labor often do because i think they know that the big perception in their minds if i'm going to stereotype wildly people often think the conservatives are beastly but very good at you know reigning things in labor are lovely but actually a bit spendthrift right and and the country sort of tends to cycle between those two polls about what you want.

Well, let's have a bit more public spending.

Oh, well, that's actually time to tighten our belts.

I mean, I guess tighten our belts is another phrase, right?

There are all these metaphors for what budgets do.

Yes, yes, that make no sense in reference to an economy in a nation sense, but like more depend on a kind of household budget.

Yes, and therefore, it's you know, you can't spend more than you can afford.

The magic money tree just doesn't exist.

And although it briefly existed during the pandemic, but then got chopped down

along with the tree on Hadrian's wall.

Because economics, to me, is baffling.

And the appalling thing is when you talk to economists, they too will say it's baffling.

And underneath it all, the only constant is nobody knows.

And therefore, these phrases, tough decisions, the right choice, are there, I think, to persuade us that everything is fine, that there is a kind of procedure here that has to be done.

And if we just follow it, then, you know, green shoots will appear in two or three years' time.

Green shoots.

That's why I miss green shoots.

Yes.

I hope they're coming back.

When you said that, it also made me think of Margaret Thatcher's Tina, There Is No Alternative.

Yeah.

Which is, I guess, is again what all of this language is designed to do, to say, look, I'm sorry.

I know you might want spending on X, but you can't have it for Y reason.

Do you ever watch the budget?

Because you don't have to professionally.

I have had to in the past.

And I wonder if any normal person has ever watched a budget.

My God, what is that like?

This is like, I feel like I've discovered some rogue specimen here.

What's it like watching the budget?

I think it's fascinating because it's such a highly choreographed day, right?

So it always starts.

Now, there's usually a pre-budget photo shoot.

If you remember, there was George Osborne with his Byron burger, which then turned out to be a very expensive burger.

So there's normally some bit where the Chancellor proves that they're actually A, working very hard, and B, definitely not a lot richer than you.

So they'll be there sort of eating some porridge and, you know, sitting over a bare light bulb in fingerless gloves.

Mending his trousers, you know, that sort of thing.

Putting a button back on his shirt.

yeah that sort of thing and then they come out with the red box which obviously you know is the original one that's been used since bc 39 whatever it was

um it's the one julius caesar brought over i think

exactly um and then there's this great tradition which is almost never now upheld which is it's the one time that you're allowed to drink alcohol in the commons chamber and usually

raise taxes on it Right, exactly.

So Ken Clark had whiskey, Jeffrey Howard had GNT, Gladstone had sherry and a beaten egg, which I've never, ever tried.

It reminds me of that sort of snowball that drink you used to have at Christmas.

I would love it.

One day, I hope someone has something like a tequila shot, you know,

Apple, WKD.

Yeah, exactly.

A huge.

Richard Reed will be doing budget slammers from 2 p.m.

God, what's a beaten egg like after an hour and a half?

Dispatch box.

But Gordon Brown went and just had, I think, Scottish mineral water.

Again, that's what I mean about now having to be more sort of Puritan about things.

I thought you were going to say Vimto, but Iron Brew.

Other soft drinks are available.

Other strange-tasting soft drinks are available.

But toughness is also something that we're meant to like and approve of, even though it means we're going to suffer.

Politicians still use that phrase tough as

a signal that they've got what it takes.

I'm talking about Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader in the election.

I can't even remember which election it was.

No, was it 2015?

When he was asked by Jeremy paxman are you tough and he said was it am i tough enough hell yes i'm tough

and it just sounded so ineffectual as if he'd been practicing hell yes all day because he'd never used that phrase ever before and and never has since really no no i don't think he has yeah i think i think it was like he was practicing it sort of his daily affirmations in the mirror yeah um

would you like chocolate sprinkles on your cappuccino Hell yes, I would.

Thank you very much.

And in fact, he was so, he was, if you watch the clip, actually, he was so concentrating on hell yes, he actually got the word tough wrong.

So he said, am I tuss enough?

Tough enough.

Hell yes, I'm tuss enough, tough enough.

It was a terrible preview of like, am I Liz Truss enough?

Yes, you too will also ultimately fail in your ambition to be prime minister.

Yeah.

But this kind of desire to be seen as more than you are, people didn't expect Ed Miliband to be, you know, clanking about with boxing gloves on.

It's a mental construct that we don't buy, really.

Well, I think that Rishi Sunak was very similar to Ed Miliband, in my view, in presentational style.

And I think wisely decided to go for lean into nerd, right?

Right, yes.

Which was, you know, I like Mexican Coke.

Do you remember that?

When he was trying to prove that he was tough, he was like, I like coke.

I'm not a junkie, close brackets.

I like coke.

All the the one you drink.

Let's not get too crazy here.

It was like, literally, no one thinks you're a cocaine addict, Rishi.

So bless your little heart.

No.

But you're clearly overexcited and all the high sugar Coke that you drink.

Exactly.

Clearly, that is enough of a high feature.

Yes, I mean, he's interesting.

He used, I'd say, the cousin of tough decisions, which is bold decisions.

Because when he scrapped a bit of HS2, when he launched the stop the bolts, he was talking about these as bold decisions.

Well, that's interesting because when you say that, it makes me think that neither tough decisions nor bold decisions imply they're good decisions or the right decisions, right?

So I think it's what you say when people are telling you wrong or arguing with you.

You sort of say, well, that's how you know it's working is because it's hurting.

Yes.

That's what bold decision says to me when, you know, the Rwanda, you know, we're going to cut these things.

These are bold decisions.

They do send up, I think, a kind of a red alert for me as in, all right, underneath you think this might go badly wrong, but I'll say bold decisions and that might just like get me through the next month.

Well, that makes me think of two phrases that I only ever hear in the context of political commentary.

The first of which is a hospital pass, right?

Okay.

Which is something that I had never heard of, but it's the idea that, you know, things are going really so badly that you get given the ball and you have to just run, even though someone might crunch into you so hard they might send you to the hospital.

I think that may be the derivation of that one.

God, no, I've forgotten the other one.

Over the course of this series, we're going to learn why you and me could never be politicians.

And it's because we start, I've got three bold passes to talk about today.

Who was that Texan governor standing for president who said there were three in his in the presidential debate, the candidates debate in the primaries, said there are three departments, if elected president, the three departments I want to shut down?

One is transport, one is education, and

I've forgotten the other one.

And he was out.

He was out.

I mean, he just crashed burned.

And it was energy.

And ironically, when Trump became president, he gave him the energy department to run which he didn't close down because he'd forgotten that he'd said he would that's a that must have been a really tough thinking on your feet moment where i'm presuming the only one that would ever come to your mind would be either homeland security or the treasury and you just have to think maybe i'll just say it maybe i'll just say we'll shut down the treasury

there's people who think it's a really bold decision what if we just didn't have money think about it there is there is another cousin to tough decision bold decision is which is difficult decisions which we've been hearing more of And I think that's the one

that's the more honest one.

I think that's the one where they're trying to convey actually, we're not going to sugarcoat this.

It will be awful.

They don't have something to say afterwards, which will kind of pull it back from just sounding apocalyptic, that they know that actually it is going to have a significant effect on a certain section of the community.

Well, that's why I think that austerity is one of the most successful phrases about however you feel about those policies just in terms of selling them it's incredible to go to i mean the conservatives get elected in a coalition in 2010 impose a huge number of public spending cuts say you know sorry we're going to have to cut libraries and you know there won't be any more money for schools in the nhs we're going to have to just um keep that stuff flat you know there won't be any pay rises for public sector servants it's austerity yeah and then not only get re-elected but actually increase their majority in 2015.

so there was a promise in austerity of this is you know this is going to hurt And then it did for a lot of people hurt.

But nonetheless, they had done enough of a job in reconciling people to that in order to get re-elected.

And that is again something you would not classically expect politicians to be able to kind of do and get away with.

Yes, it's almost like if you keep using the phrase austerity, it turns into something.

other, you know, it turns into something that's separate from the politician, from the party in power.

It's just a thing.

It's like a war or a hurricane.

It's austerity.

Yeah, I'd love love to, you know, I'd love to put more money into schools, but austerity.

As if austerity has told them that it's not possible.

Yeah.

Austerity is the treasury,

but we don't call it the treasury anymore.

Call it austerity.

You know, it kind of takes...

It takes the responsibility in a strange way away from the people doing the decisions because it's decisions in the light of something which they're persuaded us already existed as a given.

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I think politicians absolutely love that.

I remember talking to quite a senior politician on the Remain side who had previously served in government, who said, Well, you have to remember that the thing about the EU was that civil servants could always say to a minister, We absolutely love your idea to turn, you know, Coventry into a giant disco, but EU regulations won't allow it.

And I think that may have, you know, his thesis was that may have accounted for some of the hostility towards the EU.

It was like a kind of, well, obviously we'd all love to do that, but the EU won't let us.

And I think there's a similar version of that where the Treasury now functions as the sort of big bad uncle that kind of has to say no.

And while we'd love to do that, but the Treasury will never agree to that.

We were researching

the final series of The Thick of It, which took place in the middle of austerity.

I'd heard that when the coal came round from the Treasury to different departments that they had to cut their budgets by quite a lot.

Rather than the departments and the ministers doing a careful look at everything the department did and whether there was a little bit that could be taken out here and let it, the ministers actually wanted to look for headline cuts.

It was actually, you were a good person if you came up with something big that everyone loved that you were cutting because it showed how tough you were.

So even though it might not in the long run make economic sense to make that cut, there was a kind of a sense of people trying to outmatch each other.

And they also had like a week to come up with it.

So there was no time to do a considered assessment of how your department ran and how it financed various services and so on.

So yes, it was all about just headline grabbing, really.

Who is the toughest minister?

Because the toughest minister under austerity would therefore

show the true colours and hopefully get promoted.

So

it was a kind of a game.

Were they tough enough, as it turns out?

Oh, yeah.

Tuss, tuss and tuss.

They were tough.

Heck, yeah.

Yeah, heck, I'm tough.

Um,

but that interests me because, um, one of the things that is always said about budgets is that they try and take money away from you in ways that you don't understand.

There's an absolutely incredible not the nine o'clock news sketch from the 80s, you know, the budget sketch then, when they, which is riffing on Jeffrey Howe as chancellor, and he takes all the taxes off petrol, alcohol, and cigarettes and then puts 100% on them.

And the list is wheelchairs, white sticks, false limbs, glass eyes and diarrhea medicine.

Observers will notice I've deliberately chosen to penalize those members of the community who can't hit back.

And I think it's a perfect sketch because it encapsulates what people think about budgets, right?

Which is that there's always, you know, all this kind of stuff that you cannot tell what's happening in the moment.

No normal human, even a trained economist, will struggle to keep up with what tiny changes to the national insurance thresholds mean or pension contributions or whatever.

So it's like, is there a penny on fuel?

Is there a penny off cider?

And, you know, those kind of really headline-grabbing measures.

And then usually some way tucked away in the red book, which is what we call the kind of the documents that are the company that's sort of footnotes, isn't it?

Explaining the implications.

Then somewhere in there will be the bit that actually tells you what's really going to happen.

But all chancellors are that's why they're sort of obsessed with alcohol taxes, right?

It's because they think they want the headline to be, you know, bottoms up the next day afterwards.

I mean, they can't do it with cigarettes anymore because no one's like, whoa, hey, finally, we'll all be able to give ourselves lung cancer.

And that kind of takes back to the, you know, what we were talking about earlier, that it is utterly incomprehensible what's going on.

And therefore, are the rules by which finance is conducted, are they arbitrary?

Because there's been a lot of, in the last couple of weeks, in the lead-up to the budget, commentary on how they might change the way

budgeting and debt is measured to allow room for maneuver to put money into investment.

So basically you end up with a chancellor who says they're going to have to follow the rules of economics quite rigidly here because we're in a very difficult situation.

But I might just change some of them if that helps.

Oh, rules is almost a programme in itself because everyone is obsessed with fiscal rules.

Rachel Reaver's got fiscal rules.

George Osborne had fiscal rules.

And the rules turn out to be somewhat more flexible than you would perhaps imagine them to be.

You know, one of the classic ones that has been throughout British politics in the last 20 years is the idea of we're only going to borrow to invest.

You know, we won't increase the deficit for day-to-day spending.

And your definition of what investing is can often be quite flexible.

One of the main problems about covering budgets from a political journalism point of view is that people who are really good at numbers go and make an absolute fortune in the city.

They don't become newspaper op-ed columnists.

And so the only time that I can really remember thinking during a budget, oh, you've done a terrible thing, you have no idea what is, which is Philip Hammond's budget.

He promised he was going to increase national insurance contributions on the self-employed.

There was almost a kind of collective intake of breath because every single person knew that most newspaper columnists are self-employed.

And he basically might as well have just announced a kind of, yeah, exactly, all of you newspaper columnists, I've just taken about three grand a year off you.

How do you like that, lads?

And sure enough, that I remember that policy, I think, lasted about a week before he overturned it.

But it was a really interesting example of a tough decision.

Journalists were annoyed.

There was an enormous cacophony about how incredibly unfair.

And it wasn't wasn't presented as

this has really put my plan to buy a second house in jeopardy.

It was presented as, what about the hard-working people at the bottom end?

But you could tell it was one of those situations, and I think this skews budget coverage enormously, where people who were writing about it were going to be personally affected by it.

And so that's that often governs those tough decisions.

You know, most people have interactions with the school system, right?

Most people do not have interactions with the prison system.

And so when you're looking to make tough decisions, ideally you make tough decisions around things that matter.

You know, adult care being another thing.

People rely on that enormously if they rely on it.

But lots of people are not interacting with that at any given time.

So, it is often seen as a kind of easier place for cuts than the health service.

Oh, absolutely.

It's whatever our kind of concept of what is using up resources and what isn't, and that can be quite arbitrary.

Both parties always, when they're in a tough phase, talk about having to make the difficult decision to make cuts in the welfare and benefit system.

But it's something I've been blitting on about for years, but you don't see vans going around the city with, you know, if your boss is doing something odd with the accounts, please ring this number, which is why I'm always wary when a politician does say I'm making the tough decision, because for me, it can sometimes be a sleight of hand to cover up the fact that it's actually quite a lazy decision.

It's picking on the low-hanging fruit, as it were, in that, you know, they're not going to fight back.

They're not going to campaign to get it overturned.

Whereas, business, if you torment business, you're in a hell of a trouble.

Well, that's interesting because that does speak to something bigger about political language, which is the idea that both journalists and politicians, and I guess you as a comedy writer, you have to kind of make problems seem human-sized in order for people to connect with them.

It's quite hard to connect with the idea of 30 billion in fraud, but the idea that someone down your road has now got a suspiciously big telly, you know, despite not having worked, is the kind of thing that people go, well, that hang on a minute.

I do wonder a bit more about that.

A big telly that I think costs 50 billion.

So

actually, we are now finally, we can lay a much loved political phrase to rest, I think, finally.

Because if you remember, for years, the signal of people who were working class but you know, didn't earn enough money was that they had a flat-screen TV or a big TV.

Remember, that was the kind of like that was the kind of exemplar of unearned wealth.

And basically, you now cannot buy a cathode ray television.

They belong in museums.

So I think we're going to have to gently send that one off on the Viking longboat into the sea.

That never again will a flat-screen TV be a kind of sign of huge and unbelievable wealth.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And going back to tough, politicians who like to sound and look tough, so away from the economics of it, the ones who want you to be confident about their leadership ability.

You know, I mentioned Ed Milliband.

I remember Ian Duncan Smith.

when he was briefly leader of a Conservative Party and he was known as the quiet man.

Do you remember that?

And then he did a speech at the party conference where he said um

get on board or get out of the way that sounds tough the quiet man is here to stay and he's turning up the volume and he kind of shouted volume and um i think he was gone about a month later but uh that that that's pressure that we put on our political leaders to sound like something that they clearly aren't.

I think that, but you're right, it's a very high stakes thing to do.

It didn't work for Induncan Smith, and it didn't work for here's a very niche bit of U.S.

political trivolet.

Do you remember former presidential candidate Howard Dean?

Oh, yes.

He is now only remembered for the Dean scream, which is that he decided, remember, he was going to express how passionate he felt about something and screamed into a microphone.

And that was it.

Everyone just called him Howard the Scream.

And then it was his campaign.

It's not even Witty.

It's not even Witty as a name, really, is it?

Is it?

But that was it.

Much like the quiet man, he would have been better off probably keeping keeping the volume quite low i always remember uh john major when he when you know his euro rebels were causing him most bother and he resigned he stayed on his premise but resigned as leader of the conservative party to provoke another election uh you know back me or sack me was the thing but he he said when your back is to the wall there's only one thing you can do which is turn around and start fighting

and i thought well that means you're fighting a wall

whereas glorious mixed metaphor whereas all the people who hate you are advancing even further towards you because you've turned your back on them.

Oh, I love that.

Well, I think,

do you have one more phrase that you would like to bring up this week?

Yes, I'm just going to talk about black hole, really, which is not unconnected with what we've been talking about.

Because, again, there's another phrase that sounds impressive

when it's to explain the difficulty.

of being able to plug the finances.

And black hole has become more and more popular as a way of explaining it because I think there's something about the fact that a black hole is something we don't you know the reality of what a black hole is in space as it were is we don't quite know what it is it's mysterious and I think that phrase is used in by politicians now to try and have a slightly similar effect which is to say you know if you say there's a black hole in our finances it sounds like you're a scientist you kind of know what you're talking about, but also it's quite, it might be dangerous actually to go anywhere near that.

You know, best leave them to just get on with it because I don't quite understand.

Do you think?

Yeah, and I think it's also, as you say, a natural phenomenon.

It's just, it's a thing that has happened and there's no one's fingerprints on it.

You know, it's just a kind of, you know, bit of the cosmos that is just fixed and unchanged.

Although I think scientists now think that anything that goes into a black hole now comes out maybe in the future.

So it's possible that there's 44 billion pounds is its, you know, lucky descendants many, many millennia from now are going going to one day just have, oh, hang on a minute, what's come out of the event horizon?

This is all this money that Rachel Reeves was looking for.

So, there's a budget where a you know, a chancellor stands up, downs a pint of whiskey, as is their right, and says, We're borrowing to invest in a black hole we've found.

And this will mean that in 40 years' time, you can have as much fags and booze as you like because you'll be able to afford it.

It's a beautiful aspiration, certainly.

Can I tell you what I've brought you?

Um,

I think the budget cliché to end all budget cliches is the rabbit from the hat, which is the idea that, you know, oh, the thing is, we've had lots of stuff trailed about all, you know, tax cuts and whatever it might be.

But what will be the rabbit from the hat?

Would you like to guess?

I went into Hansard, which is the record of all parliamentary business, and looked for the first example of the rabbit emerging from the hat.

Can you hazard a guess at how long ago that was?

Oh, gosh, was it centuries?

Was it sometime in the Victorian era?

Or no?

No, nearer.

Oh, gosh.

was it

Geoffrey Howe?

No.

Boulder.

I'm going to say it was 1957.

It was Joe Grimmond, and it was about Labour's Richard Crossman in the first Wilson government.

He asked about the Bing Rabbit.

I did wonder briefly, there was one,

there was a use of the phrase earlier, but it turned out to be in a literal bill called the Rabbits Bill, which was about the regulation of wild rabbits.

So it was about actual rabbits in actual hats.

It is illegal to put any rabbits in a hat.

That was that would harm them.

Do we know what the the rabbit, Richard Crossman's rabbit from the hat was?

I'm not actually sure if there was subsequently a rabbit.

And then now it's become a thing that people riff on.

And I think Jeremy Hunt's large budget was described as being all hat and no rabbit.

Yeah.

Yeah, there is that expectation, isn't there?

Because, I mean, didn't someone in the 70s, a chance in the 70s, get fired or had to resign because they unwittingly revealed something that was going to be in their budget the night before?

I mean, that's how proper and secret it was.

But now the budget is leaked to the press in early instalments in the week leading up to it.

There's a kind of it's always dripped out.

Yes, the pitch is right.

You're thinking of that was Labour's Hugh Dalton in 1947.

He briefed it all to a paper called The Star, which I should clarify was a different paper to the current, in case you think, wow, the star has really changed its focus.

No, the paper that brought us Lettis Liz Truss was not then highly interested in national insurance thresholds.

It was a different paper.

But yeah, he went.

He had to acknowledge that it was, you know, the idea of the budget is you should announce things that are going to change the markets.

They should go in front of the house first so that people can't make bets on them or change their behavior ahead of time.

And so he went.

But yeah, now it's pretty standard practice.

Under George Osborne, the entire budget basically appeared on the evening standard and that went online before he'd even stood up.

Which explains the pressure on Europe being able to pull a rabbit from the hat because on budget day itself,

it's considered good to announce something that nobody saw coming.

Whether that's good, bad, or just weird.

It's just one thing that hasn't been leaked.

But yes, I think you're right.

I think, well, you're listening to this after the budget.

We're recording this just before.

So you know what the rabbit is or the absence of the rabbit is and we are on tender hooks.

The only way we can ever find out is to go into a black hole and come out the other way.

Well, look, Amando, I'm going to take the tough decision to end this episode.

Can I end by asking you what tough decisions you have taken this week?

Oh, Lord, that's thrown me.

I think crossing the road for me is always a tough decision.

I've found.

You know, I wander around the streets now with my headphones on,

which then prompts me to be slightly in another world, looking at my phone.

And I suddenly cross the road.

And halfway crossing the road, I realise, oh, I'm crossing the road.

Why didn't I actually think as I started that that's what I'm about to do?

So let that be a warning to you all, listeners.

That is absolutely terrific.

My tough decision is: I'm currently in the deep south, which means I could have chicken and waffles for breakfast every morning.

And every morning, I fight the struggle with myself to have a piece of toast instead.

So,

we've both got, yeah, yeah, we've both got something to work on in the future.

Well, I'll let you digest on that.

That's all we've got time for this week.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message here, and we'll be back with another Strong Message next week.

Goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Hey friend, I'm Randy Feldface, the world's most entertaining non-human comedian.

And if you like stand-up, sitcom, and sketch comedy, you're my kind of person.

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the band to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaysF.com