Politics & Power Quote by Mark Roberts

There is a practiced shrug in Mark Roberts' line, the kind entertainers deploy when politics threatens to crawl onto the stage. "I don't make political statements; let's all have a laugh" sounds like neutrality, but it functions as a stance: comedy as a public off-ramp from argument, and a subtle claim that laughter is cleaner, safer, more useful than taking sides. It is also a little disingenuous. Refusing politics is itself political, especially in a century where mass media made performers de facto public figures whether they wanted the job or not.

Then he widens the frame: "Let's all live and be free". That reads like a toast, but it's doing defensive work. Freedom here isn't a platform; it's a permission slip for the comic's life. Roberts is asking the audience to accept a version of liberty that includes the right to offend, to provoke, to sneak a rude truth past the censors under cover of a grin.

The most revealing part is the last sentence, where the mask slips into a grin: "I try and live to the letter of the law, but right on the edge of it". That's the ethos of a certain kind of British performer: respectable on paper, mischievous in practice. The "edge" is where comedy lives - innuendo, class satire, sexual candor, bureaucratic loopholes. It's also a compact philosophy of survival in regulated industries: stay legal, stay employed, but never surrender the thrill of almost crossing the line. In that tension, Roberts sketches the performer as both citizen and trickster, insisting that freedom is measured in millimeters.