Humor & Life Quote by Julian Clary

Bullying is framed here as an ugly, grinding force, and then instantly reframed as raw material. “Hideous and relentless” doesn’t romanticize the pain; it pins it down as sustained, bodily unpleasant pressure. But Clary’s pivot - “we turned it round” - is the real trick: a clean piece of comic engineering that converts victimhood into leverage, refusing the expected script of either quiet suffering or inspirational uplift.

The “we” matters as much as the turnaround. Clary isn’t selling a lone hero narrative; he’s gesturing toward a cohort - queer kids, theatre kids, outsiders with sharp tongues - who learned that attention can be armor. Celebrity, in this reading, isn’t just fame. It’s self-authorship. If the crowd insists on staring, you might as well direct the lighting, choose the punchlines, and monetise the gaze.

There’s a darker subtext, too: the strategy only “works” because culture rewards spectacle. The bullied person becomes legible to the world when they’re entertaining. That’s both empowering and quietly bitter, a recognition that visibility is conditional. Comedy, in Clary’s career, has often been about flamboyance as a weapon - not hiding difference, but exaggerating it until it becomes untouchable, even enviable.

In late-20th-century Britain, where queerness was policed socially and legally (and mocked as default), this is also a survival story about performance as counterattack. Not revenge, exactly. More like a hostile takeover of the narrative.