The World Is Full Of Idiots

Astronaut Chris Hadfield spent six months on the International Space Station and came back moved by the revelation that Earth is one united habitat without borders. Tiernan Douieb finds it irritating that humanity has to shoot someone hundreds of miles into the sky just to grasp basic co-existence. His counterproposal is simpler: leave the scientists home and fire the world’s most obstinate fools into deep space until they learn to behave.

Douieb’s delivery is noticeably cheerful for a misanthrope. Dressed plainly and smiling through his beard, he treats topics like everyday racism, climate change denial, and free speech meltdowns with the gentle exasperation of someone talking down an unreasonable toddler.

Filmed at The Phoenix in London in January 2016 and released for streaming in 2018, the hour evolved from his 2015 Edinburgh Fringe show, originally titled The World’s Full Of Idiots, Let’s Live In Space. Douieb was balancing the Fringe run with duties co-running Comedy Club 4 Kids and writing topical monologues for his weekly podcast, Partly Political Broadcast.

During its Edinburgh run, comic Mark Thomas praised it as a really good show, while local reviews singled out how unusually upbeat the material felt for an hour built around societal failure.