This article contains references to sexual assault.
It's really not the result you'd expect from a stand-up routine. For an hour of your time, along with the laughs, you may also feel the unshakeable urge to leave your partner.
At least 250,000 couples have broken up after watching Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss's 2018 Netflix show Jigsaw — and he stopped counting long ago.
"People would come up with their divorce papers and have me autograph them,” he told The Feed from Tasmania.
At one point a teenager asked for Sloss to sign her dad’s divorce papers. “You did a good thing. They were horrible together,” he remembers her saying.
She was one of the many people tweeting, emailing, messaging, or stopping Sloss in the street to tell him what he’s accomplished. Cancelled engagements and divorces are the “fun” ones, but he’s answerable for many more breakups, too.
It’s the one question he’ll always ask people afterward. Are you better for it? And the answer is always a ‘yes’.
It's the slippery slope where Sloss's comedy likes to lurk. Teetering on the edge of “haha” funny and “oh-I’m-probably-gonna-be-thinking-about-this-later” funny.
The show was born out of Sloss’s experience in a coercive relationship and was performed at venues around the world before it was sold to Netflix.
Sloss tried hard to make the relationship work. And years of being conditioned to put romantic relationships at the centre of life, media telling him stories can’t be resolved until you “find your missing piece”, and the misconception that divorce meant failure had led him there and made him stay.
“The woman I was in a relationship with made me feel so small and so pathetic, and so weak that getting out of that relationship was such a freeing thing,” he told The Feed.
And he wants everyone else to sit with that thought, too.
“All I'm saying is if you're finding it hard to laugh at this routine, it’s because deep down you don't love the person you're with. So either start laughing or enjoy the awkward car ride.”
The woman I was in a relationship with made me feel so small and so pathetic, and so weak that getting out of that relationship was such a freeing thing.Daniel Sloss, comedian
"We have romanticised the idea of romance and it is cancerous," he adds.
"People are more in love with the idea of love than the person they are with."
Sloss said the task of keeping up with messages from people telling him they had broken up with their partner got so consuming, he had to stop himself from spending more than a week doing it.
"I allowed myself a week, I was like you're allowed to read everything for a week, you're allowed to just fully bask in the success, the power. And then after that, you've got to stop because it's not a healthy thing," he said.
Five years after the Jigsaw Netflix comedy special shot him to fame, Sloss, now also a father and fiancé, doesn’t waver from anything he’s said.
“I just do not believe that most people who are in relationships are as happy as they say they are. And that's because they're not. And I know I'm right,” he said.
“I have the vast statistics to back that up, not just the statistics of divorces, not just the statistics of breakups, but the statistics of how easy it was for me, through a television show, to break up these relationships with people I've never met.”
Daniel Sloss' show on sexual assault: 'I had to get drunk every night'
While his comedy doesn't only focus on the heavy, it's the material he's best known for.
In Sloss's other shows, he treads different territory, talking about his sister’s disability and death in ‘Dark,’ and in ‘X’ he discusses the rape of his friend, which was perpetrated by someone Sloss had introduced her to.
“This is not information I wanted over breakfast, or any meal really. It’s not like I was sitting there thinking ‘oh this could have waited until lunch’,” he said in the show.
The routine is doused with the lessons he learned about sexual assault, male defensiveness and ignorance.
“Empowerment is not the f**king goal. If it's a goal, it's an empty goal. It would make survivors feel nice, but it doesn't do anything,” he said.
“If you want to make a difference and if you want to use your platform for good in the situation, I have to talk to the men, because they are as ignorant as I was, and probably still am."
Sloss went back and forth with survivors trying to get the show right and said he purposely pulled the male audience in with “lad culture and thinly-veiled misogyny” before he descended into the heavy subject matter.
The first time Sloss performed the show “it was uncomfortable, it was difficult. And there were long silences.” That carried through on the tour.
The show also was entrenched in an ongoing debate about trigger warnings. Sloss was adamant that the unsettling show should not have one – and for most of the tour, it didn’t.
“I needed the men who were ignorant - not cruel, not vindictive, not mean - just ignorant men, because this wasn't a conversation that has ever been had,” he said.
Sloss pushed back against putting a trigger warning
“I needed to get them on site. And if you put a trigger warning on a comedy show, whether you like it or not, that's a political flag in the f***ing ground,” he said.
“If we put a trigger warning on the show, the types of men who need to see the show are gonna go ‘Oh, I don’t want to f***ng see that'.”
So he didn’t. And it got to a stage where he had to be blinded by the lights and "blind" drunk every night to cope with the material.
“There is no riffing, no room for manoeuvring and that made me stop being a comedian. That made me into an actor … I hated it. And that's why I used to get drunk. I used to get so drunk when I was on stage, just so I could avoid the eye contact.”
“When you speak about rape on stage, within a millisecond, within a millisecond, you can see everyone who's been raped in the audience instantly, instantly, in their body language in their demeanour. These people have come to the comedy show and what you've done is you've brought up the worst moment of their life.”
When a woman left the show during the routine, he said he lost the argument and added a trigger warning.
Now, he says it's a show he could never watch again.
"You could offer me 7 million pounds I will never ever, ever watch that show ever again in my f***ng life couldn't do it, couldn't do it.”
When you speak about rape on stage, within a millisecond, within a millisecond, you can see everyone who's been raped in the audience instantly, instantly, in their body language...Daniel Sloss, comedian
But Sloss remains proud of the impact it had.
“I would get so many beautiful emails from survivors, and people who have experienced other forms of sexual assault. And so many more messages from boyfriends, from husbands, from brothers and fathers, being like, 'I had no idea what this person in my life had gone through, after the show they told me.'”
“There was so much less pushback than I thought I would get from blokes.”
Since then, though, he’s refrained from writing a show with “a sad bit”, returning to antagonistic and playful comedy.
“I want to talk about serious things. I want to joke about serious things,” he said. But for a little while, he also wants to cleanse his soul.
Daniel Sloss is touring Australia until 27 April.
If you or someone you know is experiencing, or at risk of experiencing, domestic, family or sexual violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit
