 comedy writing to her name. There was stand-up, a series for BBC Radio 4, an improv group co-founded with her husband, Tom Salinsky, and the seven-year-old podcast with a devoted following, The Guilty Feminist , which is essentially about having all the best intentions to be a good feminist but being a bit crap at it. Comedy, she says, became an outlet while she was growing up. She was born in Brisbane, Australia, and adopted at 10 days old. Her family converted to become Jehovah's Witnesses when she was a teenager, she was baptised at 16 and spent her weekends knocking on doors telling people Armageddon was coming. She bristled against the patriarchal structure of the religion, though. She cracked jokes on doorsteps and even started an illicit comedy group with other young members. At 18 she moved to London to be a nanny and shortly after left the religious community, going to Oxford University to study English, where she joined a comedy improv class, the opposite to the high-control mentality of a 'cult'. Deborah Frances-White, right, with actress Emma Thompson in London. Photo / Getty Images She spent the next decades writing comedy radio series and traipsing around the s){kind=link}
I was in a cult,” says Deborah Frances-White, a former Jehovah’s Witness. Often the “men at the top”, the religion’s governing body, would tell the followers that a new thought, a “new light”, had emerged from God. It had to be accepted, immediately, as if it had always existed.
This unwavering devotion to an ideology is not too dissimilar to where we are today, she says. “We’re not allowing for any pluralism and we’re not thoroughly discussing things. The internet is not looking for complexity or nuance. It wants a hard line.”
Frances-White, 44, is a comedian and star podcast host whose show has hit more than 100 million downloads. She has a decades-long portfolio of (largely) comedy writing to her name. There was stand-up,
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