David Mitchell reckons ‘mansplaining’ isn’t a fair term – but simply how men conversate with everyone, not just women.
The Peep Show star, 51, was discussing male friendships in a recent interview when he gave his two pence on the dreaded mansplain: when men explain something to a woman in an overconfident and often patronising way.
‘You talk about funny things that occur to you,’ he said, while explaining what he and friend of 30 years and co-star Robert Webb natter about in their famous friendship.
‘I feel there’s an unfairness to the term mansplaining, which is taken to be men explaining things in a boring way to women,’ the Mitchell and Webb star said in an interview with The Sunday Times, reasoning: ‘Because they do it to each other, and they take turns, and that’s what men call a conversation.’
He went on to say men just have ‘a little mutual explain’ while ‘politely waiting’ for the other to finish before it’s their turn to explain something again. Riveting stuff.
‘If someone won’t let you get an explaining in, that’s not a good sort of conversational partner,’ David added.
David lives in north London with his wife of 13 years, Victoria Coren Mitchell, who he met briefly in 2007 before they married five years later. They have two children together, Barbara, 10, and June, two.
In the joint interview it was also revealed David and Robert only had the ‘odd conversation’ about the latter’s previous struggle with alcoholism and life-changing heart surgery in 2020.
This comes after it was announced the famous pair would be joining forces again for Channel 4’s Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping, a new six-part sketch show hitting screens on September 5.
It will be the first time the comedy duo have shared the screen since 2017’s Back and comes 12 years since the end of Peep Show.
Ahead of its launch, Mitchell and Webb said: ‘When Channel 4 asked us to do another sketch show we were startled, bemused and available.
‘It’s a perilous time for the industry and so it’s our hope that relaunching the trickiest genre of comedy is a brilliant piece of counterintuitive commissioning.
‘And we’re confident that unlike Roger Moore with his shoe on the bonnet of a car teetering on the edge of a cliff in For Your Eyes Only [REPLACE WITH 21ST CENTURY REFERENCE?] we’re not about to give British TV comedy a final lethal nudge into the abyss.
‘We’re looking forward to working with our brilliant new cast despite their youth and talent and would like to encourage viewers to watch the advert break carefully and do their best to buy something.
‘It doesn’t have to be a car but, you know, a box of chocolates or an app or something.’
The duo’s last sketch show, Mitchell and Webb Look, won them a Bafta for Best Comedy and ran for four seasons on the BBC.
It was also recently revealed David would be starring in the second season of Last One Laughing alongside Alan Carr, Amy Gledhill, Diane Morgan, Maisie Adam, Mel Giedroyc, Romesh Ranganathan, Sam Campbell and Gbemisola Ikumelo.
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