David Hoyle (born 19 September 1962) is an English performance artist, avant-garde cabaret artist, singer, actor, comedian and film director. His performances combine disparate elements, from satirical comedy to painting, surrealism and striptease, much of which is aggressive comedy in nature. Hoyle's work has often focused on themes in the LGBTQ community, attacking what he sees as dominant trends in "bourgeois Britain and the materialistic-hedonistic gay scene". According to The Guardian his performances have led him to become "something of a legend" on the London cabaret circuit. The stress led him to suffer a mental breakdown when he was fourteen, although the doctors who treated him "pathologised my natural behaviour and tried to give me tablets for it", something which he thought caused him even greater suffering. Hoyle gained some relief from the persecution he faced however by visiting the comedians and performers that used to appear at Blackpool every summer, such as Ken Dodd and Dorothy Squires, and he particularly adored the circus, later relating that "I thought its performers were the most glamorous people. Beyond beautiful." It was around the same time that he began performing in the Belle Vue, a pub in Blackpool, where he did comedy routines whilst in the character of Paul Munnery-Vain (the name being a pun on pulmonary vein), the illegitimate offspring of the Duke of Edinburgh and Dorothy Squires. He found that many of the punters enjoyed his performances, although was unnerved that some of them made sexual advances toward him. and was also involved in the early days of the superclub Manumission, when it started as a club night in Manchester. He came to the notice of a London audience via his weekly performances at Duckie, from 1995 onwards. Soon after, Louise Gray published the first national press interview with Hoyle ('David versus Goliath', 29 November 1996). He also performed at the Queer Up North festival and the Leeds conceptual art club 'Freakshow'. Other elements of his performance included pole dancing, mural painting and even striptease. whilst that same year, he also appeared as a cameo in Todd Haynes's film Velvet Goldmine playing Freddi, a member of Brian Slade's entourage.
Hoyle appeared regularly as The Divine David in the BBC's sketch show Comedy Nation (1998) and achieved national prominence with his 1998 arts TV show The Divine David Presents on Channel 4, also under his stage persona. This was followed a year later by the series The Divine David Heals.
In 2000, Hoyle publicly killed off the Divine David in a show entitled The Divine David on Ice which was held at Streatham Ice Rink in London; at the end of the show, the character died to the soundtrack David Bowie's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide". Commenting on the reason for killing off The Divine David, Hoyle would relate that:
:In a way the Divine David became the patron saint of decadence and nihilism and all the rest of it, and it's hard for that not to affect your own actions... As much as I used to say, "Oh yes, you have to be very sure of your identity to be doing all this business," I don't think I actually was. If you're used to creating aliases and camouflage and all that sort of palaver, eventually you have to peel it all away and work out who you are. Hoyle gained most of his satisfaction from helping out his neighbours at their local housing association-backed communal garden, finding that being amongst plants aided his mental recovery. In doing so he hoped that he could get his audience thinking about intellectual topics, stating that "All I can provide with Magazine is a microcosm of a macrocosm... But at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern the truth will be revealed and it will be a shared experience and there will be a mass lifting of consciousness. That's all I can say."
In October–November 2009, Hoyle presented a piece of performance art at London's Chelsea Theatre as a part of their SACRED season. Entitled Theatre of Therapy and directed by Nathan Evans, it involved Hoyle interviewing audience members whilst sitting on a couch that once belonged to pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) when the latter had lived in Hampstead, North London. Describing the use of such an artefact, Hoyle told a journalist that "The couch will be electrically charged with the vibration of Freud's voice. I plan to have a relationship with it."
In 2009, Hoyle publicly proclaimed that he was intending to stand for election as a member of parliament in the Vauxhall constituency in south London. Standing as a representative of the Avant-Garde Alliance Party, he proclaimed that, should he come into power, he would advocate killing local priests and other authority figures to bring about "a new way, a new way of being, a new way of living, a new way of responding. No longer are we going to look to others to tell us how to be." These "pseudo-faux-adult parental figures", Hoyle claimed, "have had a jolly good run for their money and it's now time for them to fuck off". He further went on to advocate polygamy and encouraged more sex (including "inter-species love [and] inter-generational sex"), believing that it would cut crime rates. Furthermore, he argued for an overhaul of the workplace system, encouraging people to adopt a "spiritual dimension" to their jobs, and called for the abolition of the arms trade, with weapons factories being converted into social housing. Meanwhile, in December of that year he filmed a special Christmas message for the socially liberal newspaper The Guardian.
In August 2011, Hoyle produced his first musical show, Unplugged, at London's Soho Theatre, during which he sang a medley of songs, some of which were covers and others which were his own creation. Directed by regular Hoyle collaborator Nathan Evans, the music was directed by Michael Roulston, and included a series of songs that had a "personal connection" to him; covers of Nine Inch Nails's "Hurt", New Order's "True Faith", Joseph McCarthy's "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)", Stephen Sondheim's "Losing My Mind" and Tony Christie's "How Can I Entertain?", as well as a new song, "A Return to Trauma". Journalist Paul Vale of The Stage noted that it was "something of a departure" from Hoyle's earlier work, and that he was "almost sanitised" in his behaviour, providing "a healthy dialogue with his audience", discussing his "progressive views on education and a tongue-in-cheek dissection of avant-garde performance art, but mostly the chit-chat is either friendly or amiably abusive." Whilst noting that "Hoyle's anecdotes and wit were in full flow from the start", the reporter Jamie Fisher of the Pink Paper was more critical, noting that many would be "put off by his reliance on lavatorial humour and random avant-garde style", believing that he was destined to appeal "to a cult audience only".
In December 2012 Hoyle returned to the Soho Theatre with a stage show collection of songs written with Richard Thomas, covering a variety of topics raging from 'Gays in the Military' to the scandals of the BBC over the ages. Merrie Hell covers the dark side of the Christmas holidays set against melodies disjointed from the reality of subject covered within the show, with Thomas, who scored Jerry Springer: The Opera, helping bring levity alongside reflection and filthy humour.
2020s: Aviva Studios Residency and Mugler
In 2024, Hoyle had a retrospective residency at Aviva Studios at Factory International in Manchester.
In 2026, Hoyle appeared in a series of short videos explaining “How to wear Mugler” at the invitation of Miguel Castro Freitas, since 2025 the creative director of Mugler.