How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read online

  I’ve lost you now as well. I’ve beaten you. I’ve beaten you, with your KILL EVERYONE … No, you don’t claim to be an expert but you looked at me with a doubtful face, as if, ‘This is going to get him.’ But look, I know more about the Hulk than you, and I’m older than you. So!

  No, that’s fine.*

  * I love comics, especially Marvel Comics, and I am not trying to be kitsch or clever when I say that buying a copy of Captain Marvel off a revolving rack full of True Detective magazines and porn in the newsagents opposite the doctors in Shirley in 1973 changed my life, got me reading and made me who I am today. Nor am I trying to be provocative or wilfully offensive when I say that Peter Parker’s mantra ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ means more to me than any religious creed.

  When I was touring this show, 2004–5, I was still on top of the Hulk to the extent that I could answer pretty much any piece of Hulk trivia thrown at me, although in Melbourne in April 2005 I did get the issue number that Wolverine first appeared in wrong by one digit. I couldn’t do this now. Since I had a son there’s no time to read comics, and then Marvel restructured their continuity with the cross-title civil war plotline of 2006–7 and made it impossible for the casual reader and fortysomething father to dip in and out of the stories, as everything was different now. It may not seem important to you that Elektra turned out to have been a Skrull secret agent, but depending on when exactly the substitution was made it would, for example, render rather hollow all the emotional investment I had made in her relationship with Matt Murdoch, aka Daredevil, in my teens and twenties.

  But doing this routine had a lovely knock-on effect. When the DVD was shown on cable in the middle of the night in 2007, a comic-book artist called Gary Frank saw it, and subsequently drew me into the background of two frames of a fight between Doc Sampson and the She-Hulk in Hulk 106. He even sent me the original artwork for free. In his self-serving, egomaniacal and delightful blog, the comedian Richard Herring portrays his life as a continual succession of moments so superb that the young Richard Herring would not have believed they could ever have happened. Until fairly recently, my life was a succession of moments of which the young me would have been deeply ashamed or infuriated. But being in a Hulk comic would have been beyond my wildest dreams.

  In the same month as I appeared in Hulk 106, I was asked to go on the radio show of Jonathan Ross, another split personality whose dark side leads him into destructive situations which destroy the lives of all around him. I did it gladly as it was always a great show. Ross is a high-profile comics nerd who once ran his own comics shop, and has made some great documentaries about comics’ creators where he lets the endearing enthusiast in him come to the fore. I took along Hulk 106 to show him. ‘Thanks for that,’ Ross said, having perused it, and then put it into a sports bag beneath his desk full of promo DVDs, games, books, CDs and other stuff given to him that day by people plugging things or just bribing him. But that was my only copy of Hulk 106, the issue with me in it, and I had tried to get spares already but it was sold out. How could I tell Jonathan Ross that when I offered it to him, it wasn’t for him, it was just to look at, without highlighting the embarrassing fact that a man of his status now just naturally assumes that anything put into his hands is for him to keep? He could have used some of his £18-million salary to buy his own Hulk 106. It’s £2.50 or something. I bit my lip and let it go, and subsequently the comics nerd and writer Ben Moor gave me his Hulk 106 in compensation. For me, this Ross incident is worse than Sachsgate.

  So, so I was really excited to, to interview Ang Lee about the Hulk, and um … ’cause he’d made the film. But, but when I interview, I try to make a little joke to put them at ease, you know. So I rang him up. He was in New York, I was in, er, London. And I said to him, ‘Ang Lee, you have directed the Hulk film. You must be very excited and proud. But don’t make me anglee. You wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee.’*

  * I know this isn’t funny. It’s not especially meant to be. I can’t remember when or how I thought of this joke, but I knew immediately there was ten minutes in it. Over the years this has become a routine of mine people always shout out for, but the truth is I could only really perform it on this tour. It was so complicated, and crucial parts of it needed to be so precise in the exact nature of the replication of extremely similar but subtly and importantly different words and phrases, that once it was gone out of my mind it was gone, and I could never remember how I did it again.

  I suppose this is a perfect example of killing the punchline of the actual joke stone dead in the opening section of the routine, so that no one’s waiting for the pay-off, and then trying to focus the audience on the pleasure of the language contained within it. It didn’t always work.

  Every time I performed it I had to feel like I was doing it for the first time, like I was actually struggling through the argument in my head, in real time. I’d try to forget the exact words of any bits that didn’t need to be exact, to surprise myself, to try and keep it fresh. I saw the avant-garde guitarist Fred Frith doing a solo show at the ICA through the London Musicians’ Collective in about 1993, and someone was taking flash photos as he embarked on the opening salvos of an hour-long solo improvisation. In the end he asked them to stop, saying, ‘I’m trying to forget where I am, but you keep reminding me.’ In the end, I was no longer able to forget where I was in the Ang Lee routine. I knew every twist and turn and every blind alley, and there were no more new paths to explore and it died on the vine.

  Then there was a long, embarrassed pause. And then Ang Lee said, ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’

  And I said, ‘I said, Ang Lee … you have … you’ve directed the Hulk film. You must be very excited and proud. But, erm, don’t make me anglee. You wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee.’

  And there was another kind of silence. And then Ang Lee said, ‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that?’

  And I said, ‘There’s no need, it was just a stupid joke.’

  And he went, ‘No. What did you say?’

  And I said … ‘I said, Ang Lee, you’ve directed the Hulk film. You must be very excited and proud. But, erm, don’t make me anglee. You wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee.’

  And he, he didn’t say anything. And I said, ‘I expect loads of people have made that joke to you.’

  And he said, ‘No. No one’s ever said it before. Why did you say it? Why?’*

  * This clearly echoes Monty Python’s Mr Smoketoomuch, who, when he gives his name, is informed, ‘You’d better cut down then,’ and then tells his embarrassed interlocutor that no one has ever told that joke to him before. I think I had this on the Live at Drury Lane record as a child, which I still probably know off by heart.

  And I said, ‘Well, Ang … You know the Hulk film?’

  And he went, ‘Yeah.’

  I said, ‘Well, in that, Bruce Banner – he’s the Hulk – he says, “Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” And your name’s Ang Lee and you directed it. So I said, um, “Don’t make me anglee, you wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee,” um, because “Ang Lee” sounds a bit like “angry”.’

  And Ang Lee said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  And I said, ‘Come on, Ang, be fair. “Ang Lee” does sound a bit like “angry”.’

  And Ang Lee said, ‘No, it doesn’t. “Ang Lee” is a completely different word to “anglee”.’

  And I said, ‘I’m sorry. Can you repeat that?’

  And Ang Lee said, ‘Yes. “Ang Lee” is a completely different word to “anglee”.’

  And I said, ‘I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make, Ang Lee, because what I’m saying, if you listen, is that “angry” sounds a bit like “Ang Lee”, so if you swap them round, people can see there’s a slight change, there’s some sort of joke there. Ang Lee … what you’re saying is actually the same word as “anglee”. If you swap those two words round, no one would notice the difference. It wouldn’t work. But that�
�s not what you’re … What you appear to be saying is that “anglee” is a completely different word to “Ang Lee”, but it isn’t. They’re the same thing. I can’t understand … It’s very simple, the joke I made. I can’t understand how you’ve got into this kind of fix. I never …’

  And then he went, ‘Oh, I get it,’ he said. ‘Is this a joke about me having a Taiwanese accent?’

  And I was mortified. I went, ‘No, it never even occurred to me that you would think that. It’s just a simple thing about the words, the syllables “ry” and “lee”, sounding the same. My own surname is Lee, I’ve had thirty-six years of fun with that syllable. I know what I’m talking about. I can’t see why you would begin to think …’

  And he went, ‘No! You’re anti-Taiwanese.’

  And I went, ‘I’m not. I don’t even know where Taiwan is. I’ve got no interest in it.’ Which made it worse, to be honest.

  And then he got, he got like a lawyer on from Universal, and I had to … Shouting at me, saying I was anti-Taiwan … I had to get my editor on from the paper to stick up for me … We ended up having this kind of four-way argument. It went on for ages. He was going, ‘You’re anti-Taiwanese,’ he was saying. My editor was going, ‘No, he isn’t, he has no history of anti-Taiwaneseness at all.’ And there was, like, this thing. And then Ang Lee started shouting at me about it. And I went, ‘Well, I can’t see what your problem is. Why don’t you just listen to the joke? It’s obvious.’

  And then in the end he went, ‘Don’t make me anglee, you wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee!’

  And I said, ‘You’ve proved my point, you fucking Taiwanese idiot!’

  He said, ‘Don’t call me that!’ He got another bloke, an adviser. I had to get someone else on, the publisher. There’s like a six-way, two-hour debate going on. In the end, we argued for so long that Ang Lee missed his 2.30 dentist’s appointment.*

  * What time does the Chinese man go to the dentist? 2.30 (Tooth hurty). For me, the joke here is to dare to offer this seventies Beano joke up as the conclusion to all that has gone before.

  That’s the time he goes to the dentist, Glasgow! Don’t let him tell you any different. He doesn’t even need to write it down. They offer him an appointment card, he rejects it. He says, ‘I’ll remember it by thinking about my own pain.’*

  * The subtext here is that the Chinese man in the 2.30 joke thinks the thoughts in his own head in English, in a bad Chinese accent, and that for him, this bad accent echoes the time of his appointment. I thought about elaborating on this live but it would, I think, have been adding insult to injury. That said, one of the things I love about proper jokes are mad assumptions of this nature: for example, the implication here that a Chinese man thinks in English in a Chinese accent and presumably because of that books his appointment at 2.30 as an aide-memoire.

  I’m going to shout out some questions now. I need you to answer loudly to them. The answer to most of them is yes.* OK, one, two, three. Who likes alcohol?

  * The sudden lurch into this Ben Elton bit is clumsy and clanking, but I found if I approached it with enough verve and gusto no one would notice, and often the change of pace out of the Ang Lee epic was welcome and necessary. It’s also interesting to me, looking back at this now, that lurches between subject material like this aren’t present in any of the standup shows I’ve written since, which all have either a narrative or a conceptual through-line, or ideally both. StandUp Comedian was cobbled together from material run in clubs in the nineties, which I toyed with at the odd benefit during my retirement, and stuff I wrote specially for it. Since then I have always written standup with its position in a full-length show in mind. The flip side of this is I have almost nothing left that stands alone, that I can do in benefits or little ten-or twenty-minute slots. Everything I write now is tied into these epic shows full of callbacks and cross-references or supporting shifts of mood or emotional gambits that induce sympathy to justify me being a patronising horrible arse later on, and so I end up falling back on bits I wrote often over twenty years ago. The head of BBC2 recently asked me about hosting a standup show for the channel, doing little bits in-between other acts. But I am no longer fit for purpose.

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Louder! Who likes sweets?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes cream cakes?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes their favourite food, whatever it is?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes Ben Elton? Oh, it’s no one.

  OK, here’s another one. Who likes, er, who likes, er, The

  Simpsons?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes Spider-Man?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes their favourite fictional character from their own childhood?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes their own beloved mother?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes Ben Elton? Oh, it’s no one again.

  OK, here’s another one. Who likes snowflakes?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes sunshine?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes the universal concept of eternal peace and happiness?

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  Who likes Osama bin Laden? Yeah! Who likes Ben Elton?

  Oh, it’s no one again.*

  * I would change the exact detail of these questions every night, but it was always fairly easy to get the crowd to do what I wanted, namely to cheer Osama bin Laden and offer up nothing for Ben Elton, simply by varying the pitch and velocity of the sentences. And yet we still wonder how Hitler succeeded.

  It’s fucking weird, it’s weird. That is weird, ’cause I must have done that thirty or forty times, right, and every time, without any element of manipulation, more people like Osama bin Laden, a multiple murderer, than Ben Elton. I think why, why would more people like Osama bin Laden than Ben Elton? And I think it’s ’cause when you compare the two of them, compared to Ben Elton, Osama bin Laden has at least lived his life to a consistent set of ethical principles. ’Cause … Yeah, clap, let him hear you. So, er …

  ’Cause people hate Ben Elton, and every now and again a journalist has the courage to ask him why this is. I’ve seen it happen twice in print and once on Parkinson. Parkinson said to him, he said to Ben Elton, ‘Ben Elton, why do you think everyone hates you?’ And Ben Elton said – he did – and Ben Elton said, ‘Well, Michael, it’s ’cause in this country, people don’t like success.’ But he was wrong about that. The real answer is much more simple. It’s just that in this country, people don’t like Ben Elton.*

  * Why don’t people like Ben Elton? Admittedly, I was writing this material in the light of seeing Elton’s Queen musical We Will Rock You. I was obliged to see it professionally, as the director of another musical, Jerry Springer: The Opera, but I found it profoundly depressing, even as an example of the largely futile genre of musical theatre (see Appendix I). It made me despair of humanity, but having seen it, Ben Elton’s Queen musical is one of those things you can’t unsee, like animal pornography or some especially horrible vomit in a gutter, and it haunts you for days, every time you close your eyes. There’s bad art, and then there’s corrupt art, dishonest art, art that lies and is made with nothing but contempt for its audience; We Will Rock You is all those. It is currently celebrating its eighth year in the West End. A film adaptation is in pre-production and a sequel is on the way.

  I think the nature of my despair in Ben Elton is also generationally specific. Unless you can remember comedy before the Alternative Comedy boom of 1979/80, when for many people it seemed like no one was writing comedy that was relevant to them in any way, you probably can’t imagine how much Ben Elton, The Young Ones, Alexei Sayle and co. meant. Of course, all of them have on some level betrayed the principles they espoused, or else the hopes that we plastered onto them, in the last thirty years. It’s inevitable. Political and artistic ideals wither in the face of real-world choices. But few of Alternative Comedy’s first
wave have sold out with such spectacular glee and disregard for what they once stood for as Ben Elton, to the point where even watching his old material now he just seems like an opportunistic charlatan, working the system. Find the YouTube clip of Ben introducing the brilliant Kevin McAleer on Saturday Live in the mid-eighties and look how carefully the slippery snake chooses his words to disassociate himself from the risk of McAleer’s brilliantly bizarre performance failing.

  And they don’t hate him through the kind of conduit of the notion of success. They hate him entirely on his own terms, because of who he is and the bad things that he’s done. And I think if you’re my age, you can kind of understand why it is. ’Cause if you’re, if you’re over thirty-five, you’ll remember before Alternative Comedy, when you’d watch comedians, and it had no kind of relevance to you and you didn’t understand what they were talking about and who they were. And then The Young Ones came along, and all that, with Ben Elton, and you thought, ‘At last, something for us.’*

  * This idea that a writer-performer would only criticise another because they are jealous of them is extremely irritating. In the last few years, I have been accused of being jealous of Ben Elton, Chris Moyles, Richard Hammond, Adrian Chiles … the list goes on and on, and no one on it is a source of jealousy for me. I have written material making fun of them because I dislike what they stand for, or what they are perceived to embody, or because they don’t really stand for anything and so it’s funny to be so furious with, or about, them.

  That said, I wouldn’t do ten minutes on hating Ben Elton today. When I wrote this, I was at a low ebb; I hadn’t been getting audiences or good reviews. So there was almost something heroic about a pesky little outsider cocking his leg on the emperor’s naked ankle. Six years later, Ben Elton has little critical standing left, but remains enormously wealthy and successful. Six years later, I have no obvious future, my DVDs sell poorly, the money for this book is less than Ben Elton makes from one night of We Will Rock You, but, wrongly or rightly, I’m accepted as a fixture of the fringes of the comedy establishment and there’d be nothing heroic today about me having a go at someone as obviously in slow creative decline as Ben Elton. The balance is all wrong.