March of the Lemmings Read online

  And maybe I am facing a similar dilemma. The political situation has been so stupid now, for so long, it seems beyond satire. In print, and on stage, I reach for ever more desperate methods to mock it. And then my eye falls on that pile of commemorative British ‘independance’ coins. And I realise I may have stumbled across the answer. I’m sure I have that tutu somewhere.

  I think Frankie Boyle would have said it better, funnier and in half the number of words. Dunkeldog

  ‘… no such lunar monarch exists.’ Of course not. Irdonozur is President of the Moon. Another woeful misunderstanding by our so called Foreign Secretary. Smallbones

  Typical lefty luvvie quisling talking down the Lunarian trade deal. Feral Prole

  Was this article supposed to be funny? Birkenhead90210

  On my first night at Uni I watched Chris Lynam blow his own bollocks off when his firework went off prematurely. We thought it was immaculately-timed comedy. He ended up in Preston Royal Infirmary. Shakey Dave

  I enjoyed that so much that I’d love to read more. Please let me know from which first form school magazine you copied it, I would like to see the occasional copy just to check whether or not the authors have grown up. Ricmondo

  1 The previous week, Boris had claimed to be planning to build a bridge across the Channel to France, an obvious propaganda distraction from the Brexit disaster he helped cause. About a decade ago, I was walking the Offa’s Dyke path with my friend, the poet, gardening expert and confectionery historian Tim Richardson. A church we stopped at, in Llandaff, I think, had been the seat of one Francis Godwin (1562–1633), subsequently Bishop of Hereford. His proto-science-fiction fantasy The Man in the Moone, published five years after his death, concerns a man who flees to the moon in a basket drawn by swans, where he meets the moon king, Irdonozur. On a North Devon trek we visited a hut and a remote cave, once inhabited by the poets Ronald Duncan and Robert Stephen Hawker respectively, and in Pendeen we crawled through slurry in the farmyard of the antiquarian William Borlase to get into a prehistoric ceremonial chamber. I miss our walks, but I am fat and slow now and my knees have been Clarkson’d to bits. Now, I already can’t even do the thing I thought I’d spend my retirement doing, and I am only fifty.

  2 This paragraph is a mixture of comments Boris Johnson has made about homosexuals and black people and mangled quotes from a transcript of a phone call with his friend, the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy, during which the latter outlined how he would exact violent revenge on a journalist who had wronged him, with Johnson’s help. Guppy’s mother, Shushā, was, bizarrely, a purveyor of the kind of ’70s Iranian folk rock now prized by crate-digging collectors. Personally, my favourite psychedelic Iranian is Kourosh Yaghmaei.

  3 I don’t really know anything about Ricky Boleto. It just felt right to name him here.

  4 Like all the cleverest villains, Boris Johnson conceals his evil nature with absurd theatrics.

  5 These exist. And I have one.

  6 All the above acts were/are real, and how I miss those days. The longing makes me ache. Every night I left our shared house in Acton to play unpaid try-out spots, in 1989, ’90, ’91, I felt like I might catch the end of some punk-hippy novelty-comedy aesthetic that was on the way out as the men-in-T-shirts steamroller lurched forward. I saw the Amazing Mr Smith only once, at the King’s Head, in Crouch End, and he is dead now, as is Malcolm Hardee, whose funeral I spoke at. What a privilege to see these people, what an unalloyed privilege. And I sound like my own grandparents, saying how the past was better. I know, I know. I’m drinking wine and it’s late. In the last eighteen months, we have lost lots of fifty-something comedians whom I knew from the early days, including Sean Hughes, Jimmy ‘Jim Macabre’ Miller and Jack Russell, all of them restless souls who found some sort of home in the comedy community, even if only temporarily. The terse Scot Jimmy Miller wrote the following joke: ‘If an infinite number of monkeys were given an infinite number of typewriters, eventually they would write, “Hey, hey, we’re the monkeys.”’ He hadn’t done a gig for twenty-five years and died under reduced circumstances, but was fondly remembered. At his wake, the only evidence that remained of Jim’s comedy career was the photocopied flyers we used to advertise gigs in the ’80s. Handing them round in the room above the Camden Head was like time travel. Jim set up the ‘New Material’ night that ran there, and at the Market Tavern down the road, from 1988 onwards. It was the circuit’s first new-material night – until that point no one thought anyone would ever need new material – and in 1990, the biweekly team was Jim, me, Jo Brand, Hattie Hayridge, Mr Nasty, Simon Munnery, Mark Lamarr, Geoff Green, Eddie Izzard and the future playwright Patrick Marber, who at the time was heavily influenced by the unsung alternative clown Andrew Bailey. Both Jim and Sean Hughes were very kind, and also sometimes calculatedly cruel, to me at various times. You could argue that even though he betrayed his early promise by becoming a TV panel-show regular, Sean’s 1990 Edinburgh show invented long-form stand-up in the UK and Ireland as we know it, an approach that is finally even influencing the less substantial form of American stand-up, via Hannah Gadsby’s watershed Nanette hour on Netflix. Jim, in turn, saw alternative comedy as a branch of punk rock, and was terminally disappointed by the failure of its practitioners to live up to those standards. At his wake we found out that his cousin, who emigrated from Glasgow as a child, had just written the new Warner Bros animated comedy Smallfoot. It all made me feel very old, and very mortal, and very lucky. My act is still made from bits of Sean and Jim and many of the other comics whose sets seared themselves into my brain during my first three years or so of seeing stand-up.

  7 I didn’t do this.

  Satire only makes Jacob Rees-Mogg stronger

  11 February 2018

  Take heed, the metropolitan liberal elite! Cower, all you Conservative moderates!! Weep, environmentalists, and prepare your online petitions!!! Jacob Rees-Mogg is upon you, a black darkness over the shire, a shade upon your allotments. And your ancient weapons will not work upon his impervious hide, their keen blades blunt upon the armour of his cruel certainties.

  This Rees-Mogg is no Boris Johnson, the blowhard balloon animal who eventually blew himself up, spattering onlookers with a residue of sticky lies. It’s impossible to imagine now that once, only mere months ago, those who would enslave us regarded this gluteus oaf as their strongest asset; this blundering liability, whose greatest supporters now buckle under the heavy arse of his incompetence manifest, even as Johnson himself clings for survival, the cleverest piglet in the flooded farmyard, to the unexpectedly buoyant rubber ring of the suddenly viable Jacob Rees-Mogg.1

  Neither is Rees-Mogg a Gove, that cunning twig, nursing ambition beyond the scope of his tiny wooden body, buffeted by the river currents, hoping to drift towards the distant shore of victory and blown along the surface by the storm breath of his giantess troll. These two – the tiny twig and his fair-weather friend, the burst balloon animal and swimming pig – may yet be remembered as nothing more than the twin Ikea mini-stepladders upon which Rees-Mogg raised himself as he reached up towards the blown forty-watt lightbulb of Tory leadership.

  Journalists and wits! TV panel-show satirists!! And all the historic enablers of Have I Got News for You, unwitting celebrity engineers of the Boris Johnson golem!!!2 To rankle Rees-Mogg you need a charm word even more powerful than John Crace’s ‘Maybot’, which damned an already doomed leader in two conjoined syllables. But you have nothing. Your arrows of satire are blunt before him and your broken spears sleep in your hands, which are clawed uselessly into the shape of decades of lunch-time pints.3

  You call Rees-Mogg ‘the honourable member for the eighteenth century’, and Rees-Mogg ingests the insult and owns it; he takes it as the highest compliment, and it makes him stronger. He is Stan Lee’s Absorbing Man, and even the Norse gods are no match for him.

  Rees-Mogg acts as if all his political positions are the result of nothing but quiet contemplation of the facts, with no visible e
motions to betray the idea that they may be anything other than totally objective. You cannot hurt his feelings. He admits to none. You may as well stand in an aquarium hurling insults at an eel or swear at a chutney.

  (Long ago, in my capacity as Britain’s most consistently critically acclaimed stand-up comedian, I learned to treat all heckles, however aggressive, as if they were genuine inquiries made by people who were not fortunate enough to have recognised my genius. Rees-Mogg affects to regard all outbursts of noisy protest as the babbling of people sadly too foolish to realise that he is right, appearing to pity those who hate him for their lack of understanding. It may be that he is doing this consciously. Or it may be that the machine of privilege and entitlement that has fashioned Rees-Mogg has done its work so well it is simply impossible for him to believe otherwise. Either way, it’s an impregnable strategy.)

  ‘The honourable member for the eighteenth century!’ You will have to do better than that. For Rees-Mogg is upon us, his cold breath on our heels. Eventually, as Boris Johnson has shown us, even a public raised on Britain’s Got Talent and tomato sauce-flavoured crisps tires of empty novelty, and the allure of Rees-Mogg will fade. But by that time, what damage may already have been done?4

  But as all around us crumbles, a plucky band of little folk nonetheless stands firm against the wraiths of the government’s far right: old Bilbo Ken Clarke Baggins, upon the road to Rivendell with Sonny Rollins’s Freedom Suite bopping on his Walkman; little Frodo Soubry, stepping forward in grim determination with her loyal follower, tiny Samwise Greening; all under the protection of ancient Treebeard Heseltine, a speaking and often incoherent tree of indeterminate vintage. This brave band sets off to save the Tory party and, by association, the nation from itself.

  ‘… the honourable member for the 18th century.’ How fresh. Marc Adams

  ‘The honourable member for the 18th century!’ This was not really that amusing the first million times it was parroted. Now that is has been repeated more times than there are atoms in the universe it really is starting to pall just a little bit. Any chance of reaching for a bit of originality some time soon? HogarthOpines

  Lee, of course, was at Oxford with Johnson, Ree-Mogg and many other influential people who have developed media careers on the strength of the contacts they made. I left ‘laughable’ out of the description of Lee. I didn’t think it appropriate because he has seldom made people laugh. Rowlocks

  What is a ‘gluteus oaf?’ Maybe you mean ‘glutinous’? or maybe your vocabulary is as imprecise as your rather woolly mind and you just fire off adjectives for the sake of it. Claire Brittain

  What a load of febrile tripe. ‘Gluteus’ isn’t even an adjective. KevinK

  It’s very gratifying to see public school toffs like Stewart Lee and Rees Mogg turn on each other. Maybe they will wipe themselves out and we won’t have the ultra privileged filling the political, entertainment and media arenas by promoting ‘chaps like us’. Morrisseysmiff

  Stewart, if you want to know how to write a funny and pointed article read ANYTHING by Marina Hyde … JohhnyV321

  Possibly the worst and most bizarre article I’ve ever read. Mikemills2016

  I think he’s trying to be funny – ‘edgy’: the entire piece sounds like Lee’s hero and mentor, Russell Brand. Ronniestorrs

  What an evil article. A pompous and self satisfied diatribe against one of the few honest and honourable members of Parliament. JRM certainly has the lefty illiberal Corbynista worried. What an eye opener this article has proven to be! It has brought the nasty party and remoaner rats swarming out of their sewers into the light of day! If anyone was in doubt as to who the true vermin in our society are, this extraordinary outburst of hate against an honourable man, who has done nothing more than publicly state his honest opinions, has really shown what sort of people support the EU and Momentum. Thank you Stewart Lee. Pongoid

  I very much doubt the Guardian would allow articles which described women as swimming pigs. Peter Wizard

  Stand-up comedians are part of the problem; they have been since Thatcher. Since then, all you have to do is say how superior you are to this or that reactionary bogeyman/woman’s supporters, how much less racist, sexist, etc., you are. The Radio 4 audience have a good laugh, then troop off home to get on with their private, and privatised lives. Failed

  What a vile piece! If I wrote stuff like this online the cops might show up … Nathan Alexander

  I live in hope of the day when Lee chokes on his own bile. Rowlocks

  1 I have compared Boris Johnson to a piglet again. Poor.

  2 That fucking golem thing again for, what is it now, the eighth time or something? Why don’t I make myself out of clay and go and live in medieval Prague if I love golems so much, that’s what I say to me.

  3 I do feel, controversially, that satire has failed to reckon with the lying Brexiteers.

  4 As I write these notes, in February 2019, it seems Rees-Mogg’s stealth strategy has paid off. Boris Johnson has blown himself out, but Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group is a powerbroker in the Brexit clusterfuck.

  Is a sci-fi-style dystopia such a bad outcome for Brexit?

  25 February 2018

  For nearly eighteen months now, the increasingly frustrated European liberal fat-cat elite has been asking for some clues as to what we brave British Brexiteers imagine Brexit will be, the pastry edifice of Theresa May’s monumental ‘Brexit means Brexit’ statement having already crumbled last year, when a moth’s tear fell near it.

  Unable to say what Brexit is, a strategically and heroically vague David Davis last week chose instead to tell Brussels what Brexit isn’t, promising, definitively, that Brexit will not be ‘a Mad Max-style world’,1 despite evidence to the contrary commissioned by his own department.

  Andrea Leadsom, meanwhile, has clarified that Brexit will not be ‘some ham’, Jacob Rees-Mogg has stated categorically that Brexit will not be ‘a drawing of Alain Delon’,2 while Dan ‘Dan’ Hananananan has further elucidated that Brexit will also not be ‘a kind of thing with all stuff on it, and brown stripes, going up and down, like humbug mints on an escalator or some hot bees’.

  In the light of Davis’s assurances that we will not be ‘plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction’, I wonder how much worse the post-Brexit dystopia could be anyway? Would the air of the capital remain technically toxic? Would there be nuclear power stations abandoned in dangerous disrepair? Would the oceans choke on plastic? Would secure housing be a pipe dream for millions? Would Boris Johnson still be free to scatter his lies at midnight into sleeping children’s eyes?

  For many of the disenfranchised and disenchanted Britons who voted for Brexit, being plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia would represent an improvement in their living conditions! Perhaps being plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia is one of the few tangible benefits of Brexit!! Especially if it was sunny and featured Tina Turner as an Amazonian cyber-punk!!! And anyway, better to live one day free in a Mad Max-style dystopia than a thousand years as a slave in the world’s largest single-market area!!!!

  I worry that the idea that we will be ‘plunged’ into a Mad Max-style dystopia is a little optimistic. The word ‘plunged’ suggests events would unfold with a speed and decisiveness so far absent from the Brexit process. After a few years of sliding slowly and painfully into a Mad Max-style dystopia, with no clear end to the plunging in sight, Leave voters will look back at the suggestion that we were to be plunged into anything at all as just another example of the lying betrayals of their feckless and apparently unaccountable Brexit cheerleaders. Where was the plunge into a Mad Max-style dystopia we were promised?

  But what do I know? I have not even seen any of the Mad Max movies, though last year Brendan McCarthy, co-writer of the recent reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road, described me as ‘an archaic leftwing relic’, adding: ‘Milo Yiannopoulos is more on the zeitgeist.’ But where is the discredited alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos now? Nowhere. A
nd where am I? I am in a three-star hotel room in Stratford-upon-Avon, eating a bag of humbug mints, which are what gave me the idea for the closing sentence of the third paragraph. I win.3

  And anyway, the best dystopian sci-fi film is not Mad Max, but the straight-to-video Mad Max rip-off World Gone Wild (Lee H. Katzin, 1987),4 which I bought on VHS from a shop called Rimpy’s Fags, Foods and Non-Foods on Horn Lane in Acton for 50p in 1989.5 (World Gone Wild was, of course, filed in the non-foods section of the store, along with the wood, a fossilised coelacanth and Terence Trent D’Arby.)6

  David Davis rightly became the immediate target of the high-speed satire sausage machines of social media’s infinite monkey treadmill for his foolish Mad Max metaphor, but imagine if he had been just a little more pop-culturally literate, in the way that Tories just never are.

  Imagine if, instead of saying Britain would not be ‘plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction’, David Davis had said Britain would not be ‘plunged into a Derek Abernathy-style world. You know? Derek Abernathy? The Adam Ant character in World Gone Wild? Haven’t you seen it? Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols’ forgotten ’80s hair-metal band Chequered Past do the theme tune.’ The confused corrupt Eurocrat fat cats of Brussels would have immediately sent their researchers off to score copies of World Gone Wild to decode Davis’s latest opaque clue as to what Britain imagined Brexit was, thus buying Davis more time to invoke ever more obscure dystopian sci-fi movies in his quest to hide the dispiriting truth.

  ‘I tell you what Brexit won’t be. It won’t be like that one set two years from now, where Christian Bale and a group of bedraggled survivors hide in a desolate English wasteland attacked by giant dragons. Rain of Fire, wasn’t it? No, Reign of Fire.