March of the Lemmings Read online

  ‘Well, whatever, it won’t be like that. Or Enzo Castellari’s The New Barbarians, where the American footballer Fred Williamson7 is a kind of Jedi ninja in a desert ruled by lawless bikers. Brexit won’t be like that. Or a drawing of Alain Delon.’

  Dear Stewart, In a democracy, you have the right to express your opinion. Which is that you’d rather die free tomorrow than live ‘a thousand years as a slave’. All to the good and well. But your right of expression is balanced by others having themselves the same right to an opposite opinion. That is to freely choose to stay ‘slaves’ if they find this condition satisfying. Tell you what, if you really believe your quoted opinion above, please go live free in any war torn country for a full satisfying free day. And then depart this sad world. That way your wish will be fulfilled without impacting the lives of other people by removing the rights they use to live their daily lives ‘as a slave in the world’s largest single market area’. Dragon Jade

  From edgy to Establishment in a few Guardian columns. Shame. That’s how the Guardian neuter change on behalf of the Establishment. They commandeer threats to write columns and in no time at all they are repeating the tired old Establishment lines as if they thought of them themselves. Now you are thinking of all the times it happened. Keeps us in line, I suppose, plus the mouthpiece gets a fat Czech.8 Maybe I’d sell out with all the riches they dangled before me. Like carrying a fun at a high school, you don’t really know what you would do until it happens. Minutehands

  ‘The confused corrupt Eurocrat fat cats of Brussels’. Neither funny nor accurate. Ratujone2

  Rimpy’s in Acton. They did Airfix models too. A veritable cornucopia of interesting artefacts. John O’Donnell

  There goes 5 minutes of my life I’ll never get back. Eyepatch

  The Brexit Dystopia will be a bit like the late Dave Bowie’s Diamond Dogs where rats the size of cats eat hats the size of gnats. What it definitely won’t be is like the late Mark E Smith’s dystopia where all England is a university town and all you can get is wine. Clark Gwent

  I’m at Stew’s Dartford show right now. It’s the interval. He’s handling it quite well, fair play to him. He won’t be back though, you can tell. ID224110

  1 David Davis, speaking to Austrian business leaders, 19 February 2018.

  2 Alain Delon, along with Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Hallyday, is part of a raft of 1960s French celebrities who remain at the forefront of my mind, as they featured in the patronisingly youth-friendly French textbooks that we were issued with at school in 1979, by which time they were already fifteen fast-moving cultural years out of date. Presumably there is a fifty-year-old Frenchman somewhere, similarly puzzled by memories of a textbook featuring Simon Dee, Sharon Tandy and The Applejacks.

  3 After finishing and filing this article, I went for a walk in the town and saw the actor who now plays the first doctor in Doctor Who, William Hartnell having died, wandering around the shops.

  4 The reason World Gone Wild is a better dystopian sci-fi movie than Brendan McCarthy’s stupid Mad Max: Fury Road, for example, is because it doesn’t have a colon in the middle of its title like what a idiot would do; and because it stars Adam Ant as a man called Derek Abernathy, who, in a plot copied off Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, harries a plucky village of survivors in a Mad Max-style dystopia; and because it co-stars the bewildering actor Alan Autry, who played a gay footballer in the controversial gay Cheers episode ‘The Boys in the Bar’, but went on to become the anti-gay mayor of Fresno, California; and because I’ve seen it and you never will. I win. Again.

  5 How thrillingly afraid I was at 32 Hereford Rd, off Horn Lane in Acton, for the first eighteen months I lived in London, from September 1989, with two would-be actors and the future pod-king Richard Herring. What would become of me, this boy adrift in the city? Within a few weeks of arriving, our front room was commandeered for police surveillance of a drug den opposite. Mr Chaudhry, the uncommonly fair landlord, dealt with the wasps’ nests by putting plastic bags over his hands, and he gave us horrible wine at Christmas, free. And we bought all our food and fags from Rimpy’s. I became a professional comedian while I lived there, and was soon making twice my £50 a week rent from gigs in rooms above pubs. The first weekend we lived in Acton, the four of us won the Sunday meat raffle in the Duke of York, Steyne Road. It was a good omen. London would provide for us hopeful provincials, as if it were our mother.

  6 Credit here is due to my friend, the ex-comedian and Pyrenean goat enthusiast Roger Mann, who realised as long ago as 1992 that the name of the ’80s pop star Terence Trent D’Arby, in comedy terms, sat at the perfect mid-point between obscurity and recognition, and was blessed with an inherently comic rhythm. I forget which of Roger’s routines it was that included the phrase ‘my mother, my father and Terence Trent D’Arby’, but I know it was something to do with the narrator eating ‘a fine plump capon’.

  7 Ex-footballer Fred ‘The Hammer’ Williamson also appears in the 1974 blaxploitation movie Three the Hard Way, mentioned earlier in this book.

  8 I hope this ‘fat Czech’ is some kind of obscure joke about Rupert Murdoch, or is this post more rushed troll-factory piecework?

  The Brexit culture wars are driving me bananas

  4 March 2018

  On 10 May 2016, in the closing days of the Brexit campaign, during an impromptu speech in Cornwall, lying Boris Johnson again invoked the Brexiteers’ foundation myth that the EU sought to ban bendy bananas. But voters who backed leaving the EU in order to get back the bendy bananas, which had not been taken off them anyway, must surely now be wondering, privately, if it was all worth it.

  Last Monday, Jeremy Corbyn reluctantly declared his own ‘bespoke customs union’ Brexit fudge, with all the enthusiasm and conviction of a man held at gunpoint saying how well he is being treated. ‘The option of a new UK customs union with the EU would need to ensure the UK has a say in future trade deals,’ he mumbled. ‘Also, I am allowed to coddle an egg on alternate Tuesdays.’1

  Apparently, Corbyn’s Own Brexit Fudge™® was offered to preserve the soft Irish border with Northern Ireland, as it will be impossible to re-bend a straightened Euro banana should a straight Irish banana need to cross into British territory, perhaps as part of an Irish child’s snack box, an Irish chimp’s dinner or as an Irish clown’s comedy prop.

  Some Tory Brexiteers have an almost blind faith in the idea that there may be some form of as-yet-non-existent technological solution. Bernard Jenkin, interviewed by an increasingly scruffy Dobby the House Elf2 on Newsnight on Tuesday, said Wilf Lunn,3 the extravagantly moustachioed novelty-bicycle inventor from Vision On and Magpie, was already working on a bespoke Border Banana Detector and Straightener™®.

  Lunn’s Borderbananandetecto-straightorbendomatic™® would detect and straighten, or bend, any bananas crossing the border, so they would be the right banana type for the segment of the Irish island they were bound for. Jenkin’s attempt to demonstrate a prototype Borderbananandetecto-straightorbendomatic in the Newsnight studio backfired spectacularly after it lunged at political editor Nicholas Watt’s face and tried to peel it.

  Honestly! You couldn’t make it up!! It’s an increasingly difficult time to be a comedian!!! (And before I forget, message to Bernard ‘Jenkin’: Jenkin is a French name. No one is called ‘Jenkin’ here. Your British name is Jenkins. Bernard Fucking Jenkins. So start using it.)

  But Corbyn’s Own Brexit Fudge™® is as impossible a proposition for the EU in its own way as Boris Johnson’s pre-referendum fantasy of the magic cake that grows again, no matter how much of it you eat, an idea the massive liar surely gleaned from a visit to one of the cloud lands at the top of the Faraway Tree, before sliding back down the Slippery Slip with his friends Darius, Marina,4 Petronella5 and the Saucepan Man.6

  Whether you are a kamikaze hard Brexiteer or a diehard traitor Remoaner, the precision-applied works spanner of Corbyn’s Own Brexit Fudge™® means hard Brexit is far less likely. Banzai! Boris Johnson’s dre
am of bendy bananas for ever withers on the banana vine, a cowed people cowering for eternity beneath the blow of the straight banana, a straight banana squished on a human face – for ever. But the culture war continues.

  Last Monday, on the Twitter, the Mad Max writer and Milo Yiannopoulos cheerleader Brendan McCarthy called me a ‘decaying Morrissey impersonator and leftwing donut-eater’, and declared: ‘It’s end times for the Oxbridge comedy establishment as their own Roy “Chubby” Brown lashes out at an indifferent public.’

  While I never knowingly eat doughnuts, I am admittedly too heavy to be allowed to use some waterslides, and ‘lashing out at an indifferent public’ is a reasonable description of the impression I strive to create live. In fact, detractors often inadvertently illuminate exactly the effect I aim for, their harshest criticisms helping me to sculpt the on-stage character of Stewart Lee.

  But as I stood, on the 194th date of my current 220-date tour, on stage in Dartford last Sunday, my hyper-acoustic ears still ringing from a catastrophic sound-operator error at Hereford Courtyard on Thursday,7 the room somehow just would not quite catch fire. I wondered if Mad Max McCarthy was right. Was it indeed ‘end times for the Roy “Chubby” Brown of the Oxbridge comedy establishment’?

  In April last year, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, Breitbart, the Spectator, ShortList and Spiked all ran the same demonstrably false story saying I was experiencing mass walkouts because of doing anti-Brexit jokes. This wasn’t the case, even in archly Eurosceptic Lincoln, although, to be fair, the people there may have struggled to find the exits without hard-working eastern Europeans to show them the way and carry their cauliflowers around. The only walkout of the tour was a very funny man in Canterbury, who shouted ‘I’ll wait for the DVD’ as he left, but I don’t think his departure, unlike David Cameron’s, was Brexit-related.

  Last year, it was fun doing anti-Brexit material on tour. The Brexiteers in the room had won the referendum, after all, so as a Remoaner I was in a position of weakness punching up at them, as the comedian is required to. Laughing Brexiteers would come up afterwards and magnanimously get me to sign their books and DVDs ‘to a Leave-voting c*nt’, an amusing transaction that genuinely renewed my faith in humanity nightly. We could all be friends after all.8

  But on Monday, after Corbyn proposed his hard Brexit-sinking ‘bespoke customs union’, it seemed like no one was going to get exactly what they wanted out of Brexit now.9 There probably weren’t going to be any winners, certainly not the Leave voters of Leave-voting Dartford, now condemned, even their figureheads agree, to an even less prosperous future.10

  So on stage in Dartford, I didn’t feel I quite understood how to pitch the Brexit stuff any more. In a situation where no one will win, there were no winners to aim at. It was not clear any more which way was up, and I no longer knew which direction to punch upwards in.

  Since the referendum was called I’ve had to listen to complete idiots argue the same points and rehashed quips over and over, both Leave and Remain. It’s like watching two neanderthals repeatedly head butt each another, showing increasing signs of brain injury as the debates go on. To know that both neanderthals are going to be absolutely fucking miserable, whatever happens, is the only solace I can find. Vanmyp

  The earliest art in Europe was created by Neanderthals. Wardpj

  ‘So on stage in Dartford, I didn’t feel I quite understood how to pitch the Brexit stuff any more.’ Brexit as comedy hinged on a kind of Schadenfreude that those voting for it could be such idiots. Laughter was of the smug, group-think type, taking joy in being in the company of like minded people. It always was polemicism, and now it’s polemics with old, hackneyed jokes, or maybe no jokes at all. You’re going to have to find some new material. Or just give up, and leave the stage for others. Tongariro1

  ‘… but how do I pitch my Brexit gags now?’ Maybe stop desperately trying to pander to what you think is popular public opinion and tell some decent jokes, maybe? Dan York

  Brendan McCarthy called me a ‘decaying Morrissey impersonator and leftwing donut-eater’. You have to admit Stew, that is funny. Although I thought Jerry Sadowitz’s observation about your ‘comedy’ were far more accurate: ‘takes 3 hours to tell a barely adequate anecdote’ Can’t you just make people laugh instead? ‘As s Remoaner I was in a position of weakness punching up at them, as the comedian is required to be.’ Comedians aren’t required to be anything other than funny. There is only one rule – making other people laugh (not just your friends) and that’s it. There is no other. NoLivesMatter

  I am in a foul mood this morning. And a comedian who used to be funny witerring on about Brexit (again) felt like the tin lid. Can you shut up about Brexit now? Many of us on this septic isle no longer care how it pans out, or even how it will be implemented – hard, soft, banana-shaped, bareback or droopy brewer. There comes a point when you just want the thing over. Unbritannia

  pathetic virtue signalling. Taadaa

  ™ is used to indicate an unregistered trade mark and ® is used to signify a registered trade mark. It is nonsensical to use both of them together. I’m all ears if you can come up with any more hilarious material on intellectual property management. Caressofsteel

  ‘Honestly! You couldn’t make it up!! It’s an increasingly difficult time to be a comedian!!!’ This article makes that very clear. Leon Sphinx

  Except of course that the EU did have regulations about bendy bananas as Annex 1 Subsection II point 10 highlights about there being no abnormal curvature allowed. They did of course later amend this due to all the ridicule they got – but why pretend that a regulation on bendy bananas never existed when it clearly did? The Ducks

  Let’s be fair Stewart Lee, the Brexit vote was on 23 June 2016, and yet you seem to think that the actual vote is still enough material to be riffing on, 20 months later. You’ve made the mistake of attempting to be a topical comedian, like on that Mock The Week, and it patently hasn’t suited you. I realise that it is causing one of the biggest skidmarks in political and social history for many a decade, but it is a long, brown, ever thinning path, down which, you should not have gone, or at least, when the path became too thin for your overlapping waistband, you should have had the good sense to turn back … Hesalrightmydad

  1 As I believe I wrote earlier, I had never heard of coddled eggs until Corbyn said he liked to eat them, when he was a guest on a 2017 edition of Celebrity Gogglebox. Suddenly, coddled eggs are one of those things which, once you are aware of them, seem to be everywhere! Not in Swaffham, though. Last February, driving through the Norfolk market town and noting it was full of charity shops, I assumed it would be easy pickings for egg coddlers. Well, how wrong I was. There were a lot of people on heroin, though. In a related incident, only yesterday (31 March 2019) I found two egg coddlers in a Cancer Research charity shop in Marlborough, Wiltshire. I bought them, for £3.50 each, and then went to meet my wife in Boots. I asked her if she had been in the Cancer Research shop, which she had, and then I ridiculed her for having overlooked the coddlers. She explained she had seen them, but as there was all old egg congealed into the rims, she hadn’t bought them. I saw that she was right and realised I had to get rid of the coddlers. I went over the road to a dog charity shop and gave them to the man behind the counter there as a donation. The egg coddlers had travelled a few hundred yards at a cost to me of £7. I rang up the writer and performance artist Ben Moor to tell him what I had done, because it was like something the life-coach guru Jackson would have done in Will Adamsdale’s brilliant comedy theatre piece Jackson’s Way, which had inspired both of us. Jackson believed a form of enlightenment could be achieved by the performance of pointless acts, such as moving small amounts of litter from once place to another, i.e. from London to Melbourne. (Fifteen years ago, I sat in a café in Melbourne and saw Adamsdale, thinking no one was watching him, taking British litter out of a bag he had brought with him from London and putting it into an Australian litter bin. Superb!) While
I was on the phone, a man recognised me, despite the fact that I was bearded and in a woolly hat, and asked for a selfie, so I wandered off. I sat on a bench by the river on my own. Another old man with a beard and a woolly hat came and sat next to me and started talking about his drug and mental-health problems and his bipolar girlfriend. He thought I was the same as him and would understand.

  2 I think I must have been thinking of Evan Davis here, but I don’t remember.

  3 Lunn is in fact the world’s leading expert on novelty bicycles.

  4 Wheeler, second wife.

  5 Wyatt, Spectator columnist. Boris Johnson lied about his affair with her, and so was sacked as shadow arts minister in 2005. Toby Young, Spectator critic, who was later appointed to the board of the Office for Students by Boris Johnson’s brother Jo, co-wrote a play about the scandal called Whose the Daddy? Sometimes it seems that, for the tight-knit circle of the Tory Brexiteers, the world is just a playground in which everything is a wizard wheeze and nothing matters.

  6 I had been reading Enid Blyton’s badly written fantasy The Magic Faraway Tree to my daughter, as my mother in turn read it to me when I could not sleep for fear of monsters in the dark. I was twenty-eight years old.

  7 I was knocked to the floor by a feedback blast during the soundcheck, caused by an inexperienced technician. I couldn’t stand or see. All I could hear for hours was shrieking. I did the show blind, on autopilot, and threw up at half-time. My dormant tinnitus was triggered and is still humming two years later. I suppose it’s an occupational hazard. I wonder if you can perform your set from behind a Perspex screen, like the drummer from Mission of Burma?

  8 How long ago those halcyon days of agreeing to differ seem now.

  9 Sadly for die-hard Remoaners like me, this Corbyn strategy failed, and his subsequent interventions in the Brexit process were to become increasingly equivocal and ineffectual, as he tried to keep Brexit-voting Labour voters onside, gradually alienating Labour’s Remain-voting membership.