March of the Lemmings Read online

  5 Farage had intimated that Trump might not be trusted to negotiate with Theresa May safely, and there was a sexual undertone to his perceived threat.

  6 I’ve referenced this odd exchange in various media, and people always say it couldn’t have happened. It did, but I have changed the names, and I have changed them to different names on different occasions.

  7 Every Remain voter has observed evidence of the sudden shift in gear regarding what racists feel they can say in public since the referendum. Someone needs to compile some kind of archive of all this anecdotal material, so we can remember what we were like after Vote Leave uncorked the rage flask. It could be the Domesday Book of low-level anecdotal race hate.

  8 In January 2018, just over twelve months later, Trump had Breitbart’s Steve Bannon removed from the White House for criticising him in the book Fire and Fury. As a result, Bannon was free to pursue his avowed intent of creating a global infrastructure for right-wing populism, which appeared to be based on his reading of Richard Allen’s 1970s Skinhead novels.

  My Paul Nuttalls routine has floated back up the U-bend

  4 December 2016

  I believe it was a frog who wrote, ‘Explaining a joke is like dissecting the American writer Elwyn Brooks White. You understand it better but Elwyn Brooks White dies in the process, ideally before completing Stuart Little.’ I may have got this the wrong way round.

  I am a multiple British Comedy and Bafta Award-winning ‘comedian’. Once, my ‘comedy’ routines were written, performed and then largely forgotten. Now, they hang around the street corners of YouTube like homeless drunks, shouting and shorn of context, detached from the peculiarities of the times that shaped them, their relative merits debated enthusiastically by furious and illiterate racists from all over the globe. ‘Who is this faggot?’ Isn’t technology amazing!

  Whenever Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips hits the news, a routine I wrote about him on 25 April 2013 lurches back into involuntary digital circulation. Indeed, ‘Stewart Lee’ is now the third most popular Google appendage to Paul Nuttalls, below ‘MEP’ and above ‘wife’. (The ‘wife’ search is presumably the result of patriotic women all over England, keen to be the broodmares for a better tomorrow, checking to see if Mr Nuttalls of the Ukips is available.)

  Every time I think my Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips bit has been forgotten it returns to the public consciousness, more powerful and frightening than before, like a horrible Frankingstein, a persistent faecal clod that keeps floating back up the U-bend, or Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips himself.

  In 2008 I wrote a forty-five-minute routine on Top Gear, imagining the presenters’ Christmas drinks ending with Clarkson kicking a tramp to death, while Hammond and May fail to intervene, laughing and filming the attack on cameraphones.1

  Predictably, every time Clarkson was nasty, the Top Gear bit accumulated more hits, the routine oddly foreshadowing the assault which was to end his BBC career. Sometimes I wonder if I am some kind of god. Does my work reflect reality, or am I actually shaping it? Was my 2008 routine a sort of sigil that ultimately drove Clarkson’s steak-crazed fists into the face of his cheese-proffering servant?

  And, in turn, was it the traffic my Paul Nuttalls routine generated over the past few years that actually raised his profile to the point where he was able to become leader of the Ukips? I wonder, typically as one of today’s self-lacerating liberals, was it I who baked this golem and sent it out to rampage around the ghetto?2

  Some routines take years to write. But the Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips routine shot out hot and fast, in one unbroken coil, like a good shit. I was running late on the morning of 25 April 2013 and so I drove my son to school, with the Today programme on the radio. Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips came on and said something odd about Bulgarians, which seemed to me an attempt to portray his hostility to immigration as a genuine concern for the Bulgarians’ own welfare. I went home and transcribed the interview from the iPlayer, and by midday the ten-minute bit, imagining the escalating absurd rhetoric of the Ukips’ opposition to Britain’s historic waves of immigration, was done.

  In performance, I played up self-consciously to a stereotype of myself as a metropolitan liberal, angry that the lack of east European immigration would affect my ability to get cheap cups of coffee in central London, which was funny because it was true.3 And I extended my hostility to Huguenots and Anglo-Saxons4 and Neanderthal man into a general hatred of matter itself. And then I longed for a better time when not only were there no immigrants, but there was actually nothing, just a vast void. A void in which there was no crime. Obviously.

  Because behind the practical critiques of immigration offered by the far right of today, there seems to be a more mysterious backstory, a kind of gaseous nostalgia for an imagined England that maybe never quite was, of warm beer, and old maiden aunts on bicycles, and the satisfying thwack of willow on a Gypsy’s brown face.

  The routine now bobs beyond my reach on YouTube, in a variety of different edits, some without the metaphysical coda about longing for oblivion, some with the removal of a burst of choice swearing, directed at an insolent prehistoric fish daring to come onto our land, which served crucially to leaven the polemic with ludicrous obscenity.

  My showbiz friend Andreas Schmid, of krautrock legends Faust and Birmingham post-punks The Nightingales, even alerted me to a German stand-up whose verbatim translation of the routine had scored ten times more YouTube hits than my own original, for which the young comic has since apologised.5

  The Ukips routine generated a flurry of oddly literal critiques, mistaking its intended effects for the writer’s unintended errors, their blank analysis funnier than anything one could contrive. ‘Lee is becoming so absurd’, offers a contributor to a website called Western Defence, ‘that one does have the impression the audience is laughing as much at him as with him. He adopts a (more) juvenile tone and begins singing a childish song, repeating himself all the time as usual. In an incredible display of immaturity for a 45-year-old man (perhaps befitting of the old children’s television programme Rainbow), Lee continues his song. We are now supposed to laugh at the fact that Lee is really not making any sense at all. His arguments have been fully taken to absurd extremes.’

  I am glad the bit has a second life and I hope it cheers people up, and perhaps takes away their fear for a moment or two. Maybe it will even sell me some tickets! But I don’t know if I could write it today. Despite having been photographed hobnobbing with the EDL, claiming he wants to see the NHS dismantled, denying climate change, not supporting the ivory trade ban and refusing to quite disavow the BNP supporters he accepts the Ukips may have assimilated, the personable Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips seems eminently electable in post-fact, hate-fuelled Britain, even with his inexplicable loathing of elephants.6

  It’s not inconceivable that in a few years’ time, former Labour supporters might be tactically voting Conservative to keep Nuttalls’s far right out. Dancing around, singing childish songs and swearing at imaginary fish as a response to the Ukips seems to belong to simpler times, when Paul Nuttalls’s avowed intent to ban comedians who did jokes about the Ukips from theatres seemed laughable. I don’t know where I’d start a half-hour set on the Ukips today. I feel depressed, defeated, and often more than a little afraid for the future. This frog is now dead.

  Try being amusing lad. That was what ‘comedians’ used to be paid for. No need to be afraid of the future. Our Paul is the future. He is made of much sterner stuff than you give him credit for. As befits a Hillsborough survivor. He will send seismic shock waves from Wales, the Midlands and the North that will reverberate through the Palace of Westminster. The price of sushi will be astronomical. Try having toast for brekkie instead lad. Kloppite

  i don’t get why people think stuart lee is funny. i’m a massive fan of stand up comics but i’ve never found him funny. much prefer a frankie boyle. wtfbollos

  Stuart, why don’t you get some loo paper and wipe your mouth. Mufc2014

  Mor
e echo chamber stuff … yawn. Gravyring

  Your whole act has been in the toilet bowl for years. Bobhelm

  1 Because I have no dramatic training, I acted out Clarkson kicking a tramp by kicking the floor of the stage hard and repeatedly. I did this probably over two hundred times. As a result of this (and being fat and old), my knees don’t really work now. My health has been damaged by pretending to be Jeremy Clarkson. And so has Jeremy Clarkson’s, if you think about it.

  2 The golem, again. I keep mentioning it. I have no imagination. Why can’t Czech folk tales stay in the Czech Republic, where they belong, and enrich the Czech collective subconscious, instead of coming over here and clogging up my English imagination?

  3 Many an eastern European, serving me across a counter in a hotel or railway station, has since told me how much they love this bit, before telling me they have a degree in astrophysics or something.

  4 When I performed this routine in Comedy Vehicle I quoted accurately lines in Anglo-Saxon from the ninth-century poem ‘The Wanderer’, the fatalistic outlook of which permanently informed my worldview when I studied it at university: ‘Swa cwæð eardstapa, earfeþa gemyndig, wraþra wælsleahta, winemæga hryre.’ (So spoke the Wanderer, mindful of hardships, of fierce slaughters, and the downfall of kinsmen.) Billy Childish’s literary garage-folk Medway combo The Spartan Dreggs have a deceptively beautiful setting of ‘The Wanderer’, entitled ‘So Spake the Wanderer’, on their 2012 album Coastal Command. I specifically wanted to get into Oxford University as a teenager for two reasons: firstly, because I knew the student drama society took comedy shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, and a doctor called Mark Payne, whom I did filing for on Saturday mornings, told me he had done that and it was brilliant; and secondly, to study Anglo-Saxon literature, which I turned out to be terrible at, so I was put in a special set with one other student, who was also rubbish. Weirdly, performing this routine alone means that I have probably made more practical use of my Anglo-Saxon poetry module than anyone else who studied it.

  5 Andreas Schmid’s colloquial English is so good that he is able to use the Shropshire saying ‘all round the Wrekin’ with both accuracy and regularity. He is the Henning Wehn of post-punk.

  6 In the end it was pretending to have been in the Hillsborough disaster that finished Nuttalls’s political career off. Everyone has a red line.

  Beyond good and evil with Gove and Trump

  22 January 2017

  In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is able to translate the grunting of Mark Ruffalo’s incoherent Hulk into meaningful dialogue. Last Monday, The Times newspaper invited us to believe that the resentful foundling Michael Gove could do the same with the contradictory snarling of Donald Trump.

  As a fellow adoptee I recognise Gove’s irreparably damaged personality. Indeed, both of us were once published in the same vanity-pressed anthology of neurotic, self-justifying teenage poetry.1 And as a member of the Gove-loathing metropolitan liberal elite, I thought we had seen the last of the self-serving nest-cuckoo and his hand-wringing wife.

  Six months ago, it looked as if a stateless Gove and Sarah Vine were reinventing themselves as the amusing celebrity political couple for young millennials so jaded they no longer found Neil and Christine Hamilton quite sickening enough. Michael Gove and Sarah Vine – a Neil and Christine Hamilton for the 2 Girls, 1 Cup generation.2

  It had been Gove who, with David Cameron and Boris Johnson, sabotaged our children’s futures in a doomed peeing war of competitive posh men.3 As a student, David Cameron is rumoured to have put his penis into a dead pig. To outdo him as an adult, in an act even more bizarre and obscene, Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist. And to render both his rivals irrelevant, to do something even more disgusting and demented, Boris Johnson allowed himself to be put into the role of foreign secretary, a camp-guard punishment beating for the world.4

  But, in a plot twist worthy of an HBO box set, it is actually Johnson’s old ally and enemy Gove who has made the first plausible contact with the new president of America. This journalistic coup goes some way to restoring the wounded pride of Gove, an adopted misfit masking his low self-esteem, afraid that his standing is an accident of administrative paperwork in infancy, desperate to assert his role in a world of entitlement to which he suspects he is not really entitled.5

  Encounters with Trump that appear calm usually suggest the school-bus driver in the film The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976), interacting as politely as possible with DeVeren Bookwalter’s vividly unhinged psychopath, in the hope that he won’t massacre the kidnapped pre-teens on board. When Bookwalter forces the weeping children to sing ‘Old MacDonald’, the scene conveys the same air of forced jollity evident among Democrats at Trump’s inauguration. But Gove’s dealings with Trump were reported as relaxed, admittedly by Gove, in an interview he wrote, in a paper he works for, owned by an arse.

  Everything you need to know about Gove’s feelings for Trump, and for his previous paramour Boris Johnson, is contained in Nietzsche’s 1887 book of essays, On the Genealogy of Morality. If you haven’t read it, download Apple’s Ask a Nietzsche app and question a tiny avatar of the dead philosopher, voiced by the German comedian and talkSPORT regular Henning Wehn. I first heard about the book on a radio show hosted by someone called Melvyn Bragg, who I was surprised to find was a respected broadcaster, rather than a Siri-like app with a broken pitch control.

  Now, I personally know nothing about psychiatry, philosophy, moral philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychological profiling, cultural history, politics, linguistics or the science of personality, but to me Gove would appear to exhibit all the characteristic traits of what Nietzsche calls the ‘slave mentality’, the resentful jealousy of the ‘ill-born, meek’ man, imagining that one day the world will see that he was right all along.6

  Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, however, fulfil the criteria of what Nietzsche names, in the same essay, ‘blond beasts’. Not only are they both blond and beastly, but they are ‘beyond good and evil’, observing no law other than their own power. The Gove-slave needs to believe in deferred justice, as he is physically incapable of defeating the blond beasts on their own terms. Nietzsche sees this as the root of Christian morality.

  Or alternatively, it would appear, the slave can canoodle with the beast, and if one blond beast doesn’t take the bait, there’s always another one over the Atlantic to cuddle up with instead.

  But one doesn’t need Nietzsche to understand Gove’s relationship with Trump. Presumably you remember it from the playground, where Gove-like figures peeped over bullies’ shoulders, urging them to violence from a position of cowardly safety, the Richard Hammond/Jeremy Clarkson dynamic, an eternal archetype, replayed in Trump’s golden office, framed Playboy covers reflected in the smeared lenses of Gove’s steamed-up spectacles. Is it just me or is it hot in here?

  Gove may be a slave but he is not an idiot. He knows there is no point setting any store by anything Trump says. Trump’s comments do not add up to any coherent worldview. Each emerges in the moment, suitable for that second, and that second alone. In his Gove interview Trump said he hoped to scale down his nuclear arsenal. But as recently as 22 December, in his famous ‘Let It Be an Arms Race’ series of 140-character treatises, Trump declared: ‘The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.’

  Trump’s inaccurate pronouncements about NATO member states’ financial contributions and the ‘illegal’ status of refugees in Germany were accepted and transcribed unchallenged by Gove. Jokes about farts that I perform on comedy DVDs are held to higher legal standards than Gove’s Times piece on the then president-elect, but are not as funny.

  After the interview’s publication, Gove was deferred to uncritically on Radio 4’s Today programme, a show currently so spineless in its questioning of government that it resembles not so much a news source as a stack of jellyfish piled up on top of one another and wrapped in an unbuttoned sh
irt and a Robert Redford wig, in the hope that someone will mistake it for Bob Woodward.

  Gove is a desperate, disappointed man, staring into the murky dew pond of Trump’s inarticulate pronouncements, looking for something that validates him. Hearing that Trump will do a trade deal with the UK ‘absolutely, very quickly’, Gove the emasculated Brexiteer makes this the focus of a Times interview so uncritical as to be as dangerous and dishonest as anything emerging from a Macedonian fake-news factory. This is not a game. Lives are at stake. You all need to do better. See me.

  Play the ball, not the man. This kind of ad hom attack on Gove (and his wife too?) is very undignified. Yohdur