How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read online

  And then the Arab guy that I’d had my kind of moment of epiphany, of kind of human trust with in the toilets, he was standing just in front of me. And he looked across at me with these eyes full of hope, as if to go, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I couldn’t just do another fart at will. You know, I’m not a nineteenth-century French music-hall entertainer. I’m the opposite of that. In four main ways … there isn’t time to go into now. But … But someone went, ‘Aw,’ disappointed there. If you seek me out afterwards, I’ll clarify the exact position.*

  * I never did decide what the four main ways I differed from Le Pétomane were, and this is another example of me making spaces in the material to amuse myself. Perhaps I hoped I would be called upon to explain this unsatisfactory sentence at some point. Or maybe, in my eternal love–hate relationship with the very idea of being a standup, I did feel that all I was at the time was a turn, a turn farting gags out towards bemused onlookers, who craved the sweeter smells of roses and lavender.

  But I knew I had to do something, so … It was my moment. So what I did was, I just kind of lifted my leg up like that. And I sort of acted it out. I went, ‘Ugh, fuck, smell, ugh, horrible!’ And he laughed. And the guys he was with laughed. Gradually the laughter spread all around the room. There was a critic from the Independent at the back not laughing. But he didn’t really get what I was doing, you know. It was a kind of mixture of the sacred and the profane, it just went over his head.*

  * I am thinking specifically of Julian Hall of the Independent here, who always gives me three stars but comes back to my shows every year out of the goodness of his heart to try and encourage me further in my sadly misguided endeavours, like a dog returning to a pile of old shit and sniffing it again to see if it has suddenly turned into ice cream.

  But eventually everyone in the room was laughing. And I realised that with that one inane, puerile, scatological gesture I had achieved more for world peace than any politician had all day. ’Cause farts are funny, Glasgow, right? That is the international baseline of all humour, farts, right. And you can be as sophisticated as you like, Glasgow, but at the end of the day you have to admit farts are funny. And you go, ‘No, we don’t actually agree with you, Stew. I saw a hilarious, satirical cartoon in the New Statesman at the weekend, satirising EU farming policies, it was hilarious.’ Was it? Was it as funny as a fart? No, it wasn’t.

  ‘But I saw Ian Hislop on television at the weekend, Stew, satirising the government, with his voice going up at the start of the sentence and going down at the end. It was hilarious.’ Was it? Was it as funny as some gas that smells of shit coming out of an arse? No, it wasn’t. And nothing Ian Hislop ever says or does or secretly imagines will be as funny as that.*

  * I chose Ian Hislop here because he seems like an utterly blameless figure with whom no sensible person could take issue, which seemed to make the attack on him funnier, painting me as a ‘demented, inexplicably bitter man’, which I am, as you will see. It’s probably worth pointing out that during my short-lived and misguided attempt to appear on TV comedy panel shows, in late 2006, Hislop was easily the most helpful and supportive person I encountered.

  And I ran this show in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, right, in August and, um, every year in Edinburgh they have a prize for comedy, right, organised by Perrier – the Perrier Awards. Perrier of course owned by Nestlé, Nestlé top of the World Health Organisation list of unethical companies. It suggested that their milk-marketing policies contribute to the death of 1.5 million children every year. So every time you laugh at a Perrier-nominated act, a little baby dies. Bear that in mind.*

  * When this show was due to be issued on DVD in 2005, the legal department of the production wing of my old management, who filmed it, initially said it would not be possible to describe Nestlé in these terms. I told them to look into it. And, after the briefest bit of research, they decided it would be fine. Make of this what you will. By the following year, Perrier was no longer the sponsor of Nica Burns’s Edinburgh comedy award. It is entirely plausible that Perrier no longer felt the increasingly coarse and volatile world of once ‘alternative’ comedy sat well with the sophisticated nature of their brand, but romantics like to imagine the sustained anti-Perrier campaign by Baby Milk Action and the Tapwater Awards team may have helped sway their bloody hand, as every story on the Perrier Comedy Awards ceremony was always accompanied by information about the protests. Delightfully, Jason Trachtenberg, of the lo-fi, outsider art, comedy singing trio The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, was booked as the entertainment at the 2005 Perrier Awards party and, having learned of their parent company’s disgraceful and unethical record, used his platform to improvise lyrics about Nestlé’s well-known and proven complicity in the deaths of millions of children. Typically, the TV-industry weekenders present were too pissed to notice, and continued looking for the future of comedy in the bottom of their champagne glasses, I expect. I don’t know. They don’t invite me. And if they did, I wouldn’t go. So there!

  And every year in Edinburgh, they always give that award to comedy to a human being speaking about some stuff. But if they had any integrity, they would give the Perrier Award to the genuinely funniest thing that’s going to happen in Edinburgh all August, which is just going to be an old Scottish tramp doing a fart in a wood. But, Glasgow, if a tramp farts in a forest and no one hears it, is it still funny? Yes, it is. ’Cause it’s some shit that smells of shit coming out of an arse. And if the Perrier had any integrity, which it doesn’t, it would sign up that fart for its own twelve-part Channel 4 comedy series deal.

  Some laughs, some doubt in the room. People going, ‘We’re kind of with you theoretically. We understand this is some kind of satire of something. But how would that actually work, Stew? An invisible cloud of shit-smelling gas with its own Channel 4 series?’ I don’t know, Glasgow, I don’t know. But what I say to you is, could an invisible cloud of shit-smelling gas with its own Channel 4 series be any less funny than The Friday Night Project?*

  * Writing these notes six years on, it seems bizarre to single out The Friday Night Project for abuse, as the bar for bad comedy has been lowered so far by the broadcasting on BBC3 of Horne and Corden that The Friday Night Project now seems like a product of a longgone Age of Enlightenment by comparison. What a different world we live in, here in the 2010s! I flew up in the air to throw my copy of Lesbian Vampire Killers into a skip wearing my own personal jet pack!

  So the day after the 9th of November – which is the 9th of December, nine-one-two.* Do the math … s … I flew back from Spain to Heathrow Airport. I got a minicab from Heathrow Airport to Stoke Newington, Hackney, northeast London, where I live.† And on the way, I had to go past the Finsbury Park mosque, which you’ll know if you read the news is the kind of hotbed of Muslim radicalism in Britain, run by Abu Hamza until recently. That’s the guy who has an eye patch and hooks for hands. An eye patch and hooks for hands. That’s not a good look for a religious leader. It’s a good look maybe if you’re considering auditioning for extra work in the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean. But it’s not a good look for a religious leader. The Archbishop of Canterbury does not have an eye patch and hooks for his hands. He has a big festive Christmas beard in which robins might nest. And that helps us to take his pronouncements on the ethics of the family and modern society more sympathetically than we would if he had hooks for his hands. We’d be suspicious.‡

  * By this point, I had entirely lost the audience at the Aspen Comedy Festival, culturally, politically and, most crucially, mathematically.

  † Stoke Newington is a great place to live for a comedian, if for no other reason than it’s a funny-sounding address. I love saying it onstage, I like setting stories there and I love the resonances that go with the name, from Alexei Sayle’s classic ‘What’s on in Stoke Newington?’ routine that all comics of my generation remember fondly from their childhoods, to the air of shabby would-be bohemianism that hangs around t
he area today. I was unfavourably described by a reviewer in 2009 as ‘Britain’s most middle-class comic’, but I’m not. That is Michael McIntyre. I am the most Stoke Newington comic there is, with all that that suggests.

  ‡ I would try and improvise the Abu Hamza stuff differently every night, aware subconsciously, I suppose, that I was sort of taking on the persona of a proper normal standup comedian, riffing around the kind of news personality whose unusual physical appearance always makes him a regular occurrence in panel-show comics’ bits, irrespective of his actual newsworthiness. I even went on to satirise this kind of Hamza riff in 2007’s 41st Best StandUp Ever show. I don’t remember doing stuff about the Archbishop of Canterbury and his beard other than in this performance, but maybe the perceptible shift into a genuine conversational, improvisational idiom is what prompts the heckler to feel they can contribute, both helpfully and amusingly, leading to an off-the-cuff splurge about the deceitful opportunities of the editing suite that seems really neat on the finished DVD recorded at this performance.

  Live comedy DVDs rarely address the fact that the viewer at home’s experience is clearly different to that of the audience on the night. I always try to crank something in, and made it a central plank in my approach to considering the shots and the directorial approach to my 2009 TV series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Only one hook!

  No, a woman there saying it’s only one hook. I think that it’s hooks for hands, I think he’s got two. But of course luckily the element of doubt’s been introduced here. Umm … I’m able to go away and check that. Er, if it’s factually inaccurate, I can remove it from this video … [male audience member heckles unintelligibly] … as I can everything you’ve said.

  So it’ll just look like a sixty-minute stream of uninterrupted success. Although, ironically, I may consider leaving this part in to give the illusion of it being a genuine event. What do you think of that, viewers at home? This is simultaneously dishonest, and yet also satisfying.

  But Abu Hamza of course, he’s in Belmarsh at the moment. He’s in the process of being deported to America, where he is guaranteed a fair trial. Irony there. One of the many comic tools we’ll be using tonight.*

  * Again, this never worked in America, where the average person’s

  perception of the situation is entirely different.

  So. So I was driving past the Finsbury Park mosque on the, er, 9th of December, the day after the 9th of November, and it was all kicking off outside. There’s Muslim demonstrators on one side of the street complaining about the reprisals they’ve suffered, police in the middle trying to keep order. And on the other side of the Seven Sisters Road, British National Party members standing near the Arsenal shop, their spiritual home. And they’re shouting out, ‘SEND THEM BACK! SEND THE MUSLIMS BACK TO WHERE THEY CAME FROM! BRADFORD, WOOD GREEN, LEEDS, LIVERPOOL, MANCHESTER, BIRMINGHAM AND OTHER BRITISH INDUSTRIAL CITIES WHICH REQUIRED CHEAP LABOUR IN THE NINETEENSIXTIES AND SEVENTIES.’

  And it looked, Glasgow, like there was going to be a full-scale religious race riot. And so I said to the minicab driver, ‘Stop. Let me out. I can help here.’*

  * Looking at this years later, I suspect this routine has its genesis in two things: (1) Seeing this demonstration outside the Finsbury Park mosque, which is about a ten-minute walk from me; and (2) a Simon Munnery routine where, in the character of the naive anarcho-punk Alan Parker Urban Warrior, he tries to quell a sectarian squabble in Glasgow by tying together the scarves of Rangers and Celtic supporters against their will, which ends with them all beating him up, as he explains triumphantly, ‘together’. I’ve never consciously stolen any of Simon’s material, but his shadow hangs heavily over everything I do. I bought two lines off him for my 2009 TV show, and I consider him one of the all-time greats, the Peter Cook of our generation, without whose influence the entire comedy landscape would be entirely different, even if he is far from a household name. Indeed, even in his own household his name is barely known, as Simon’s wife and his three beautiful little girls are in the habit of referring to him simply as ‘Mr Poo Poo Head’.

  And I got out the minicab. I pushed through the British National Party blokes. I pushed through the police line. I pushed through the Muslim demonstrators. I ran into the mosque, some guy tried to get me to take my shoes off, I don’t know what that was about, there wasn’t time, I carried on through. It was a nice, hospitable gesture, but it was ill-timed. And I ran up the prayer tower to the minaret, where the call to prayer is broadcast out to the faithful of North London, and I snatched the little microphone out of the stand there, and I pulled down my underpants and I shoved it up my anus. And with a concerted effort of mental and physical willpower, I farted into it. But on that occasion, it didn’t really help.

  In fact, some eyewitnesses to the ensuing carnage were subsequently to suggest that it may have made the situation worse. And my heartfelt message of peace and goodwill to all men was misunderstood. Although I take some comfort in the fact that a similar thing often happened to Jesus. I’m not saying I am Jesus. That’s for you to think about at home. But if I was Him, this is the kind of place I would come, isn’t it? A simple, humble place. Not the Glasgow Empire, I’d come here. But I’m not saying I am Jesus. Not in the current climate. Erm …*

  * The Irish comedian Ian Macpherson, mentioned earlier, has written a book, The Autobiography of a Genius. I have not read it, but I am told it begins with the line ‘It is not for me to draw parallels between my own life and that of Christ,’ a set-up similar to one both Richard Herring and I imagined independently of each other, which we may have used in the double act at some point.

  But I think there’s a kind of European smugness where we look at America’s hysterical overreaction to the events of the 9th of November and we go, ‘Thanks for that, America, thanks. You’ve set us off on a course of the destruction of world civilisation as we know it. Thanks for that. Thanks.’ But you mustn’t hate the Americans, right? America is currently the most hated country in the world. Americans don’t know that. They don’t read, or watch news. If they did, they would be unhappy. Osama bin Laden flew planes into the World Trade Center, it was a waste of time. If he’d really wanted to hit America hard, where it hurts, he should have carpet-bombed the country with a weapon that Americans would never be able to understand – world geography examination papers. Shops which don’t have the word ‘barn’ in their name. And the metaphysical concept of shame.*

  * I probably wouldn’t write or perform something like this now. It seems glib, stereotypical, cheap and simplistic. It was funny at the time, though. Also, our failure to act entirely honourably in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside the USA means that, to the rest of the world, we’re both the bad guys. You’d have to address that now. Today, this approach to the topic would be dishonest, ignoring the elephant in the room. How different the world is in the futuristic days of the 2010s! I’m going to fly alongside the funeral cortège of British servicemen’s bodies passing through the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett on my own personal hover-saucer!

  But you mustn’t hate the Americans. Don’t hate them, Glasgow. Americans live in a kind of state of ignorant, prelapsarian bliss. They don’t know what’s going on.* And because of that, it can be very relaxing to go to America and watch them. If you go to America and look at Americans in their natural habitat – er, the theme park, the shopping mall, the race riot, the high-school massacre – and you watch them walking around, looking at colours and shapes … and lights … and words … sometimes imagining what the words might mean … It’s very relaxing, Glasgow. It’s like watching carp in a pond in a stately home, er, their mouths opening and closing. It’s charming.†

  * As a rule I try to avoid using long and complicated words that not everyone understands, as it seems like something Russell Brand would do to try and make Sun readers think he was an intellectual. But ‘prelapsarian’ is the perfect word to use here.

  † There are echoes her
e of how I would describe Richard Herring’s home town of Cheddar in the routines we co-wrote for our Lee and Herring double act in the midnineties about him being a bumpkin peasant, so some credit must go to him here, as it must for much of what I have done since meeting him in 1986. When we first arrived in London, we shared a flat in Acton, and I was complaining bitterly about some aspect of modern life which irked me. Rich, finding my position untenable and unintentionally amusing, said I should try expressing this point of view onstage, thus helping me to realise clearly, I think for the first time, who my ‘clown’ was: an outsider, inexplicably annoyed about things that don’t really bother most people.

  On the whole, the double act necessarily involved more compromises than my solo work, but you can’t help but carry parts of a partnership like that with you, and sometimes, I have noticed, in the absence of a second voice to argue with live onstage I am given to fabricating a second one of my own – ‘Oh, Stew!’ etc. – which sounds uncannily like Richard Herring.

  But you mustn’t hate the Americans. They’re not a naturally curious people. Most Americans do not own passports. They’re not a naturally curious people. If you were to lock an American for sixty years in an empty underground bunker which contained nothing but a woolly tea cosy, the American would not even be curious enough to be tempted to see if the tea cosy would make a serviceable hat.* They’re far more likely to arrest the tea cosy, intern it illegally in Guantanamo Bay, and then repeatedly anally rape it until such time that it admits that it was actually a member of an al-Qaeda training cell. Even though at the time of the alleged offence the tea cosy was actually working as a shop assistant in a branch of Currys in Wolverhampton.†

  * This line about the Americans’ lack of curiosity was adapted from an old routine from the midnineties about babies and their lack of curiosity, which in turn was based on something my friend Giles Clarke said at school, describing a mutual acquaintance as ‘the sort of person who, if they were locked in a room with a tea cosy, wouldn’t even be tempted to try it on’. Years later, I rejigged, or stole, Giles’s witticism for my set, though even at the time I remember it seeming an uncommonly well-rounded bon mot in the mouth of a thirteen-year-old fantasy war games fan.