March of the Lemmings Page 7

  This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this in the Guardian – pointing out that Gove is adopted. It’s not relevant to anything and needlessly offensive to keep doing so. Alastair T

  What an unbelievably vicious and small minded article. It is like a distillation of Frankie Boyle, except for the fundamental difference that Frankie Boyle is actually funny. Presumably the perpetrator of this sick juvenile filth feels justified in his unmitigated hatred of the Goves and the Mays because he does not approve of their politics. Keep it up, all the better to show the world want hateful unthinking spiteful petty morons you leftists are. Peter Grimes

  Stewart, I’m guessing you know that pipe in French is in common usage. Now I can’t get the image of May and her screwed up expression out of my mind. ID873852

  ‘progressive’ comedy about as funny as cancer. JoePublic247

  If a right wing writer had written an article like this about, say, Diane Abbott, they would rightly be pilloried. Hypocrisy by Lee. GruntyMalunty

  Typical snowflake misogynistic bullship. If a powerful woman wants to have a sex robit who is Stewart Lee to criticise them? We can’t all have the winning personality of Mr. Lee, if we did have what would he write about? Obscure 80’s bands and Jazz most likely and what’s worse we’d let him because we’d all have his personality as I stated before. Jonty101

  I’m all for articles like this. The trouble is that if Milo or others had written something similar there’d be incensed outrage and ‘how dare anyone be so offensive’. Ubermensch1

  Read this article and then had to check who Stewart Lee is, apparently he’s a comedian.. Derek Strange

  Wtf IS this Lee twerp? He’s as witty as herpes and without its charm. Allan Friswell

  Hate is hate. What you are experiencing here is exactly the same emotion people who crucify the looks and mannerisms of a less than attractive feminist feel when they spill their bile over, say, gamergate – I disagree with your opinions so therefore it is ok to attack you personally. Don’t think for one second you are better than them – you’re the same. Self-assured, bullying and vile. Can’t stand the May’s – but I’m not so devoid of self-awareness that I’d turn myself into the exact thing that I’m claiming to be ‘against’. maybe have a moment of reflection and ask yourself if you’re any different to the people you slag off, or if you’re just doing the same thing from a different position. MrSiegel

  Anyone who read this article and enjoyed it needs to re-appraise their attitudes and think whether they are a fully functioning human being. Catu11u5

  ‘And eat the occasional tuna taco way down south in Dixie.’ Will they get it without ‘way down south in Dixie’? I suspect the author agonised over this. The addition makes the sentence a little too long for mine and though the use of over-emphasis has a precedent, Basil Brush as an example, I believe the writer was trying too hard for his laugh. It may have been slightly more obvious, economic, and shocking if he had said ‘stimulate the clitoris with their tongue’, but I suppose the comedy is in the euphemism. PerryW

  1 I went to Seattle, grunge central, in 1994, on a road trip from Vancouver to San Francisco with my then girlfriend, on a £500 budget. We briefly witnessed a very late line-up of Moby Grape in a supper club, and an indie-pop band called Baby Snuffkin, along with a thoughtful group called Peach, at the Crocodile Café. Peach was made up of ex-members of The Posies, whom I liked, and they were nice to us. We drank exotic and mysterious Starbucks coffee and micro-brewery craft beer in rooms full of bearded hipsters and tasted the future of Western Civilisation. We didn’t stay in a flat full of sex robots. In San Francisco, our motel was rocked by a minor earthquake, and somewhere in Oregon we met a man whose wife told us he had murdered a Mexican on their land and that she had seen The Quicksilver Messenger Service live, back in the psychedelic day. America obligingly became what we had hoped it would be.

  2 Boris Johnson, the Goves’ former dinner-party guest, is also twenty-four years older than the woman he left his last wife for, though admittedly he was not her former schoolteacher. He was Boris Johnson. I am three years older than my wife, but once, when we went out for dinner on our wedding anniversary, it was clear the waitress thought she was my daughter, or perhaps even my carer. We played up to this idea, and when we asked the waitress to take a photo of us, I stayed seated and my wife stood behind me with her hand on my shoulder, as if she was there out of a sense of duty. How we laughed later. It is laughter that keeps marriages together, I think. That and simply running out of other options.

  3 I have been fixated on the image of ‘a cluster of toads spawning in a pond’ ever since a friend who had been a customer of an Old Street gay sauna used it to describe his experience of activities in the venue’s swimming pool in the 1980s. Does mentioning this gay friend count as ‘virtue signalling’? I do hope so.

  4 James Naughtie had me on some literary review show on BBC News. He clearly hadn’t read my book and tried to bluff his way through the interview, using stuff he, or his producer, had gleaned in five minutes from Wikipedia and the Daily Mail website. At one point, the question J. Naughtie was asking me made so little sense, and bore such little relation to anything I had ever said or done, that I asked him if he wanted to start the interview again, so he did, and then just did it equally badly, while I sat there making a bemused face. It was like I was still at school, and he was the impotent and resentful dad of a girl I was taking to the fair, trying to get one over on me for some inexplicable reason that I didn’t understand, interrogating me in the kitchen while she waited on the sofa with a video of The Return of Martin Guerre, which we simply had to watch. I look forward to being allowed to behave equally badly to some young man.

  5 In the interests of full disclosure, on reading the sentence back I realise it is rhythmically indebted to the superior and more nuanced joke the comedy genius Simon Munnery wrote in the late ’80s, in his Alan Parker Urban Warrior guise: ‘The Birmingham Six are free! When will the rest of Birmingham be free?’

  6 The Treachery of Images, René Magritte, 1929.

  7 Imagine being able to just say such hilariously banal things naturally, as Mr May does here, without spending hours, like I do, trying to think up hilariously banal things on purpose.

  When Boris Johnson’s inner monster goes on the rampage

  21 May 2017

  Last Wednesday,1 our chief Brexiteer, Boris Johnson, dressed up in a Sikh costume to visit a Bristol gurdwara. There he told the alcohol-abstaining supplicants to take bottles of Johnnie Walker to Indian relatives to speed up post-Brexit booze exports, leading one to comment that had he made that suggestion in India, the foreign secretary would have been killed immediately. Another successful Boris Johnson PR exercise.

  That said, I don’t think Boris Johnson was seeking to pique the Sikhs. Indeed, Boris Johnson’s own wife, Marina Wheeler QC, is half Sikh, though it is not clear which half, so it is difficult to deduce anything from this.2 It might be just her leg and some bits of one of her arms. I don’t know. This notion is a minefield of potentially explosive cultural sensitivities, both gender- and faith-based.

  Personally, I think the Sikhs’ reaction is a perfect example of that Political Correctness Gone Mad™ that they have now. In respect of his pernicious Brexit lies, it is not necessarily wrong that Boris Johnson should be punished indiscriminately by the full force of whatever belief systems are most unforgiving, but he shouldn’t be slain for saying ‘whisky’ to a Sikh. No one should.

  Nonetheless, an expensively educated hominid like Boris Johnson, doing the sensitive job he does, should have a subliminal awareness of cultural taboos. The Sikhs’ offence is Eton College’s failure. Perhaps fewer soggy biscuit competitions after lights out, and more comparative religion, headmaster!

  And gurdwara-gate definitely calls into question Boris Johnson’s fitness for the role of foreign secretary, a position he is unlikely to occupy after 8 June anyway, especially in the event of a Corbyn win.3

  But Boris John
son’s biggest cultural cringe happened earlier in the week, in faraway Newport, South Wales. The Conservatives consider Wales invisible to mainstream media, which is why they sent Boris Johnson there in the first place. But my friend, the Welsh mystic Carlton B. Morgan, sent me the following email.4

  ‘Apparently, Boris Johnson came to Newport market yesterday. I had sadly just vacated the place having ate a vegan breakfast with Fakin’ Bacon, so there but for the space–time continuum goes a smart-alecky remark I could have made to the odious sap.’

  ‘Anyway,’ the vegan punk visionary continued, ‘this have I gleaned: BJ approached the Negative Zone comics stall and said to the comics man, “Oh! When I was a youngster I wanted to be the Incredible Hulk™. The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets!” I thought you might like to know. Nos da.’

  Sure enough, Wales Online was now reporting the story of Boris Johnson™’s disastrous visit to the Gwentish market. Apparently, Boris Johnson™ declined to eat a suspected hash cake; said, ‘This is one of those cakes that you can both have and eat,’ but then, illogically, did not eat the cake that he had; painted some concrete letters that spelled out his name, like a clever fat baby; placated a weeping Nigerian; was booed about the miners; and having told the Negative Zone man that his favourite character was the Incredible Hulk™, was met with the response, ‘You’re halfway there, if you don’t mind me saying, Boris.’ Pow!

  In less than a minute, I found four interviews, from 2009 to 2015, in which Boris Johnson™, each time citing the comic-book quote ‘The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets’, said he would like to be the Incredible Hulk™.

  Perhaps quoting a comic book is one of those little tricks clever Boris Johnson uses to appear down with the normal people, irrespective of his actual feeling for the work itself, having long since made the concepts of truth and expediency indivisible in his own mind.

  Johnny Marr told David Cameron he wasn’t allowed to listen to The Smiths; Bruce Springsteen disavowed Ronald Reagan’s absorption of ‘Born in the USA’; and ’80s anarcho-punks Flux of Pink Indians were privately dismayed by the Countryside Alliance’s misappropriation of their album The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks to soundtrack its campaign against rural post-office closures.

  And likewise, Boris Johnson™ absolutely cannot have our Incredible Hulk™ – no way, man! You’ve taken our future. At least leave us our comic books, dude.

  I emailed various comics creatives to solicit their opinions on Boris Johnson™’s desire to actually be the actual Incredible Hulk™, the most succinct coming from exiled Hulk artist Gary Frank.

  ‘I can’t help feeling that Boris Johnson™ slightly missed the point of it all,’ wrote Frank, ‘in that Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner, doesn’t actually want to get angry, become stupid and then smash everything to fuck. Do you think Boris Johnson™ misread the Hulk comics as a sort of Tony Robbins self-help guide to fulfilling your potential?’

  But dig a little deeper into the Hulk’s genesis, and it seems Boris Johnson is right to identify with the creature, but not for the reasons he imagines. The early American comic-book superheroes were authored almost exclusively by liberal Jewish visionary autodidacts, who reluctantly Americanised their Jewish surnames, and leaned heavily on Hebrew mythology.

  Hulk was created by Stan Lee (Stanley Salmon-Bagel) and Jack Kirby (Jacob Matzoh-Balls) in 1962, and though influenced by Frankingstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the character is best understood through the sixteenth-century tale of the Golem of Prague, as, indeed, is Boris Johnson™ himself.5

  Having made a man-monster from magic mud to protect his community, Rabbi Loew soon finds he, like Bruce Banner after he unleashes his inner Hulk, loses control of the creature, which heads off on a psychotic rampage, destroying everything, though stopping short of telling Sikhs to buy whisky.

  Finally, the golem is subdued and stuffed back into the attic, leaving the rabbi – like Theresa May or Donald Tusk, depending on your politics – to clear up the mess the deranged creature has made.

  At the end of the second issue of The Incredible Hulk (July 1962), Bruce Banner wakes from the fever-dream of a night spent as the monster, dimly aware of his responsibility for the destruction around him. In torn rags, he says, ‘Tell me – quickly – what happened? I – I can’t remember – it’s like an ugly fading nightmare!’

  Banner’s haunted face recalls nothing so much as the face of Boris Johnson, as he emerged the morning after the Brexit vote, in denial of the destruction that his own inner Hulk had wrought.

  Boris Johnson was always the Hulk, all along. And he always was the golem. The ancient legend claimed him at birth, and it knew Boris Johnson better than Boris Johnson knew himself, as legends are wont to do. And now his attic awaits.

  Wow. I guess most posters here would have sided with the attackers of Charlie Hebdo too. Wow – Boris said a word that – by the way lost on Stewart Lee – only 1 haughty dumbass took offence too. No one else did. But hey its Boris so who cares right? And Mr Lee where the f is your condemnation of those who think it’s alright to kill someone based on an off the cuff remark? Haven’t got one? Shock. Londonrob68

  Sikhs love beer and johnnie Walker is regarded with veneration. Sikhs are not like Muslims in their attitude to alcohol. Why the racist assumption that all brown people eschew alcohol? Boris actually knew a thing or two about Sikh culture more than the hand wringing Guardianistas. Ever been to a Sikh wedding? Not much abstinence there. Nidoc10

  1 17 May 2017.

  2 Boris Johnson and Marina Wheeler split in 2018, after she became bored of his infidelities. You can’t have your cake and eat it after all, it seems.

  3 Well, I was wrong about that.

  4 Carlton B. Morgan, the Welsh mystic, is a former NME cartoon-strip scriptwriter and ex-member of both The Immortal Invisibles and The Supernormals, and my annual hook-up with his magic band in Cardiff, Swansea, Bristol or Newport is one of the things that makes touring tolerable. Carlton in Cardiff, Anthony and Linda Frost lighting up Cornwall, Richard Dawson and formerly Rhodri Davies in Newcastle, Andy Miller and his forensic mind in Canterbury, Dan Rhodes writing great novels and delivering the mail in Buxton, The Nightingales drinking late in Wolverhampton dive bars, Peter ‘Trotsky’ Edwards still furious in Yorkshire, The Aberdeen Knitting Circle weaving their woollen magic, and a whole bunch of psychedelic seers and record collectors down in Brighton – there are little beacons of companionship along the otherwise lonely way: a stolen hour in a pub with a late licence after the show has been packed up and driven out of the venue, and a pint of something local – Brains or 80 Shilling or Ghost Ship or Tribute – to make you feel human again, not inadvertently famous or exhaustingly presidential to the people in the merch queue, or forcedly cheery to tonight’s theatre staff, making sure you leave everyone with a pleasant memory. Carlton, an original Welsh punk scenester and expert on both Arthur Machen and Captain Beefheart, is one of my national network of ears and eyes on the ground, which keeps me one step ahead of The Man, and he squats at the centre of a vast network of counter-cultural contacts, outsider artists and flâneurs, like a psychoactive spider. His flat could do with a tidy-up, though.

  5 It’s the golem again. My metaphor bucket overflows!

  A papal encounter with a bat-faced duck-lion

  28 May 2017

  Beelzebub, the gluttonous emperor of hell, master of calumny, foremost in wickedness and crime, is a fallen angel who presides over the Order of the Fly. Some say he is as high as a tower. Others say he has the figure of a snake, but with the generative organs of a young woman and the face of a bluebottle.

  Consequently, the god of Ekron’s first ever official visit to the Vatican last week was fraught with difficulties regarding imperial protocol, dietary requirements and appropriate toilet usage. To which facilities were the Swiss Guard to direct a pert-breasted snake-fly?1

  Pope Francis is a normally cheery man, but on seeing photos of his haunted vis
age on Wednesday, it seemed to me that a great sadness, a coal-black fear even, had seized his holy heart. At first I was confused. Had the Pope, like me, read Morrissey’s comments on immigration and terrorism and realised that after years of trying to make fanboy allowances for the singer’s pronouncements, he was finally going to have to throw away all his Smiths records?2

  Perhaps the pontiff had learned that Russell Howard was going to be replaced as host of Comedy Central’s Stand-Up Central by the less experienced Chris Ramsey, a source of anxiety not only to the Pope, but to the brightly lit show’s hundreds of non-papal fans? Or was the leader of the world’s Catholics saddened by the death of Roger Moore, star of his favourite film, the 1980 marine insurance-themed thriller, North Sea Hijack?3

  (Though Moore was cast against type as the boorish misogynist marine insurance expert Rufus Excalibur ffolkes, Pope Francis is known to have admired the way Moore beatified the gruff, no-nonsense and decidedly politically incorrect character by making him a lover of cats. At the end of the movie, foulmouthed ffolkes accepts only a litter of kittens as payment for thwarting Anthony ‘Psycho’ Perkins’s perverted oil-rig hijack, snubbing grateful dignitaries to nurture the newborns with a saucer of milk.)

  Sad-faced Pope Francis had my sympathy, whatever ailed him. I am not a religious or a superstitious person, despite having once been given a wedgie in a Paris mausoleum by the ghost of Napoleon,4 but like many atheists and agnostics, I find in Francis much to admire, at least in comparison to all the evil popes that preceded him.

  Pope John XII raped pilgrims and drank toasts to a Satan; Pope Alexander VI had an incestuous relationship with his daughter and made naked boys leap from cakes; Pope Benedict XVI wore extravagant Prada shoes, sported a decadent red hat and was a notoriously unenthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, adding laziness as well as dressing as a young Nazi to his list of crimes.