How I Escaped My Certain Fate (18 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
It was great to have the show filmed too. It drew a line under the material and forced me to move forwards. The problem now was how to follow it up.
Stand-Up Comedian
had been assembled from the best leftovers of a decade and the few ideas I’d had in my sabbatical. What was I
supposed
to talk about now?
In-between my discharge from hospital and the start of the tour, in December 2004 and January 2005, I went to Hanover with the composer Richard Thomas to help out on a piece he was writing for the Schauspielhaus there. I wasn’t really switched on and felt like a passenger. I never really figured out what my role was, how to speak to anyone, or what to eat and drink. All the Germans we worked with evidenced a deep and dry humour. ‘There are no old buildings here,’ Richard said to a German actor. ‘That is because you destroyed them all,’ he answered. The
Weihnachtsmarkt by the station glittered pleasingly, and I finally found an Irish pub where I could drink halves of Guinness all day. But the flat we were billeted in was
freezing
and we ended up spending too much time there, sitting up, dealing with phone calls and emails and mass panic when, suddenly, out of nowhere, the
Jerry Springer: The Opera
shit hit the born-again Christian evangelist fan.
Because the show was now on its last legs as a live West End proposition, the producers had decided it was time to auction it off to the BBC, who had long been seeking a transmission, and then send it out to tour the provinces. The TV director Peter Orton, who had played sax for the sixties mod group The Attack, was contracted to film it, and caught a great performance with the sublimely subtle David Soul in the lead. I was happy the piece was going to be out there, for anyone to see, for free. And then a
rightwing
Christian pressure group decided to use objections to the show’s religious content to catapult themselves into the public eye, causing 65,000 people to complain in advance of the broadcast, their vociferousness eventually leading the police to advise some BBC executives to go into hiding on the night of the programme.
*
*
An early attempt by the BBC to get the opera on BBC2, which we were able to resist, saw the then controller Jane Root advising me to learn about how to present it using the example of On the Hour, a show for which I had been one of the four main writers.
It was odd to be in Germany and to know that 65,000 people wanted your work banned. The Germans found it funny, and mocked us for being enemies of society and makers of
‘Entartete Kunst’,
the Nazis’ demonised ‘decadent art’. When we had first heard about them, I had looked at Christian Voice’s website and assumed the whole thing
would soon blow over. They were obviously small-time shock merchants, who even suggested that Hurricane
Katrina
was God’s punishment on New Orleans for having a gay parade. Matters soon escalated, though. On the night of the broadcast, we sat, in defiance of Christian Voice’s homophobic agenda, in a gay bar in Hanover, drinking gay drinks nervously until we were sure the show had gone out without anyone being killed.
*
*
A gay bar in Germany is the same as a normal bar here. Whereas a normal bar in Germany is like a dentist’s waiting room with beer.
Christian Voice’s head honcho, Stephen Green, had quickly mastered the art of the inflammatory soundbite, and the press lapped his comments up without really doing any background checks on him or his organisation. Acres of angry newsprint were generated, much of it about things that weren’t even in the show – the supposed
nappywearing
Jesus, the 6,000 swear words that never were – and frightened white people who imagined immigrants were getting an easy ride whenever their faiths were mentioned joined the queue of incoherently angry people eager to see the show closed. In December, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play
Behzti
had been closed by furious Sikhs at the
Birmingham
Rep, and on a not unrelated note even the national treasure Billy Connolly had recently been censured for a routine about the British hostage in Iraq Ken Bigley. But Stephen Green managed to mobilise the non-specifically miffed on a previously unseen scale. Then he started to close in for the kill. Green’s creative interpretation of the legal implications of the proposed and pending new laws on the incitement of racial and religious hatred meant that a whole slew of venues that were lined up to take the show on tour pulled out after he wrote to them and said they’d
be prosecuted. Our final chance to make some money on the opera faded away.
Over the next few months, as the fuss rumbled on
endlessly
and Christian Voice began to make plans to prosecute us for blasphemy, in-between smashing my head into walls in rage I began to wonder whether there might be a
standup
show in it. Becoming part of the news itself ought to offer the comedian-victim interesting creative possibilities. Would it be possible to comment, satirically and
objectively
, on a story, or a scandal, in which you yourself were a character?
*
*
Out of professional curiosity, I would like to have seen the TV personality Russell Brand’s 2009 stand-up show, Scandalous, in which he talked about his role in the Sachsgate scandal. A BBC
producer
had mistakenly broadcast a recording of the hairy corncrake telling the elderly character actor Andrew Sachs that he had enjoyed sexual intercourse with his granddaughter, who is one of these Goths that they have nowadays that are sexy. (In a grainy film of the phone call Jonathan Ross can be seen touching himself
mysteriously
in the background, in an act of magical transference,
ingesting
psychically the energies of his young buck.) As I say, I would have liked to have seen Brand’s stand-up show, but pretty quickly it became possible to sum up the whole story thus: two overexcited middle-aged men make stupid comments and are then persecuted by a slavering right-wing media to fulfil its own anti-BBC agenda, mobilising ‘decent people’ much in the manner of Christian Voice. And the thought of watching Russell Brand drag this out for an hour, whilst girls threw their bras at him, and then having to read him being described as the ‘closest thing we have to Lenny Bruce’ by Bruce Dessau of the London Evening Standard free-sheet made me, to be honest, bitter and resentful. I would also like to remind you all that despite the fuss about Sachsgate, the most-complained-about broadcast ever remains Jerry Springer: The Opera. I am not proud of this. But if this is a competition, and I have chosen to see it as one for now, I am still on the winning team.
In mid-February, I took a week off the tour to go to America and perform
Stand-Up Comedian
at the
invitation
of the Aspen Comedy Festival, which is basically a trade fair for the American TV comedy industry, hosted by HBO. As noted, my show didn’t really work, though Janeane Garofalo and all the cool teeth-grinding radicals liked it, which pleased me no end. The American
comics
in Aspen were mainly terrible, as usual, and luckily I managed to wriggle out of hosting a showcase full of acts whose worthless material, it turned out, would have made it very difficult for me to introduce them with any degree of enthusiasm and sincerity. But I did get to meet loads of my favourite underground American comic-book creators, who were doing a panel there, and I was smuggled into a rich man’s party, high in a mountaintop mansion, by the persistent and perverted writer Jonathan Ames, whose work I admired enormously. And the festival offered one of the last opportunities to see the brilliant Flight of the
Conchords
baffle an unprepared American crowd before they broke big, as they silently died in a tent in the afternoon.
But the single best thing about the Aspen festival was a film screening I attended, out of sheer boredom, of a
documentary
about stand-up called
The Aristocrats,
by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette. It features clips of over a
hundred
principally American comics telling variations on a joke known as ‘the Aristocrats’, which concerns an obscene vaudeville act. Gradually, the film becomes a hilarious and often moving treatise on shock, surprise, taste, humour, the art of storytelling and the creative imagination. I became an evangelist for
The Aristocrats,
writing lengthy pieces on it for the
Sunday Times,
cannibalised below, and
The Wire
(see Appendix III).
Apparently, the Aristocrats gag, though never repeated
onstage and unknown in Britain, had been a
dressingroom
staple of American comics for decades. It begins with a man entering a showbiz agent’s office to pitch him a nightclub act comprising a man, his wife and their two children, whose performance is then described in as much pungent, pornographic and scatological detail as possible, limited only by the imagination and scruples of the teller. The horrified agent then asks what the act is called. The man replies, ‘The Aristocrats.’ The humour arises from the contrast between the repellent nature of the act and the polite, gentle title it has been given. The lure of the
Aristocrats
gag for the film-makers appeared to be the
infinitely
extendable central section, which pushes boundaries of both endurance and taste, and has, on occasion, been stretched out for as long as an hour and a half.
I interviewed Paul Provenza, himself a stand-up, about his film later that year for the
Sunday Times.
The editing process reflected a conscious decision to make the movie about ideas. In fact, we ended up doing some comics a disservice because we didn’t
necessarily
use their funniest bit, but the bit that best helped to illustrate the ideas of the movie clearly. The movie starts repetitively, but if you listen to each version of the joke, hearing the same gag again and again shows how people take off with it and create different things. In the first six minutes George Carlin does a version that’s totally grossed-out and scatological, then we move on to Drew Carey teaching us how to do the joke, then into a riff constructed entirely of little sound-bites until, I think, your moral judgment is suspended. You’ve been
bludgeoned
. Boom! And then you can concentrate on the absurdity of the thing, the structure of the gag, and the
different layers of offence. It’s about the singer not the song.
Repeating the same joke actually allows us to get over the issue of content and concentrate instead on the thorny issue of aesthetics.
For me, hearing Provenza say this last sentence was like a cartoon lightbulb appearing over my head. This was what I had been trying to do in comedy for nearly twenty years, but I’d never heard the idea expressed with any degree of clarity.
Sometime around the mid-point of the film, after an especially hilarious sequence in which a clown-faced mime acted out the gag silently on Venice Beach, there was a twenty-minute section where, for me, the joke wore thin. I began to feel as if I was being dragged through a trench of filth. The violence against women in the various
versions
of the story became so relentless that when Bob Saget described one of the male performers smashing his penis repeatedly into a drawer, I was almost relieved because at least it offered some respite. That said, other sections of the comedian-packed cinema were still splitting their sides.
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*
There can be something utterly hysterical about imaginatively framed obscenity. One of my all-time-favourite routines remains one which Sean Lock performed, I think only once, in about April 1990. Sean, today a popular TV personality and consequently able to play the crowds he always deserved, pictured himself sitting on a toilet, defecating, and looking down to realise that the first stool to emerge from his anus has splashed down into the toilet bowl in the shape of a penis. A second stool emerges. To Sean’s delight it is in the shape of a vagina. The penis-shaped stool and the vaginashaped stool begin bumping into each other in the water of the toilet, at which point, aroused by the activity of the genital-shaped stools, Sean falls to his knees at the bowl and begins to pleasure himself. Sean must have made this story last ten minutes, and I was weeping with laughter, admittedly alone. Whenever I see him I always ask him about this bit and tell him it was the best thing he’s ever done, apart from his BBC2 sitcom, and that he should do it again one day, which seems to irritate him no end.
Seen in public,
The Aristocrats
becomes a living object lesson in the fact that a one-size-fits-all approach to making
decisions about what is acceptable just won’t fit. It doesn’t even work in one room full of people who all do the same job. It could be used as a tool to refute Christian Voice’s claims that
Jerry Springer: The Opera was, in and of itself,
offensive.
In its closing section,
The Aristocrats
transcended its base subject material to become genuinely profound and emotional, and I think I took this unlikely transition as a challenge, eventually borne out in the closing stages of the
’90s Comedian
set. Viewers were softened up for the final sequence of
The Aristocrats
with a specially made South Park short, in which the animated toddlers describe a version of the vaudeville act where the perverted
family
run around impersonating the victims of the 9/11 disaster whilst covered in various bodily fluids. Next we go to a charity event filmed in New York three weeks after 9/11 itself. ‘The shock of hearing the
South Park
bit makes us close to the state of the room when Gilbert Gottfried takes the stage at a Friars’ Roast,’ Provenza said. ‘Inadvertently, we had somehow created our own third act of
The
Aristocrats
.
We had already shot Gilbert doing the Aristocrats joke in private three or four weeks before 9/11, so the joke was in his mind.’