How I Escaped My Certain Fate (26 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
And another great thing about the IRA, I always think, apart from the warnings – and the uniforms, which were stylish but also practical – is that they had achievable aims, didn’t they? What do they want? Er, a united Ireland. And of course it’s possible to imagine getting round the table and negotiating towards that. What do al-Qaeda want? Al-Qaeda want to see the destruction of Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation in its entirety. And it’s harder to imagine getting round the table and negotiating towards that, isn’t it? ‘Obviously, you’ll appreciate we’re unable to meet all your demands. But here are some areas of Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation that we’d be happy to let go.’ Like Splott.
*
I don’t even know what that is, I just saw it on a map. Splott and Joe Pasquale, he could be sent out as well.
*
Splott is an area of Cardiff with a funny name. It is
onomatopoeic
. It sounds like porridge falling onto a red-brick,
terracedhouse
doorstep. Splott used to be a student zone when I was young and had friends there. I was performing the show this text is
transcribed
from in Cardiff. I always cranked in some local reference at this point, wherever I was, as the thing that we in the West can afford to sacrifice to Islamic terrorists. These days, I try not to make this kind of local gag. Having said that, when I was last in
Liverpool
, the local paper reviewer hated the whole evening, apart from an obvious, off-the-cuff joke I made about housing quality in
Toxteth
, which seemed to her to be the only evidence I offered all night that I even deserved to be called a comedian.
But there’s lots of good stories from the war against
terror
, though. I mean, I was reading this, um … I hate it when comedians do that as a kind of intro, ’cause
basically
the link between what I’ve just said and this bit is a bit contrived. So I go, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of good stories from the war against terror, though, but I wasn’t actually talking about that then, was I, no.’ But I would have got away with it, no one would have noticed. But. There
are
a lot of good stories from the war against terror, apropos of nothing.
*
*
Deconstruct and do it anyway. The first place I ever noticed the phrase ‘apropos of nothing’ being used outside academic circles was in the surprisingly subtle 1994 Sheryl Crow song ‘All I Wanna Do’, where it is tossed away with grace and ease as if part of a casual everyday conversation. Since noticing this I too have tried to use the phrase in the same way wherever possible, but I am aware that in doing so I am stealing a little bit of Crow’s linguistic genius. Or paying homage to it anyway.
And, um … I was reading this great book of, of trial transcripts, of American soldiers accused of human-rights abuses in, in Abu Ghraib, which was of course closed today.
*
And, um … I don’t know if you remember Charles Graner, he was a fat American soldier but he had a
moustache
, so you could identify him. And he was the guy that organised the photographing of a naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian being dragged out of a cell, er, on his hands and knees, er, on a dog’s lead. And, um, in his defence, er, his lawyer, Charles Graner’s lawyer said that the naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian wasn’t being dragged out of the cell but was actually crawling of his own free will. And I just wondered how many other lines of defence they rejected before they settled on that one. And also what the naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian might have been crawling of his own free will towards? And I like to think he was crawling towards the notion of Western
democracy
. But obviously he was having some difficulty knowing which way to crawl, er, because of the hood, er, and because of the fact that he was approaching a palpably abstract concept.
†
*
By sheer coincidence, the American prison camp Abu Ghraib was closed on the day this recording of me doing a routine about Abu Ghraib, which I’d been doing for nine months, was made. See how professional a comedian I am, in that I mention that here, to give the routine a feeling of absolute, cast-iron relevance.
†
There are few things as inspiring for good stand-up as utter
disgust
, as genuine utter contempt for a person, an event, a point of view. But there are also few things as unattractive in a comedian as appearing to occupy, deliberately, the moral high ground, especially with the degree of smugness I am prone to, even though I
sometimes
attempt to disguise this repulsive characteristic as a deliberate artistic choice, as if I were inhabiting a subtly crafted role rather than just being an actual wanker. That said, when I was in Aspen doing this bit, I didn’t really care what the people there made of it, such was my self-righteous hatred of Amerikkka, which you will notice I have spelt with three ‘k’s, despite the fact that its current president is black. Of course, within a few months, when evidence of similar British abuse of detainees emerged, it wouldn’t have been possible to go over there and take this tone with them. They should have all stood up, as one, and spat in my face.
OK? And so there’s good laughs for that over here in this area, and those tail away towards that corner there. When it’s late at night, there’s a long set to get through, as I said, there isn’t going to be time for me to work a
mixedability
room tonight. No offence, right, but time’s money, you know. Now. So. Everybody over here, for the rest of the night, you’re on board, you’re going to be Team A, OK? And you won’t mind if I don’t play over here too much,
I’m going to be mainly concentrating on Team F in that corner. Don’t cheer that you are better than them, right, Team A, for some of you it’s just the luck of random
seating
, isn’t it, right? I don’t want you … Don’t laugh at them or cheer yourselves, right, we must do everything we can to make them feel comfortable and we will bring them along with us. Don’t laugh at them, don’t even look at them, right? Look at me, Team A. But if you’re sitting next to an F and they laugh at a clever bit, right, you can just reach over and give their hand a little squeeze, and we will bring you along. I will not leave anyone behind, I swear. All these jokes have worked before at some stage, they are about things in the news and people who exist, so you have … Don’t laugh at them, Team A. There’s Team … you are … right? And I know it’s weird, what’s happening now, ’cause you’ve thought, ‘Ooh, let’s go out and sit in the dark and judge someone,’ right? But now you’re being judged and it feels strange, right, but don’t worry, you will … I will … you will not be … look, it’s fine, OK? You’ll be all right. There’ll be a point in about eight minutes when you’ll be … when you’ll laugh at something. You won’t know why. But you will laugh. And it will all be fine, right? Sometime … I’ve, I’ve done this before when there’s been a kind of split in the room. Usually it creates an atmosphere of
bonhomie
. But tonight, it’s made it worse, hasn’t it? It’s made it worse. There’s a tension in the room that’s now ‘the gig is lost’, right? It’s lost.
*
*
This breaking down the room into groups didn’t always happen at this point, and it didn’t always play out exactly like this – this is a transcript of what happened on one occasion – but I’d always need to do this at some point in the first half hour of this show to soften up the ground for the heavy aerial bombardment of toilet-related blasphemy in the second half. By the time I gave up stand-up in 2000, one of the few things I still enjoyed onstage was trying to lose a room and then win it back for my own amusement. Now, instead of it being an act of self-indulgent self-sabotage and wire-walking, I was able to use these skills for some purpose, as I attempted to forge the audience into a group that will go with the heavy stuff ahead, proving to them that they need not find supposedly
offensive
subject material offensive. Form and content, finally, had a relationship. And, with an eye on the cohesion of the evening as a whole, I encourage the stronger and quicker sections of the room to help the weaker, slower members of the audience, and encourage those weaker, slower punters, in turn, to feel no shame in accepting this aid.
OK, Team F, I’m going to put you at your ease, right? It’s OK to not like all of this. It has sometimes happened before. Will that relax you, madam? Good. Um. It’s OK to not like some of this, right? People have not … I’ve done this show about ninety times. I did it for three weeks in a little theatre in London and I had some walk-outs. And one of the walk-outs was the pop star Robbie
Williams
, who left about halfway through. Yeah. And on the way out, the woman from the Soho Theatre said to him, ‘Oh, are you not enjoying it?’ And he said he was, but that he had just remembered that he had to go to a wedding in the morning. Do you think that’s true? Do you think that’s true? If it was true, I hope he’d already bought them a present, and he didn’t just get something from a garage on the way … And then he said that he thought that I was all right, but that my voice – and this is true – Robbie
Williams
said my voice would be better suited to meditational relaxation tapes. That’s what he said. And the weird thing was that when I saw him in there, I thought, ‘Oh, I hope he doesn’t come backstage afterwards, I won’t know what to say.’ What positive thing could you say, you know? But, like … ‘I liked it when you dressed as that skeleton,’ you could
say it was good. But I didn’t know when he’d gone, right?
*
*
This story is entirely true. R. Williams, formerly of the group Take That, was in the company of his showbiz friend, the tiny
satirist
Matthew Lucas, of Little Britain, who was laughing alone, both of them on the right-hand fringe of my vision in a balcony over the stage, Williams’s boredom visible to the crowd. Sometimes I
elaborated
the story, explaining that I was going to tell Williams that I had gone with a crowd of people to watch him onstage at
Glastonbury
in 1997, hoping it would be awful so that we could all laugh at it, but actually his performance had been entirely adequate.
A few years later, the gossip column of the Independent ran a story saying Robbie Williams had walked out of my show because he was offended by the religious content. I wrote back and pointed out that he walked out before the religious content, and that he left simply because he was bored and thought I had a boring voice, a clarification that the newspaper was happy to publish.
I expect it is hard to concentrate on a long monologue by a speaking man if you are from the world of pop, with all the flashing lights and fast music. And cocaine.
But it is … But there are people in Team F – there’s A people are … Team F are going, ‘Yes, Stew, that’s very funny isn’t it? But in Cardiff Robbie Williams plays in the stadium, not in this small room, like you. So maybe you should look at him and learn something about what
entertainment
means. And what it means is not talking in a monotonous voice, dressing as a luminous skeleton. That is what people want.’
So all I’m saying is, if you’re … It’s OK to not like this, but if you don’t like it, that means that you are the same as Robbie Williams.
Lynndie England was a female American soldier and she was photographed pointing and laughing at the naked genitals of hooded, bound Iraqis. And in her trial the judge actually intervened, rather unusually, and he said that he wasn’t convinced that Lynndie England knew what she was doing. Now, I don’t believe that, ’cause in my
experience
, when a woman points and laughs at a man’s genitals, she’s normally fully aware of the effect that will have. In my experience. Especially if he’s hooded and bound. In my experience.
The laugh spreading into the, the Team F region for that, because it’s a kind of bit of satire about the news, but it’s got cocks in it as well. So that helps to bring the whole room onside.
*
Come on, come on in, Team F, come on. It’s a bit like, kind of, at the moment, I feel like we can get there, and I know it’s a bit early in the evening but … At the moment, it feels like over here, there’s loads of nineteen-fifties
American
teenagers splashing around in a lake in little shorts. And there’s some other nineteen-fifties American
teenagers
, and they’re going, ‘Oh, that looks fun. I wish we could go in that lake. But we can’t. ’Cause we’ve got orthopaedic shoes.’ But you can! Throw them off! Take them off, throw them away, you will float in this lake. You will float.
†
*
Here I am having my cake and eating it. I set up the audience to laugh at a pathetic cock joke, and then berate them for doing so. It is I that have trivialised the Americans’ sexual abuse of Iraqi
detainees
by using it as a platform for a cock joke, and yet I choose to shift blame onto the audience for enjoying the very food I have
forcefed
them, like some French pâté manufacturer berating geese for being gluttons. Sometimes, going back over these transcripts, I hate myself for my hypocrisy. Shame on you, shame on you, Stewart Lee.
†
This wouldn’t always happen at this point, or in this form, but a riff on cheery American teenagers would usually be applicable to the crowd response at some point, and however long it went on there was always the funny phrase ‘orthopaedic shoes’ to get a laugh at the end. The phrase feels like it belongs in that Baby Cow production company school of post-Alan Partridge comedy that aspires to combine an illness and a brand name in one sentence as the ultimate in northern realist humour: i.e. ‘He fell down in the aisle of Morrison’s when he had a sudden attack of pancreatic cancer. Well, there was tins of alphabet spaghetti everywhere. One smashed and it spelt out a racist word on the lino. I didn’t know where to look. My sister-in-law is Turkish, as you know. It’s not the same, you’re right, but she’s very dark-skinned and their little boy is half-caste
…
’ etc., etc.
The phrase ‘orthopaedic shoes’ is not in my natural vocabulary and so I feel it must have been brought to my attention either by some Mancunian Steve Coogan character that I and Rich Herring perhaps wrote for in On the Hour, or by a graduate of the same eighties Manchester drama-school gang as Steve Coogan, or else by Rob Brydon in thrall to this particular idiom in the early noughties, or else by the acclaimed playwright and ‘new Shakespeare’ Patrick Marber when attempting to write in this style for profit in the
midnineties
. I can also picture the delightful Caroline Aherne, aka Mrs Merton, sitting before me in her tiny Manchester flat, when we toured student shitholes together in 1993, saying ‘orthopaedic shoe, orthopaedic shoe’, or something very like it, in-between playing me New Order’s ‘Love Vigilantes’ and making me watch Pretty Woman on video, and the words burying themselves deep into my brain. I know this isn’t a phrase I would have arrived at naturally. It’s not from my realm. But where did I rip it from? Someone must know.