How I Escaped My Certain Fate (37 page)

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It’s hardly surprising that I would assume my mother is not interested in me being a comedian. She struggled to bring me up as a single parent, blagged me into the local Church of England junior school, where I studied alongside the middle-class elite of Solihull and got an inroad to a life of educational privilege, took on extra evening jobs and took in student lodgers to make up the shortfall in my fees after I got a charity bung and then a part-scholarship to the local independent boys’ school, and then watched me get a place at Oxford University, an opportunity of the kind she never had, only to blow it outta my ass by becoming a stand-up comedian.

I’m not even sure my mother really believed I was making any kind of living as a comic until the 2009 TV series, as I was never really written about in the normal newspapers, except as a scourge of society and proponent of mass choral swearing. But she came to see me twice on the 2009 tour, having not seen me since 1990. The first time, I think she mistook my whole onstage approach for me being actually unable to do comedy properly, and seemed to pity
me afterwards, but after the second show, in the company of some enthusiastic former workmates, my mother seemed to have really enjoyed the event. I was surprised how relieved this made me feel. I suppose I didn’t want her to feel I had wasted my life and, by
association
, her efforts to give me a good start.

Earlier this year, I found out that my mother had been keeping a scrapbook of press cuttings about me all along, so this whole
routine
, about my mum’s supposed indifference to my work, is based on a false premise. She’s just a quiet and modest woman, and
probably
worries that anything she said about my work would be the wrong thing, me being a temperamental artist and that. And in 1992, my mother recently reminded me, she even wrote to the Daily Mail radio critic, the dishonourable Quentin Letts, to reprimand him for failing to credit the writer, me, of a show he had reviewed favourably. At the time I was faintly embarrassed by my mother’s behaviour, but now I am very proud of her. More people’s mothers should write to Quentin Letts, and Daily Mail journalists generally, and tell them off. Perhaps Richard Littlejohn wouldn’t have said that the murder of all those prostitutes in Ipswich was of no
consequence
if some nice mums had written him a few stiff letters earlier in his career of evil.

†
The comedian Simon Munnery, who was once an expert
swordsman
, has since stolen this idea. He says – onstage, mind – that the title of Celebrity Mastermind, which I won, entirely legitimately, on the BBC show in January 2010, is of no value, as the Mastermind part of the title is degraded by the appending of the word ‘Celebrity’. ‘Celebrity Mastermind’, he says, ‘is a bit like being Tallest Dwarf.’

*
I realise that I often do this – point out that the majority of the audience aren’t interested in what I am talking about, and tell them that I’m about to discuss it for half an hour or so anyway. Again, it’s a counter-intuitive move, but one that tells them they may not be getting what they want, so they may as well try and like what they are given.

†
I regret being cruel to Tom O’Connor here. He is, after all, a
fellow
comic, and therefore by default I have more in common with him than with any actor, musician or member of the public. But the problem is, it was Tom O’Connor that my mum saw on a cruise, and I cannot tell a lie. On this occasion. 

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It occurs to me as I reach the third transcript in this book that all my best jokes have been written by, inspired by, duplicated
independently
from, bought off or suggested by other people – Dave Thompson, Simon Munnery, Ian Macpherson, Michael Redmond, Louise Coates, Kevin Eldon, Richard Herring and my wife, Bridget Christie. I begin to sympathise with people who think I am a
charlatan
. In fact, the good jokes in my set are starting to stick out so obviously by this stage in my career that it even feels necessary for me to attribute them to their writers, live onstage during the show, as they are so clearly not of a piece with my own interminable and self-regarding material. 

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There are few things funnier than the frustration engendered by my mother, or indeed any civilian non-professional comic, failing to tell a joke properly by getting all the details in the wrong order. I love it. It’s like someone’s given Georges Braque a ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ set-up and he’s handed in a painting of a road that looks like a chicken with crosses for eyes. My favourite example of this was a Liverpudlian cab driver trying to tell me a joke set on a building site, during which he became totally bogged down in the idea of ‘the camaraderie of the building site’ and kept stressing it at every point, mistakenly imagining it was somehow an important element of the joke, the entirety of which I have since forgotten, except that it involved ‘the camaraderie of the building site, you know, the camaraderie, of the lads, on the building site … the camaraderie of the building site, the camaraderie, it was because of the camaraderie like, the camaraderie of the building site’. I am pretty sure I hijacked his weird and strangely hypnotic rhetoric to achieve maximum tedium in the telling of the sardine joke here.

Since doing this set, I’ve found a new mode of being onstage, which is to take on the persona of an old lady – not strictly based on my gran in any real sense, but channelling elements of
childhood
memories of many dotty aunties and neighbours – who is trying to tell a story in a mild Midlands accent about something she does not really understand. This has been the key to me being allowed to ramble incoherently around various subjects for
minutes
on end, and resulted in the ‘Rap Singers’ routine on the first episode of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, during which section of the show, viewing figures record, 300,000 people switched off or died of boredom. 

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The repeated image of Tom O’Connor being quick, like various animals and objects, is indebted to Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh, whose 2000 Edinburgh show with Noel Fielding, Arctic Boosh, I directed and essentially script-edited. The free-form
narrative
approach I struggled to impose on Arctic Boosh later became the basis of the ungrateful duo’s multimillion-pound touring shows and many hit television outings, but during my tenure with them they accused me of being ‘like Hitler, stamping all over us in your jackboots … trying to make us write a fucking play or something’, and sacked me, like the jazzed-up wankers they are.

But there was one sentence in Arctic Boosh, typical of the boys’ approach, wherein Julian described himself, with the most brilliant throwaway timing, as ‘coming at’ someone like a particular thing, and this thing would be changed every night in the pursuit of spontaneity, and in order to remove definite cues so as to make the show impossible to tech in any meaningful way, and also making anyone kindly trying to structure it, for no fee, out of the goodness of their heart, feel like some kind of loser or fascist.

Most comedy happens in 4/4, or at least in a recognisable rhythm. The punchlines fall on the beat. But The Boosh are like Sunny
Murray
, the free-jazz drummer who reinvented time for Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor in the sixties. There’s a pulse in their heads, but only they can hear it, and the timing of the funny lines is falling all around it, like dried stalks of spaghetti being dropped onto a china plate. You’re laughing on the off-beats, and the on-beats are empty, glaring holes. It is brilliant, and disproves the rigour of accepted comic theory. But as with all art, you can only really do it wrong if you’ve first mastered doing it right.

Once, in the late twentieth century, when characteristically annoyed with their refusal to conform to my ideas of what comedy should be, I said to the two surly young Booshes, probably racked by my own bitterness and envy, ‘The problem is, you two think you’re Miles Davis and John Coltrane, but actually you need to realise you are Flanagan and Allen.’ But it turns out that Noel and Julian were The Mighty Boosh all along. And I was wrong.