How I Escaped My Certain Fate (41 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
(
goes back onstage
) I’ve been going to Weight Watchers
anyway. I have been going to Weight Watchers. But I’m forty. I was forty two days ago. And it’s hard to go to Weight Watchers as a middle-aged man, it’s embarrassing.
Everyone
else there is women, so you feel embarrassed. And you have to be brave as a middle-aged man to keep going back to Weight Watchers, brave, braver in many ways than a
fireman
or someone fighting in a war. And I’m the only
person
currently failing to lose weight at Weight Watchers as a result of Islam. Some laughs here, mainly an anxiety in the room. Don’t know what you’re scared of. Haven’t you got a bloke, an airport baggage handler, who can pretend to have kicked someone? It’s an empire built on sand, that man’s career.
*
*
This was a comment, off the top of my head, relating to John Smeaton, an airport baggage handler who kicked a terrorist with one of his two Scottish feet at Glasgow airport during a failed attempt to blow up the place. He subsequently became a minor celebrity, though there were doubts about the full extent of his hero ism. I don’t have a genuine opinion on the matter. I just said it in the heat of the moment to be annoying.
Don’t worry, I’m going to talk about Islam, don’t worry. There’s people walking out, they’re so afraid. Ben Elton says we can’t talk about Islam because we’ll be killed.
*
Well, I don’t care. Don’t worry, right, don’t worry about where this bit’s going, ’cause this, don’t worry, ’cause this bit, if you’re nervous, this bit was reviewed in the London
Evening Standard
as being ‘tediously politically correct’. So, don’t worry about where it’s going. In fact, if you were
confused
so far, you can now add boredom to that.
†
*
The month prior to filming this, in March 2008, the
eighties
comedian Ben Elton had told the Christian magazine Third Way that the BBC were too scared to broadcast jokes about Islam because he had had a line about ‘taking the mountain to
Mohammed
’ cut. I wrote a piece for the same paper at the time defending the BBC’s position, and saying that Ben Elton had missed the point. But then the only piece of material cut from my subsequent 2009 series by the BBC was one that the compliance unit were worried broke an Islamic cultural taboo. Sorry, Ben Elton.
†
I was so bored of the way that being politically incorrect in
comedy
was being seen as an end in itself that I was actually very glad to be described by a reviewer as ‘tediously politically correct’, and decided henceforth to adopt the criticism that I was ‘politically correct’ as a positive thing, as something to aim for. (One way of defeating critics is to embrace their criticisms as positive things. I had ‘surly, arrogant and laboured’ made into a badge.) Over the preceding year, I had become more and more interested in all the right-wingers’ exaggerated urban myths of political correctness, and this culminated in me losing my temper, quite
unprofessionally
, in a discussion on the subject on David Baddiel’s Radio 4 show Heresy in May 2007, when the majority of the audience voted for the suggestion that ‘Political correctness had gone mad’, and Harry Enfield agreed with them.
Now. I go to Weight Watchers where … I go to Weight Watchers, ladies and gentlemen, I go where I live. And I go to Stamford Hill library, Stoke Newington, in
northeast
London. And, um, there’s only two men in my Weight Watchers group, me and an old Polish man in his late
seventies
. And everyone else is women, women of all races and creeds and colours and cultures and shapes and sizes. It’s like a United Nations day out to a funfair hall of mirrors. Which they have actually, they have those. And um, I was in the queue waiting to get weighed, you queue up to get weighed, right, and three in front of me there’s a young Muslim woman about twenty-five years old, and she was wearing the hijab, this is the headscarf they wear ’cause there’s an Islamic taboo about men seeing hair. And she turned round to me and she said, ‘I do apologise but I’m about to get weighed, would you be so kind as to go out in
the corridor?’ Now, at the time, I mean obviously in
retrospect
, um, it was ’cause she was going to take the
headscarf
off and I couldn’t see her hair, but I didn’t make the connection then and I thought she just didn’t want me to see how much weight she’d put on. So I said, ‘No, I’m not going out, and I don’t know what you’re worried about, love, you’re not even that fat.’ And then she said, ‘No, it’s the …’
And then I realised, right, and I started to apologise, but in-between me and her was a Hassidic Jewish woman about fifty years old, and she sort of budged in and she looked at the young Muslim woman and then she looked at me and then she sort of went [
sigh of exasperation
] like that. [
sigh of exasperation
] As if to go, ‘First the suicide bombings and now this.’ But the irony was that the Hassidic Jewish, they have a thing where they shave their hair off and the women wear wigs over it. So she’s in a wig, the young Muslim woman’s in this headscarf. Me, I’m an atheist, right, a fat atheist we’ve established, but I didn’t see why my attempts to lose weight should be compromised in any way by the hair anxieties of a God I don’t necessarily believe exists, right. But it looked like there was going to be a three-way argument. Everyone was looking at each other. And then I thought, ‘I can’t stay here to debate this,’ I thought. ‘I can’t stay here. ’Cause if we ever are going to decide how exactly, if at all, God wants hair to be concealed, that’s not going to happen at Stamford Hill Weight Watchers. It’s Stamford Hill Weight Watchers, not Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle.’ Although I would go to that.
*
*
Everything here happened exactly as described, except that I didn’t say, ‘No, I’m not going out, and I don’t know what you’re worried about, love, you’re not even that fat,’ to the Muslim woman. I just looked confused. When I did this routine on Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle for BBC2, they made me change the location of the Weight Watchers to Finsbury Park, to avoid the possibility that I had libelled anyone.
And I tell you what, it’s really nice being back in a kind of cosmopolitan city like Glasgow, where you can say the phrase, er, ‘Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and
Religious
Hair Taboo Discussion Circle’ and you people
realise
that that is a joke, there’s no such thing. Because what I’ve found is, in the north of England, right, in Carlisle or Derby or somewhere, when I say ‘Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle’, there’s no laugh, ’cause all the north of England people are going, ‘Well, they would have that in that London – the kind of stupid thing that they would have there.’ And what I say to people in the north of England is not every town has to have a cake named after it, yeah. And it’s not strictly true, they haven’t all got cakes named after them, right, but enough of them have, if you say that to a north of England person, they go, ‘Oh, Bakewell, Eccles …’ and then they get confused. So … ‘Yorkshire pudding, is that …?’
*
*
I found that this routine worked better in cities. Perhaps in more rural areas of the UK, people genuinely believe their pretentious urban counterparts might actually be attending, in the interests of multiculturalism, a ‘Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle’.
So, anyway, I went out in the corridor. And the young Muslim woman had already asked the old Polish man to go out in the corridor, and he was out in the corridor, and he looked at me and he made this kind of angry face, right.
*
And I looked away, ’cause I was worried he was going to say something like ‘fucking Muslims’ or something, yeah, and I looked away. ’Cause I didn’t want to have to agree with something racist out of politeness. ’Cause I can do that whenever I go home at Christmas. I say quilts, but they’re flags really. Banners.
*
The Polish man’s face wasn’t really angry. He just looked more like he was wryly amused but wasn’t sure if he even ought to communicate this with me. I made him into a worse figure than he was
to make this story work. When I did this routine on Radio 4’s
Political
Animal, I asked them to check it at length with lawyers before wasting everyone’s time and getting me to record it and then having to cut it all out, as I had just had to cut a load of stuff that I wrote for Kevin Eldon’s Radio 4 series Poet’s Tree on the grounds of
blasphemy
, which wasn’t even a crime any more by that stage. (I would like to do more BBC radio comedy, but the bullshit factor of the process massively outweighs the pleasure of doing it.) The lawyers of Political Animal’s production company said the routine was fine, I could even set it in Stamford Hill, and I recorded it for the show in front of a live audience. Then, after recording, it was decided by Radio 4 that the Polish man might sue. Was the man Polish? I wasn’t sure. Would it be possible to cut the word ‘Polish’ in the edit? No, because it was important that the story was set in a multicultural area and that the man was also non-indigenous, to play up to the cross-cultural tensions, and to not make him the usual straw man of the supposedly racist white working-class male. Could the man’s nationality be changed to some other Eastern European country? Yes, but as I didn’t know if the man was really Polish, as I just
identified
him as having an Eastern European accent and assumed he was Polish, there was every chance, if we changed him to
Hungarian
or Czech, that we would be changing him from something he wasn’t into something he was and thereby worsening the problem. Despite this, it was decided that this was the best course of action and I went in and overdubbed a new Eastern European
nationality
onto the now not Polish man. Honestly, it’s political correctness gone mad. Or, as Simon Donald from Viz put it so brilliantly, ‘It’s political correctness gone mad gone mad’.
So … And then I was out in the corridor, and I was annoyed initially ’cause I thought, ‘I’ve gone out, I’ve left
the Weight Watchers now, and I’m going to lose my nerve and I’m not going to go back in, and I’m going to get fatter and fatter.’ But then I thought, ‘You know what, it doesn’t matter, right, it’s ten, fifteen minutes out of my day, I can rejoin the queue.’ And if I was a young Muslim in Britain today, maybe I’d feel quite put upon and maybe these kind of cultural signifiers would take on an extra importance – it doesn’t matter. Then I thought, ‘You know what, it doesn’t matter, it’s ten, fifteen minutes out of my day, I can rejoin the queue.’ And if I was in a queue for something and there was someone behind me who was, like, blind or on crutches or mentally handicapped or something, I would let them go ahead of me. And then I thought, ‘That’s a bit weird, isn’t it, ’cause I’ve just equated having a religious belief with being mentally handicapped.’ Which obviously isn’t appropriate. Even though it is correct.
And then I got annoyed, right, and I thought … I got annoyed, I thought, ‘I’m going to go back in, I’m going to go to her, “You, a Muslim, may be a contributing factor in my ongoing weight gain. Driving me out, you know … And if you must wear your hijab to Weight Watchers, then what I suggest is that you take it off at home and weigh it separately before you come out, and then deduct its weight from your Weight Watchers total, giving you your correct weight, using maths, which I understand your people claim to have invented.”’ Yeah? But I didn’t say that, right, I just went back in and er, you know, and I had, um … gained some weight.
*
*
Although I intended this bit to be absurd and silly, and I don’t think any right-thinking fat person would be that bothered about having to leave Weight Watchers for a moment while a Muslim was weighed – I certainly didn’t mind – the joke does have a serious resonance. As I write, Ed Balls is trying to standardise sex education across the school system to minimise teenage pregnancy, STDs and the bullying of homosexuals, but is, predictably, encountering
religious
resistance from faith schools, some of which believe their
theistic
scruples set them above the duty to help implicate generally applicable, across the board, ethical values in sex education. What is the politically correct response to this?
Now, one hesitates in the current climate to make a joke onstage about the Muslims, right, not for fear of religious reprisals, right – when’s that ever hurt anyone?
*
– but because of a slightly more slippery anxiety, which is, like, basically, when you do, like, stand-up in a small room, it’s like, ‘We’re all friends, hooray, and we can make a joke.’ But you don’t really know, you don’t really know how a joke’s received, and it could be that it’s laughed at
enthusiastically
in a way that you don’t understand, particularly out there, you don’t know who’s watching on television. I mean, if it’s on telly on Paramount, probably someone horrible, an idiot, um … The kind of person who’s awake at five in the morning, who knows what, it could be
anyone
laughing at this, you don’t know, awful people. And um … So … um …
†
*
This line was getting laughs for two reasons: (1) because I was known by some of the room to have had work closed down by
religious
people; and (2) because it is an understatement and people are being threatened all the time by the religious.
†
As the missing presumed dead comedian Jason Freeman said as the punchline to a joke I’ve already quoted but long forgotten the set-up for, ‘context is not a myth’. It’s worth saying again. In the early nineties, Frank Skinner was able to break various taboos of gender-and sexuality-based political correctness, back when
standup
really was still in the shadows of a polytechnic-lecturer liberal orthodoxy, by using his easy charm and casually confidential air to make everyone in the room feel they were amongst friends, and that anything that was said was really just a joke.