Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
How I Escaped My Certain Fate (43 page)
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The chiselling here, where I tapped the mic stand with the mic, went on at some length, sometimes uninterrupted for minutes at a time, with me varying the rhythm and intensity of the
tapping
. This doesn’t work on the page, and ideally, my ambition is to get to the point where none of my stand-up works on the page. I don’t think stand-up should really work on the page, so the very existence of this book is an indication of my ultimate failure as a comedian. The text of a stand-up set should be so dependent on performance and tone that it can’t really work on the page,
otherwise
it’s just funny writing. You don’t have to have spent too long thinking about stand-up to realise that even though critics and TV commissioners always talk about our art form in terms of its content, it is the rhythm, pitch, tone and pace of what we do – the non-verbal cues – that are arguably more important, if less easy to identify and define. (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant brilliant side-stepped the inability of commissioners to interpret naturalistically nuanced scripts by submitting a film of The Office, not a script.) A good joke is rhythmical and physical. You’re either slapped by the surprise of the punchline in a zingy one-liner, or tickled slowly into submission by the endless undulations of a shaggy-dog story.
I’m fascinated by issues of pitch and tone and pace and rhythm in stand-up, and had always wanted to do something that
eliminated
words and replaced them with abstract sounds, to see if you could tune an audience into noises alone and give them a rhythm, tone, pitch and pace which were funny. I wrote a long poem about this notion for a book of writing by comedians edited by the late Malcolm Hardee (see Appendix VII). This Richard Littlejohn bit, featuring as it did an incident involving chiselling with metal upon rock as a name is carved out, was the perfect meeting of form and content.
I can honestly say I was rarely happier in any show I’ve ever done than when I was just standing here for minutes on end,
tapping
the microphone on the microphone stand, scraping it round the housings and the bolts, waiting and waiting, changing the rhythm, trying to find the off-beats, letting the moment settle, and then starting again. Asked how long you could show a couple
kissing
in a bed, Alfred Hitchcock said, ‘As long as you like as long as there’s a bomb under it.’ To quote the Mod hairdresser opera investor, that’s the jeopardy. This routine, the audience knows, is a joke, so somewhere, after all the scraping and clinking, they assume there’s going to be a punchline, and so the tension was, pretty much always, held.
I think this section, Littlejohn’s chiselling at the grave, was the furthest I ever managed to get away from stand-up, whilst still remaining recognisably a stand-up, and I’d love to do something like it again, but the story suggested a sound, and I’d not feel
comfortable
reverse-engineering the same effect a second time, by finding a sound and then looking for a story that fit. I wish I could work my way back, in live shows, to this level of abstraction, but doing the TV series in 2009 necessitated, to some degree, a
consolidation
of my most accessible approaches, rather than a leap further into the dark, and for the time being, I’ve lost the thread and my nerve.
At the end of the chiselling, after a use of the word ‘cunt’ that I am sure even Frank Skinner would accept as necessary, there’d be a big laugh and then a long dead silence which I could flip over as soon as I started the next bit, to make it clear we were on the home straight, where everything ties together.
So the last time I was at home, my mum said to me, ‘Why can’t you work the cruises like Tom O’Connor?’
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And then the phone rang and it was Bridget Nicholls from Pestival, and she said to me, ‘I hope you don’t mind me ringing up, but I’m just checking that you’re still all right for Pestival at the weekend.’
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And I said, ‘I’m glad you’ve called, Bridget, ’cause I’ve no intention whatsoever of coming at all.’ And she said, ‘Why? Why?’ And I said, ‘Well, I was going to film it for this thing but they’ve cancelled it, so it’s a waste of time for me. I haven’t written any aphid stuff, it’s … it doesn’t sound very … it sounds stupid anyway, and I’m not coming.’ And she said, ‘But I thought you said you loved insects.’ I said, ‘I don’t love insects. At best, I’m ambivalent about them.
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And there are many that I actively dislike. Yeah? Those ladybirds, those new French ladybirds, they stain fabrics, yeah?’
§
And she said, ‘Well, what am I going to tell the potato peach aphid study group, they’re excited?’ I said, ‘I don’t care. I don’t care what you tell them, ’cause I’m not coming to your stupid thing.’ And then, from the other end of the phone, I heard this sound:
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You could sense the people’s relief as I returned to this familiar motif. Their inherent sense of structure in the show, the reason you can’t just gut it for five-or ten-or twenty-minute telly spots, tells them it’s nearly all over. When I had to give chapter titles to the show for its DVD release, I called the closing section of the show ‘Eight Callbacks’. A callback, seen in its most evolved form in the stand-up routines of TV’s floppy-collared loon™ Harry Hill, is when the mere reincorporation of an idea from earlier in the set can seem funny in and of itself, if its re-emergence happens at a surprising or satisfying enough point. For the final section of 41st Best I aimed to create a domino effect of callbacks, weaving in as many of the earlier strands of material as possible, like the design of some enormous quilt cover. I worked out that there are eight identifiable callbacks here, but I could be wrong, and I can’t remember now exactly what I thought they were.
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This phone call never happened in reality.
‡
I have used the word ‘ambivalent’ many times since in this context onstage, and it has become a repetitive cliché of my work.
§
I would change this bit to a different insect every night in the interests of fighting off my own boredom.
[
whispering to female audience member
] Will you just cry into here?
[
Female audience member crying.
]
Oh dear. Well. I said, ‘Can you just cry into here?’ I’ve done seventy other dates of this tour where a person knows the difference between giggling and crying. And this is the one that’s being filmed. Here in Glasgow, the city where all emotions are considered to be the same. ‘I went out tonight, I had a feeling.’ ‘Were you happy or sad?’ ‘I don’t care, a feeling is enough for me.’ Imagine it was someone going [
crying
].
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Trying to get a woman in the audience to supply the crying was an opportunity to do something fun to leaven the narrative-heavy course of this section of the show. And usually something
unexpected
would happen.
Anyway, so it was that, three days later, I found myself onstage at Pestival, dressed as an insect, in a now financially unjustifiably expensive insect costume, trying to think of something funny about aphids to say to three hundred of the world’s leading entomologists. And I, er …
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This paragraph ends with a classic example of Ó Briain’s
Truncated
Appendage, as you can see, while I give the crowd a second to take in the full enormity of my impossible situation. I actually performed at Pestival in my normal clothes, and not those of an insect. A transcript of the event as recorded, mushed in with the best bits of my notes, is available here in Appendix VI. It includes a Robert the Bruce joke reworked from a routine I wrote in about 1992, which I think may also have appeared, in some form, in a TV show I did with Richard Herring. The entomologists liked my set but they didn’t exactly go nuts.
Now I realised I’d missed the point. Pestival was a really
good thing, actually, and I should just have done it with good grace, but it was too late and I was out there. I was looking at all these three hundred entomologists, I had nothing to say, a minute passed, nothing. Another minute, dry throat, nothing to say. And then I thought to myself, ‘What would Tom O’Connor do?’
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The smarter punters know what Tom O’Connor would do. They’ve already worked it out, and are enjoying the inevitability of what is coming up.
So I said to a bloke in the front row, ‘What do you do for a living?’ He said, ‘I’m an entomologist.’ I said, ‘Are you a sardine?’ He said, ‘No, no.’ I said to a woman next to him, ‘What do you do for a living?’ She said, ‘I’m an entomologist.’ I said, ‘Are you a sar …?’ ‘No.’ And then I said to a bloke in the middle, ‘What do you do for a living?’ He said, ‘I’m an entomologist. We’re all entomologists. This is a conference of entomologists.’ And I realised that Tom O’Connor had made it look easy. Yeah?
And I asked around other comics, had anyone I know seen him in his seventies heyday, before all the game shows. And it turned out Johnny Vegas told me he’d seen Tom O’Connor in a Catholic men’s club in Liverpool in 1978, and that he was brilliant, and he should have been the new Billy Connolly, and he had all these fantastic routines about growing up and working-class life and kids and families and weddings and funerals, and it always went down brilliantly.
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But remember, Glasgow, this was in Liverpool, where cloying mawkish nostalgia is regarded as the highest form of entertainment.
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And … Rather than fighting.
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It turned out I had remembered this wrongly. Johnny’s relatives had seen Tom O’Connor in the clubs, but Johnny only became familiar with O’Connor’s oeuvre after he found loads of Tom O’Connor audio tapes abandoned in the dirt whilst playing on a
spot of waste ground in St Helen’s where burglars dumped stuff they couldn’t sell. I assume this happened when Johnny was a child, but knowing him, it is possible that it was a recent occurrence.
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I am sure I copped the essence of this idea from the scene in Irving Welsh’s novel Filth, in which Detective Sergeant Bruce taunts some Liverpudlians about all the tragedies that befall their city, whilst on holiday in Amsterdam, saying that Liverpudlians love misery.
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This is a dig at Glasgow, but doubtless equally stereotypical comments were available in my vast store of slander for other towns.
And … And then I thought about what my mum had said, you know. And she was right: I had nothing to show for my career. But Tom O’Connor knows that when he dies, somewhere in a lock-up garage in Liverpool there’s literally hundreds of thousands of golf umbrellas with a picture of his face on them. And when this world finally floods, and our civilisation is buried under thousands of feet of water, alien archaeologists will find those Tom O’Connor’s face umbrellas, and they will assume that Tom O’Connor was a significant figure, perhaps a god. Maybe responsible for rainfall, whom we failed to appease.
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Yeah? Rather than just a man, a man who spent his twilight years travelling the high seas, endlessly repeating the phrase ‘Are you a sardine?’ in the hope that it might at last be appropriate.
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I was so pleased when people laughed at this idea, which they rarely did. I kept it in for me, really.
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I think there are elements of Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in this idea, a poem which I first learned about by association, as a child listening to my Monty Python Live at Drury Lane record, specifically the sketch in which John Cleese is a tormented theatre ice-cream seller, cursed to wander the world with an albatross in his ice-cream tray, which no one is interested in buying. ‘I haven’t got any ice creams. I’ve only got this fucking albatross.’ ‘Well, what flavour is it?’ ‘I don’t know. It’s fucking sea-bird flavour.’ I loved this sketch as a child and thought the whole idea of it was brilliant, but it was only when studying Coleridge at Oxford University that I realised its roots lay in his Ancient Mariner story, wherein a cursed seaman is forced to wander the world with the body of a dead
albatross
, explaining his decision to slay it. Very often, timid TV and radio comedy execs slash supposedly highbrow references from scripts on the grounds that people won’t get them. But if the piece is properly written, it shouldn’t matter whether people ‘get them’ or not. I loved John Cleese’s albatross seller, on its own terms, and the fact that, years later, I discovered its debt to Coleridge just made it seem funnier.
And I realised I’d underestimated my mother, and
obviously
whenever she goes on at me about Tom O’Connor she’s not trying to wind me up, she’s just trying to find some common ground.
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And about a year ago, I was in a branch of WHSmiths and I looked up and at eye-level I saw a magazine I’d never noticed before, called
British Quilt-Making Monthly,
and there was a photograph of one of my mum’s quilts on the front, and it turned out she’s the 41st best quilt-maker. In Worcester.
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