Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
How I Escaped My Certain Fate (8 page)
And then I went back into the bar. By now the
situation
was even worse, even more tense. The room had kind of split along racial, religious lines. There was a
horrible
tension in the room.
*
And then suddenly Co-lin –
Colin
– Powell went on the television – we invented those names, his name’s not … he’s not Co-lin the Barbarian, his name’s Colin, he should be running a photocopier repair workshop – Colin Powell went on television on the 9th of November, Spanish bar, and he said, ‘We are gonna launch a crusade against them folks what done this.’
†
And being in a largely Muslim town, full of murals of crusaders
cutting
the heads off Muslims, you realise what an
inappropriate
word ‘crusade’ was to use on the 9th of November. It went down really badly. And as a, a world statesman, Colin Powell should be aware of how words change their
meaning
, culturally. Saying ‘crusade’ on the 9th of November, it’s a bit like if I were to get a job as a maths teacher, teaching maths in a German town somewhere near Belsen. And I was to say to the kids, ‘I’m going to set you a maths
problem
. I want you to work through it, and on the last page, fill in your final solution.’
‡
You know, it would be received badly. And as a world leader, Colin Powell should be aware of these kinds of cultural shifts in language. But he said ‘crusade’ and it went down really badly with everyone in the room, so there was an even worse atmosphere than before.
*
Sometimes, if the atmosphere at the gig was bad enough by this point, I was able to play a game in the performance of this section whereby I would gesture around the emotional topography of the uncomfortable room I was in to stand in for the emotional
topography
of the uncomfortable room I was describing.
†
Co-lin Powell did not say this on 9/11. He never really said it, but he did use the word ‘crusade’ a couple of days later. I lied for comic effect. But who is the real criminal? Is it the humble stand-up
comedian
, slightly changing what someone said a bit for comic effect? Or is it the American politician, laughing and touching himself inappropriately while he rains death and destruction on the heads of millions of innocents? (Answer: it is the American politician. He is the real criminal.)
‡
When I performed this show in Solihull, where I grew up, a bloke I was at school with, who was now an Alpha Course born-again Christian, tried to engage me in a conversation about the rights and wrongs of the supposedly blasphemous Jerry Springer: The Opera that I had worked on. He suggested that this line, for example, was anti-Semitic and that Jews would be offended by it, though he wasn’t personally. It’s so obviously not the point of the line at all, to me, but I mention this only as an example of the fact that you can’t always worry too much about what people think, as some people are just beyond help.
And then the Arab guy that I’d had my kind of moment of epiphany, of kind of human trust with in the toilets, he was standing just in front of me. And he looked across at me with these eyes full of hope, as if to go, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I couldn’t just do another fart at will. You know, I’m not a nineteenth-century French music-hall entertainer. I’m the opposite of that. In four main ways … there isn’t time to go into now. But … But someone went, ‘Aw,’ disappointed there. If you seek me out afterwards, I’ll clarify the exact position.
*
*
I never did decide what the four main ways I differed from Le Pétomane were, and this is another example of me making spaces in the material to amuse myself. Perhaps I hoped I would be called upon to explain this unsatisfactory sentence at some point. Or maybe, in my eternal love–hate relationship with the very idea of being a stand-up, I did feel that all I was at the time was a turn, a turn farting gags out towards bemused onlookers, who craved the sweeter smells of roses and lavender.
But I knew I had to do something, so … It was my moment. So what I did was, I just kind of lifted my leg up like that. And I sort of acted it out. I went, ‘Ugh, fuck, smell, ugh, horrible!’ And he laughed. And the guys he was with laughed. Gradually the laughter spread all around the room. There was a critic from the
Independent
at the back not laughing. But he didn’t really get what I was doing, you know. It was a kind of mixture of the sacred and the
profane
, it just went over his head.
*
*
I am thinking specifically of Julian Hall of the Independent here, who always gives me three stars but comes back to my shows every year out of the goodness of his heart to try and encourage me
further
in my sadly misguided endeavours, like a dog returning to a pile of old shit and sniffing it again to see if it has suddenly turned into ice cream.
But eventually everyone in the room was laughing. And I realised that with that one inane, puerile, scatological
gesture
I had achieved more for world peace than any
politician
had all day. ’Cause farts are funny, Glasgow, right? That is the international baseline of all humour, farts, right. And you can be as sophisticated as you like, Glasgow, but at the end of the day you have to admit farts are funny. And you go, ‘No, we don’t actually agree with you, Stew. I saw a hilarious, satirical cartoon in the
New Statesman
at the weekend, satirising EU farming policies, it was
hilarious
.’ Was it? Was it as funny as a fart? No, it wasn’t.
‘But I saw Ian Hislop on television at the weekend, Stew, satirising the government, with his voice going up at the start of the sentence and going down at the end. It was hilarious.’ Was it? Was it as funny as some gas that smells of shit coming out of an arse? No, it wasn’t. And nothing Ian Hislop ever says or does or secretly imagines will be as funny as that.
*
*
I chose Ian Hislop here because he seems like an utterly
blameless
figure with whom no sensible person could take issue, which seemed to make the attack on him funnier, painting me as a ‘demented, inexplicably bitter man’, which I am, as you will see. It’s probably worth pointing out that during my short-lived and misguided attempt to appear on TV comedy panel shows, in late 2006, Hislop was easily the most helpful and supportive person I encountered.
And I ran this show in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, right, in August and, um, every year in Edinburgh they have a prize for comedy, right, organised by Perrier – the Perrier Awards. Perrier of course owned by Nestlé, Nestlé top of the World Health Organisation list of unethical companies. It suggested that their milk-marketing policies contribute to the death of 1.5 million children every year. So every time you laugh at a Perrier-nominated act, a little baby dies. Bear that in mind.
*
*
When this show was due to be issued on DVD in 2005, the legal department of the production wing of my old management, who filmed it, initially said it would not be possible to describe Nestlé in these terms. I told them to look into it. And, after the briefest bit of research, they decided it would be fine. Make of this what you will. By the following year, Perrier was no longer the sponsor of Nica Burns’s Edinburgh comedy award. It is entirely plausible that Perrier no longer felt the increasingly coarse and volatile world of once ‘alternative’ comedy sat well with the sophisticated nature of their brand, but romantics like to imagine the sustained
anti-Perrier
campaign by Baby Milk Action and the Tapwater Awards team may have helped sway their bloody hand, as every story on the Perrier Comedy Awards ceremony was always accompanied by information about the protests. Delightfully, Jason
Trachtenberg
, of the lo-fi, outsider art, comedy singing trio The
Trachtenberg
Family Slideshow Players, was booked as the entertainment at the 2005 Perrier Awards party and, having learned of their parent company’s disgraceful and unethical record, used his platform to improvise lyrics about Nestlé’s well-known and proven
complicity
in the deaths of millions of children. Typically, the TV-industry weekenders present were too pissed to notice, and continued
looking
for the future of comedy in the bottom of their champagne glasses, I expect. I don’t know. They don’t invite me. And if they did, I wouldn’t go. So there!
And every year in Edinburgh, they always give that award to comedy to a human being speaking about some stuff. But if they had any integrity, they would give the
Perrier
Award to the genuinely funniest thing that’s going to happen in Edinburgh all August, which is just going to be an old Scottish tramp doing a fart in a wood. But,
Glasgow
, if a tramp farts in a forest and no one hears it, is it still funny? Yes, it is. ’Cause it’s some shit that smells of shit coming out of an arse. And if the Perrier had any
integrity
, which it doesn’t, it would sign up that fart for its own twelve-part Channel 4 comedy series deal.
Some laughs, some doubt in the room. People going, ‘We’re kind of with you theoretically. We understand this is some kind of satire of something. But how would that actually work, Stew? An invisible cloud of shit-smelling gas with its own Channel 4 series?’ I don’t know, Glasgow, I don’t know. But what I say to you is, could an invisible cloud of shit-smelling gas with its own Channel 4 series be any less funny than
The Friday Night Project?
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*
Writing these notes six years on, it seems bizarre to single out The Friday Night Project for abuse, as the bar for bad comedy has been lowered so far by the broadcasting on BBC3 of Horne and Corden that The Friday Night Project now seems like a product of a longgone Age of Enlightenment by comparison. What a different world we live in, here in the 2010s! I flew up in the air to throw my copy of Lesbian Vampire Killers into a skip wearing my own personal jet pack!
So the day after the 9th of November – which is the 9th of December, nine-one-two.
*
Do the math … s … I flew back from Spain to Heathrow Airport. I got a
minicab
from Heathrow Airport to Stoke Newington, Hackney, north-east London, where I live.
†
And on the way, I had to go past the Finsbury Park mosque, which you’ll know if you read the news is the kind of hotbed of Muslim
radicalism
in Britain, run by Abu Hamza until recently. That’s the guy who has an eye patch and hooks for hands. An eye patch and hooks for hands. That’s not a good look for a religious leader. It’s a good look maybe if you’re
considering
auditioning for extra work in the sequel to
Pirates of the
Caribbean
. But it’s not a good look for a religious leader. The Archbishop of Canterbury does not have an eye patch and hooks for his hands. He has a big festive Christmas beard in which robins might nest. And that helps us to take his pronouncements on the ethics of the family and
modern
society more sympathetically than we would if he had hooks for his hands. We’d be suspicious.
‡
*
By this point, I had entirely lost the audience at the Aspen Comedy Festival, culturally, politically and, most crucially, mathematically.
†
Stoke Newington is a great place to live for a comedian, if for no other reason than it’s a funny-sounding address. I love saying it onstage, I like setting stories there and I love the resonances that go with the name, from Alexei Sayle’s classic ‘What’s on in Stoke
Newington
?’ routine that all comics of my generation remember fondly from their childhoods, to the air of shabby would-be bohemianism that hangs around the area today. I was unfavourably described by a reviewer in 2009 as ‘Britain’s most middle-class comic’, but I’m not. That is Michael McIntyre. I am the most Stoke Newington comic there is, with all that that suggests.
‡
I would try and improvise the Abu Hamza stuff differently every night, aware subconsciously, I suppose, that I was sort of taking on the persona of a proper normal stand-up comedian, riffing around the kind of news personality whose unusual physical appearance always makes him a regular occurrence in panel-show comics’ bits, irrespective of his actual newsworthiness. I even went on to satirise this kind of Hamza riff in 2007’s 41st Best Stand-Up Ever show. I don’t remember doing stuff about the Archbishop of Canterbury and his beard other than in this performance, but maybe the perceptible shift into a genuine conversational, improvisational idiom is what prompts the heckler to feel they can contribute, both
helpfully
and amusingly, leading to an off-the-cuff splurge about the deceitful opportunities of the editing suite that seems really neat on the finished DVD recorded at this performance.
Live comedy DVDs rarely address the fact that the viewer at home’s experience is clearly different to that of the audience on the night. I always try to crank something in, and made it a central plank in my approach to considering the shots and the directorial approach to my 2009 TV series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.