How I Escaped My Certain Fate (9 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
AUDIENCE MEMBER
: Only one hook!
No, a woman there saying it’s only one hook. I think that it’s hooks for hands, I think he’s got two. But of course
luckily
the element of doubt’s been introduced here. Umm … I’m able to go away and check that. Er, if it’s factually inaccurate, I can remove it from this video … [
male audience member heckles unintelligibly
] … as I can everything you’ve said.
So it’ll just look like a sixty-minute stream of
uninterrupted
success. Although, ironically, I may consider leaving this part in to give the illusion of it being a genuine event. What do you think of that, viewers at home? This is
simultaneously
dishonest, and yet also satisfying.
But Abu Hamza of course, he’s in Belmarsh at the moment. He’s in the process of being deported to America, where he is guaranteed a fair trial. Irony there. One of the many comic tools we’ll be using tonight.
*
*
Again, this never worked in America, where the average person’s
perception of the situation is entirely different.
So. So I was driving past the Finsbury Park mosque on the, er, 9th of December, the day after the 9th of
November
, and it was all kicking off outside. There’s Muslim
demonstrators
on one side of the street complaining about the reprisals they’ve suffered, police in the middle trying to keep order. And on the other side of the Seven Sisters Road, British National Party members standing near the Arsenal shop, their spiritual home. And they’re
shouting
out, ‘SEND THEM BACK! SEND THE MUSLIMS BACK TO WHERE THEY CAME FROM! BRADFORD, WOOD GREEN, LEEDS, LIVERPOOL, MANCHESTER, BIRMINGHAM AND OTHER BRITISH INDUSTRIAL CITIES WHICH REQUIRED CHEAP LABOUR IN THE NINETEEN-SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES.’
And it looked, Glasgow, like there was going to be a
full-scale
religious race riot. And so I said to the minicab driver, ‘Stop. Let me out. I can help here.’
*
*
Looking at this years later, I suspect this routine has its genesis in two things: (1) Seeing this demonstration outside the
Finsbury
Park mosque, which is about a ten-minute walk from me; and (2) a Simon Munnery routine where, in the character of the naive anarcho-punk Alan Parker Urban Warrior, he tries to quell a sectarian squabble in Glasgow by tying together the scarves of Rangers and Celtic supporters against their will, which ends with them all beating him up, as he explains triumphantly, ‘together’. I’ve never consciously stolen any of Simon’s material, but his shadow hangs heavily over everything I do. I bought two lines off him for my 2009 TV show, and I consider him one of the all-time greats, the Peter Cook of our generation, without whose influence the entire comedy landscape would be entirely different, even if he is far from a household name. Indeed, even in his own household his name is barely known, as Simon’s wife and his three beautiful little girls are in the habit of referring to him simply as ‘Mr Poo Poo Head’.
And I got out the minicab. I pushed through the British National Party blokes. I pushed through the police line. I pushed through the Muslim demonstrators. I ran into the mosque, some guy tried to get me to take my shoes off, I don’t know what that was about, there wasn’t time, I
carried
on through. It was a nice, hospitable gesture, but it was ill-timed. And I ran up the prayer tower to the
minaret
, where the call to prayer is broadcast out to the
faithful
of North London, and I snatched the little microphone out of the stand there, and I pulled down my underpants and I shoved it up my anus. And with a concerted effort of mental and physical willpower, I farted into it. But on that occasion, it didn’t really help.
In fact, some eyewitnesses to the ensuing carnage were subsequently to suggest that it may have made the situation worse. And my heartfelt message of peace and goodwill to all men was misunderstood. Although I take some comfort in the fact that a similar thing often
happened
to Jesus. I’m not saying I am Jesus. That’s for you to think about at home. But if I was Him, this is the kind of place I would come, isn’t it? A simple, humble place. Not the Glasgow Empire, I’d come here. But I’m not saying I am Jesus. Not in the current climate. Erm …
*
*
The Irish comedian Ian Macpherson, mentioned earlier, has written a book, The Autobiography of a Genius. I have not read it, but I am told it begins with the line ‘It is not for me to draw
parallels
between my own life and that of Christ,’ a set-up similar to one both Richard Herring and I imagined independently of each other, which we may have used in the double act at some point.
But I think there’s a kind of European smugness where we look at America’s hysterical overreaction to the events of the 9th of November and we go, ‘Thanks for that,
America
, thanks. You’ve set us off on a course of the
destruction
of world civilisation as we know it. Thanks for that. Thanks.’ But you mustn’t hate the Americans, right?
America
is currently the most hated country in the world.
Americans
don’t know that. They don’t read, or watch news. If they did, they would be unhappy. Osama bin Laden flew planes into the World Trade Center, it was a waste of time. If he’d really wanted to hit America hard, where it hurts, he should have carpet-bombed the country with a weapon that Americans would never be able to understand – world geography examination papers. Shops which don’t have the word ‘barn’ in their name. And the metaphysical
concept
of shame.
*
*
I probably wouldn’t write or perform something like this now. It seems glib, stereotypical, cheap and simplistic. It was funny at the time, though. Also, our failure to act entirely honourably in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside the USA means that, to the rest of the world, we’re both the bad guys. You’d have to address that now. Today, this approach to the topic would be dishonest, ignoring the elephant in the room. How different the world is in the futuristic days of the 2010s! I’m going to fly alongside the funeral cortège of British servicemen’s bodies passing through the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett on my own personal hover-saucer!
But you mustn’t hate the Americans. Don’t hate them, Glasgow. Americans live in a kind of state of ignorant, prelapsarian bliss. They don’t know what’s going on.
*
And because of that, it can be very relaxing to go to America and watch them. If you go to America and look at
Americans
in their natural habitat – er, the theme park, the shopping mall, the race riot, the high-school massacre – and you watch them walking around, looking at colours and shapes … and lights … and words … sometimes imagining what the words might mean … It’s very relaxing, Glasgow. It’s like watching carp in a pond in a stately home, er, their mouths opening and closing. It’s charming.
†
*
As a rule I try to avoid using long and complicated words that not everyone understands, as it seems like something Russell Brand would do to try and make Sun readers think he was an intellectual. But ‘prelapsarian’ is the perfect word to use here.
†
There are echoes here of how I would describe Richard Herring’s home town of Cheddar in the routines we co-wrote for our Lee and Herring double act in the mid-nineties about him being a bumpkin peasant, so some credit must go to him here, as it must for much of what I have done since meeting him in 1986. When we first arrived in London, we shared a flat in Acton, and I was complaining
bitterly
about some aspect of modern life which irked me. Rich,
finding
my position untenable and unintentionally amusing, said I should try expressing this point of view onstage, thus helping me to realise clearly, I think for the first time, who my ‘clown’ was: an outsider, inexplicably annoyed about things that don’t really bother most people.
On the whole, the double act necessarily involved more
compromises
than my solo work, but you can’t help but carry parts of a partnership like that with you, and sometimes, I have noticed, in the absence of a second voice to argue with live onstage I am given to fabricating a second one of my own – ‘Oh, Stew!’ etc. – which sounds uncannily like Richard Herring.
But you mustn’t hate the Americans. They’re not a naturally curious people. Most Americans do not own passports. They’re not a naturally curious people. If you were to lock an American for sixty years in an empty underground bunker which contained nothing but a woolly tea cosy, the American would not even be curious enough to be tempted to see if the tea cosy would make a serviceable hat.
*
They’re far more likely to arrest the tea cosy, intern it illegally in Guantanamo Bay, and then repeatedly anally rape it until such time that it admits that it was actually a member of an al-Qaeda training cell. Even though at the time of the alleged offence the tea cosy was actually working as a shop assistant in a branch of Currys in Wolverhampton.
†
*
This line about the Americans’ lack of curiosity was adapted from an old routine from the mid-nineties about babies and their lack of curiosity, which in turn was based on something my friend Giles Clarke said at school, describing a mutual acquaintance as ‘the sort of person who, if they were locked in a room with a tea cosy, wouldn’t even be tempted to try it on’. Years later, I rejigged, or stole, Giles’s witticism for my set, though even at the time I remember it seeming an uncommonly well-rounded bon mot in the mouth of a thirteen-year-old fantasy war games fan.
†
One of the British inmates at Guantanamo Bay had been
working
in a branch of Currys in Tipton at the time he was supposed to have been training with al-Qaeda. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t a sympathiser, but I thought it was a funny juxtaposition. Obviously this bit died in Aspen, as it often did in the UK. I was quite happy for it to die, as it opened up enormous possibilities for
improvising
around its failure, as happens in the subsequent section. I really enjoy this aspect of stand-up – how failure presents opportunities to create subsequent victories – and increasingly I build
pseudo-failure
into the shows to give myself and the audience the thrill of a struggle. In the nineties, I was often criticised for losing the room and then fighting for ages to win it back, when in fact that was what I had been trying to do all along. It seemed that what I imagined were my strengths were perceived as weaknesses, that my successes were viewed as failures, and that my positive choices were viewed as accidental errors. At least these days most critics realise I am doing this deliberately
.
Some laughs there, other people are a bit confused. ‘What’s he talking about?’ Right? OK, well, again, that’s a kind of bit of satire of the fact that some of the British citizens held in Guantanamo Bay were tortured into
saying
that they’d been in al-Qaeda camps, even though at the time they were supposed to be there, they were actually working as shop assistants in a branch of Currys in
Wolverhampton
. Other people I sense are going, ‘Yeah, we know about that. That’s not what’s confusing us. What’s
confusing
us here in Glasgow is the idea of a tea cosy working as a shop assistant in a branch of Currys. How could that
possibly
work?’ And again, Glasgow, I say to you, I don’t know, I don’t know how that would work. But what I say to you is, could a tea cosy working as a shop assistant in a branch of Currys actually be any less effective than some of the people currently employed there?
*
*
Again, I probably wouldn’t make a joke about stupid shop
assistants
today. Not because it’s not necessarily true, but because it’s the kind of joke you see on all those production-company landfill TV comedy sketch shows on BBC2, BBC3, Channel 4 and ITV3, in which privileged middle-class actor-comedians do impressions of what they imagine the working classes are like.
‘Hello. I don’t know if you can help me. I’m interested in buying one of those iPods.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I won’t be able to help you, on account of the fact that I am fashioned entirely from colourful wool.
*
Perhaps you’d like to ask one of my colleagues – the cardigan, the mitten, the balaclava helmet.’
*
‘Wool’ is a brilliant, all-purpose funny word. Few things are not made funnier if one imagines them being made out of, or coated in, wool. I believe it was the feckless Australian comedian Greg Fleet who drip-fed the idea that the word ‘wool’ is funny into the international comic subconsciousness from his smegma-smeared seaside lair in St Kilda, at some point in the mid-nineties. Greg is responsible for much of the whole tone of contemporary stand-up in Australia, but is unable or unwilling to take any real advantage of his statesman status. If he were given a Lifetime Achievement Award, he’d only take it to Cash Converters anyway. The rurally named musical comedian Boothby Graffoe has a tattoo of Greg’s name on his leg, as a tribute to the beaver-toothed funnyman. Greg is more than loved; he is universally tolerated, like a beloved
family
dog. That stinks. Two or three particular moments of watching Greg onstage in the nineties have undeniably shaped what I do in stand-up for ever, notably his heroin addiction/kidnapping show Thai-Die, which I saw in Edinburgh in 1995 and which was the first ever narrative-driven stand-up show I’d seen, and his
shark-attack
routine, as performed to uninterested lunchtime drinkers at Adelaide University in 1997. In the event of his death, I would
certainly
make the effort to travel to Australia to attend his memorial service alongside his family, friends and creditors. Greg Fleet – that wool guy!
The Canadian stand-up Glenn Wool, meanwhile, even has the word ‘wool’ in his name. How cool is that? Imagine if Wool was, like, your actual name! Awesome! Sweet as!