Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (18 page)

I’ve sort of been able to watch all this from the hallway, always having written columns and done interviews with a variety of newspapers. You see what does and doesn’t get printed. The last five years or so have been a time of increasing conformity. News stories are presented to us differently now. During the Occupy movement, just like with the eviction of travellers from Dale Farm, we were presented with no characters – and actually almost no images of the protest – making it very difficult for the story to progress into other areas of the culture. You don’t get characters from the counterculture anymore. No Swampy the environmental protester, nothing that can ‘monologue’, that hideous American verb of the comedian as meme processor and cultural drip tray.

I genuinely worry that Leveson will result in the press being forcibly beaten back into some kind of relevance just as their circulations are dying. Can you imagine that a teenager nowa-days who’s grown up with broadband is going to end up forking out for a hard copy of tits and jingoism? Even the language of the tabloids must sound to young ears like some desperate holiday rep at the last place you ever let your parents take you. We should encourage everything that is worst in the press and let them drown in their own hate. Don’t ban Page 3. The men of Britain need something to hang on to. And it’s knowing that in exchange for £150 their daughter might someday show her tits to every builder in the United Kingdom. That’s terrifying. Which is why I go to my daughter’s parents’ nights, I watch her crappy plays and I praise her terrible drawings. It keeps her self-esteem up. And it makes me try to be the best father I can be. Page 3 is the mortar that holds this country’s families together.

• • •

I feel it’s a bit pointless to list the ways in which our culture is dead. A bit like a coroner at an autopsy documenting into the microphone, ‘He’s not blinking . . . he’s not talking . . . he’s not wriggling his toes . . . he’s not clicking his fingers . . .’ But here’s one you might not have noticed. There’s a general magazine dynamic that has got a hold of everything like gangrene. What I mean by that is that much of what we see and read now is produced to order rather than as an attempt to communicate felt experience.

Nowadays, rather than someone writing a book about China because they were obsessed with the East and travelled there, we are confronted with celebrities who go to China because they were asked to by a TV channel. And rather than giving us their impressions of what they happen to find, they’re led through a variety of situations set up by their production company. We’ve moved from a culture of people attempting to communicate something to a culture of people who are happy to communicate anything.

It really is everywhere, this notion of working to a predetermined brief. Panel-show comedians are told which topics to cover, and journalists travel with politicians in their buses during election time, still not seeing themselves as embedded even when the seat of a chemical toilet is still warm from the prime minister’s visit. You’ll have noticed that you sometimes get left-field people allowed into news studios to comment on tomorrow’s papers, mainly because the agenda is so rigidly set by what the papers cover.

The effect is to make it look like a lot of clever people
are interested in this shit
. They’re not. The celeb doesn’t give a deep-fried fuck about China, because by the very nature of being famous enough to front the show he’s being torn away from his golden house, beautiful wife and the sentient robot from
Rocky III
. The comedians don’t want to make jokes about the fact it was raining at the golf; they have their own interests, although to be fair nobody would want to watch a panel show where everybody talked about how much they hate other comedians. So we all desperately chatter about ever more irrelevant topics even as the world ends, having been told to write a symphony about the wallpaper in a burning building.

We think of ourselves as a society of freedom of expression but the more mainstream you go, the narrower the parameters. In live broadcasting, any time they venture beyond platitudes you can actually hear the caution. When a newsflash comes in, the average local radio DJ starts choosing her words as if she’s talking a suicide off a windowsill. Of course, people will claim that nobody tells them what to say but that’s because they colour in between the lines.
You say what you like if they like what you say
.

We’ve this constant reinforcement of what can and can’t be expressed because it functions as social control. Here’s a funny wee example. I was asked to do a questionnaire by the
Guardian
. They sent me a bunch of questions and there’s no way I expected everything to go in. Here’s how it was when I sent it in:

1. When were you happiest?

Between Richard Hammond’s high-speed car crash and receiving the news he’d survived.

2. What is your greatest fear?

Developing locked-in syndrome at the start of
Alan Carr’s Chatty Man
, then after exactly an hour falling sideways onto the remote control, switching the telly to Channel 4+1. Then when my wife comes in to hold a mirror over my face to see if I’m still breathing, I see that I’m Justin Lee Collins.

3. What is your earliest memory?

Being told to kill David Cameron, then myself, about two weeks ago.

4. Which living person do you most admire and why?

Colin Stagg, for obvious reasons.

5. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

My slapdash

6. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Does being Jessie J count as a trait?

7. What was your most embarrassing moment?

My son introducing me to his nursery teacher with ‘He sleeps through the day!’

8. Aside from a property, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever bought?

Ulrika Jonsson’s silence.

9. Where would you like to live?

New York. I’ve never been there, but I know all about it from the TV. I will run a deli and date lots of women at once and be murdered in an alley by some punks.

10. What would your super power be?

Invisibility. I’d kick a mime artist to death so he died with everybody thinking he was great at his job. Or I’d paint my dick to look like a Jaffa mini roll and hang around a bulimia seminar.

11. What makes you unhappy?

That takes two good ecstasy.

12. What do you most dislike about your appearance?

My beard, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.

13. If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

Stewart Lee’s sense of humour.

14. What is your favourite smell?

Beads burning in a freshly crashed car.

15. What is your favourite word?

Toboggan.

16. What is your favourite book?

The Book of the New Sun
by Gene Wolfe.

17. What would you most like to wear to a costume party?

Katherine Jenkins.

18. What is the worst thing anyone’s ever said to you?

Are you Frankie Boyle?

19. Is it better to give or to receive?

Depends what it is. Toaster – receive. AIDS – give.

20. What is your guiltiest pleasure?

Colin Stagg’s
100 Football Howlers
.

21. What do you owe your parents?

Realistically, about five grand of babysitting money.

22. To whom would you most like to say sorry and why?

Colin Stagg. It wouldn’t have helped if I’d confessed.

23. What or who is the greatest love of your life?

My kids. I think kids deliver on all the stuff romantic love only promises. I’m in love every day.

24. What does love feel like?

It feels like a belt around my throat.

25. Have you ever said ‘I love you’ without meaning it?

Only to my kids.

26. Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

People always say Muhammad Ali, but in reality it would be horrible watching him trying to eat.

27. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

She was like that when I got here, Colin and Stagg.

28. What is the worst job you’ve ever done?

I was fucking shit on
QI
for a few series. Oh no, hang on, that was Alan Davies.

29. If you could edit your past, what would you change?

I’d do it all again in a funky yellow cape

30. If you could go back in time, where would you go?

Well, obviously I’d set out to kill Hitler and get sidetracked trying to fuck the young Diana Rigg.

31. How do you relax?

Same as everybody else, really. Looking at blueprints of the Olympic Village, digging a tunnel, dressing up as a member of Olympic Security, fucking a life-size clay model of Jessica Ennis.

32. How often do you have sex?

I regularly have sex with someone I hate, or masturbation as I call it.

33. What is the closest you’ve ever come to death?

Middlesbrough.

34. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

You’re kidding, right?

35. What song would you like played at your funeral?

‘If You Don’t Know Me by Now’.

36. How would you like to be remembered?

As a G.

37. What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

People hate jokes.

38. Where would you most like to be right now?

Having a heart attack in Jessica Ennis’s arsehole.

What’s interesting is that we all know exactly what went in and what didn’t. You’re right: Colin Stagg, Muhammad Ali, my borderline personality disorder sexual intentions towards heptathletes, drugs, Alan Davies – all gone. Decisions we imagine are about whether a subeditor happens to be in a good mood are actually about something else. An internalised template we’ve all been given about what people can and can’t hear.

I will say this about the press, though. At least they always keep things in perspective. In fact I quite enjoyed the
Daily Express
’s prediction for 2025, where from coast to coast we’re living like pencils stuffed in a mug, the fortunate ones being nudged off our cliffs like coins on a penny falls, only the tallest escaping permanent befoulment from their neighbour’s farts, where the lottery prize will be the blissful release of a bullet from the helicopter gunships that permanently hover overhead.

When I did stand-up I was always very conscious of when a show needed a ‘dip’, a lowering of energy. And often I liked to plough on regardless, just to see what would happen. Usually it would fuck the show up, but not for me really, as I’d get home quicker. You’re well into the second half of the book by now and you’re probably feeling that you’ve had enough gags for a bit. That’s how I feel writing it, so let’s have a wee change of pace. I’ve always been interested in what I suppose I’d call the pitfalls of rationality: the little reality tunnels we live in, the way rationality can cut us off from a more magical view of the world. So the introduction to this chapter is a sensible little essay about that, then we’re back to daft jokes about things scientists have been up to.

Peruse the letters pages of a broadsheet newspaper and you’ll gain the impression that the battle for the soul of humanity is currently being fought between the forces of science and those who value religion or who are sceptical about the benefits of modernity. It’s not difficult to see parallels between many in the Richard Dawkins/secularism camp and fundamentalist religious types. What seems to unite them both is certainty.

Certainty about the nature of reality is something you won’t necessarily find in the hallways and cafeterias of scientific institutions. Scratch the average Nobel Prize winner and you’ll probably find someone fretting about the inexplicability of things. Stephen Hawking, for example, has publicly mused that science might soon have to abandon its quest for a ‘unified theory of everything’, such are the difficulties with the current picture. So what do Dawkins and his ilk know to justify their conviction and their arrogance?

There’s no denying the achievements of science. A hundred years ago there were no smartphones or space stations. But what’s not mentioned is the cost of technological progress. Life isn’t necessarily getting better. For every new kid who’s now able to plug himself into the internet, there’s a little cloud of black smoke going up somewhere. In the 70s we were told to prepare ourselves for a new world of technologically supported leisure and extended free time. What we got was call centres.

The world is becoming an increasingly soulless place. We’ve replaced genuine human emotions with the communal buzz of the electronically connected hive mind, with its indistinguish-able identikit opinions about films and TV programmes we probably won’t have time to see anyway. We’ve substituted genuine wonder at the mystery and beauty of nature with a belief that trees and butterflies and human consciousness are machine-like.

The problem could be one of ‘literalism’, something that philosopher Patrick Harpur believes began to creep into humanity’s thinking alongside the rise of science four hundred years ago. Nowadays, we’re inclined to see the world in more concrete, narrowly defined terms than the metaphor-rich, mythic way of thinking that characterised peoples of earlier times. If nature is simply an inert assemblage of atoms, which form DNA molecules and proteins, which in turn determine the shapes and properties of plants and animals – if this is literally all it is – then it’s easier to view it as expendable and less worth caring about.

This debate’s not all new, either. Romanticism was born out of a deep scepticism about the Enlightenment. What came with science and the Enlightenment seems to have been something called the ‘rational ego’. We began to draw boundaries around things, to say ‘this is my land, not yours’.

We became preoccupied with categories and labels, with numerical quantities. Our concern with qualities such as size and number seems to have run parallel with the inflation of the human ego. Tyrants were able to quantify their own importance in terms of the size of their palaces or the amount of land they lorded over.