Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (29 page)

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men can now buy glasses with lenses that only let them see clearly for a few metres, thereby reducing the risk of viewing immodestly dressed women. I worry there’s a slight flaw to the plan. Ten thousand years of alcohol use would tend to suggest that girls being out of focus doesn’t make men less inclined to want to shag them. Surely it’s better to see attractive women when they’re at a distance; if they suddenly just emerge from the fug you’ve much less time to disguise a semi.

And farewell Reverend Moon, the cult leader who amassing an eye-watering fortune while demanding total obedience from followers. Followers could come nearer to God by having sex with Moon himself. I hear that although the process could cleanse your soul, he’d usually end up making a right mess of your tits. He built a business empire that included media chains and arms factories, and lived in a palace while his followers lived frugal lives. Amazing to think that someone like that was the head of a religion, and not a political leader.

• • •

The Church of England voted against women bishops. An outrage, as those old cathedrals can get so dusty. But it’s understandable that women bishops weren’t allowed. I mean, 80 per cent of a bishop’s job is map reading, unscrewing the lids off jars and disposing of spiders. Opponents argue that this issue is a lot more complicated than it seems and they
certainly
don’t have time to explain it to a load of women.

I’ve done everything I can to campaign for women in the Church. Whenever I play chess I insist on making tiny breasts from Blu Tac and attaching them to my bishops. Why not let women become bishops? If I’m to be told a fairy story I’d prefer it to come from someone who looks like my mum.

The Church of England then signalled its opposition to gay marriage by taking a 550,000-signature petition to Downing Street, although I must say I don’t know if it’s really appropriate to protest against sodomy by shoving such a big document through a poor wee letterbox.

Scotland, however, went ahead and introduced gay marriage. We’ve never had anything against gay people in Scotland. Unless by gay, you mean English. Cardinal Keith O’Brien said that proposals to legalise gay marriage were ‘grotesque’. Actually, it makes perfect sense for homosexuals to marry each other as they’re the only group of men that don’t actually hate going to weddings. The cardinal accused the government of trying to ‘redefine reality’. This from someone who worships a magical man living in the clouds. Of course, Catholics insist that a man should not lie with another man. I’m guessing that’s what’s led to their ‘under-fourteen’ loophole. To be honest, when it comes to same-sex matters like this I always reach for my trusty Bible. It’s just the right thickness so that when I kneel on it Ricardo can more easily get his **** in my ****.

And then, of course, Cardinal Keith O’Brien was accused of ‘acting inappropriately’. I heard he played a sordid trick on a blind bell ringer. Just imagine it. The young priest finishing his night prayers. The cardinal’s voice. ‘You’d better hope he was listening.’ Then the unmistakable rasp of a zip.

Why is everyone getting so wound up about this? They’re saying gays want to marry in church, not bum each other in the vestry. What are churchgoers worried about? Do they think that they’ll kneel down to pray and someone will stick their dick in their mouth? But there’s nowhere gayer than church – there’s loads of blokes wearing frocks, pictures of a half-naked man on the wall who they say they love, and they won’t allow women to join in. The Church of England has to realise that everyone has to keep up with progress. I mean, look at me – my VHS of
Footloose
isn’t worn out but it’s not stopped me updating to LaserDisc. Jesus would have been a great gay man – with those extra holes in his hands and feet he’d have been all sorts of fun. Lady Gaga says the pope’s opinion on gay marriage ‘does not matter to the world’. Most people don’t care about the opinions of a man in a silly outfit. But, sadly, millions do still care about what the pope has to say.

Jeremy Irons has claimed gay marriage could be used as a way to avoid inheritance tax if a son married his father. This is the latest in a long line of strange statements from Jeremy. It seems like every time he opens his mouth he ends up putting his dad’s cock in it. Sorry, I meant foot. It’s this bloody permissive society that’s warping my mind. I can’t even think bent. I mean straight. Jeremy is possibly unhappy about gay marriage and he finds the best way to distract himself from the thought of two adult men agreeing to a loving relationship is to block it out by picturing himself shagging his own dad. I guess we all have different ways of dealing with stressful situations.

Lord Tebbit raised the same point about this. His son must be devastated that his dad only wants to marry him for his own money. Tebbit made his anti-gay comments in an interview with homeless newspaper
The Big Issue
, a publication he actually helped start – by being part of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. I suspect his dislike exists at a deeper level. He may have seen gay men stripped to the waist and glistening with sweat, and subconsciously thought they might be mining coal. Tebbit insists he doesn’t necessarily object to seeing a gay couple together at the altar, so long as it’s in boxes following a shame-induced suicide pact. Tebbit raised the possibility of a lesbian queen. She’d be a lot like the normal queen, but with fewer corgis and more cats. In private, Tebbit apparently confesses he’d be happy to attend a gay church wedding. He could cover then his body in gold paint in order to leap down from the crucifix at the crucial moment and shout, ‘Not on my watch, ladymen!’

The bill to make same-sex marriages legal was passed in parliament. Lesbians will now be allowed to marry – so if I were you I’d invest heavily in companies that make white dungarees. There’s too many innuendos involved in weddings – you don’t want to ask, ‘Who’s going to play the organ?’ and have half the congregation shout back, ‘Buy us a drink first, love.’

I only have two reservations about gay marriage. First, it’s against the holy teachings of our Lord. Second, it could fundamentally undermine ratios at wife-swapping parties. Of course, the official Catholic position is against. As opposed to the unofficial Catholic position, bent over the font biting down hard on a hymn book.

Plans for gay marriage have been approved by MPs despite opposition from nearly half the Tory party. They’re worried their rent boys will propose. One chief opponent is Tory MP Peter Bone. A little rich, as I’m sure I saw his name on the credits of
Dishonourable Members 2
. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say afterwards they had to take a nailbrush to the Mace.

It’s astounding that in 2013 there’s still currency in hinting at people’s sexual preferences. So, to help this practice wither in the bright light of public exposure, I’m going to reveal my own. I’m happy to admit I like being filmed being mounted by a giant screeching eagle with a four-metre wingspan. There, I’ve said it.

My premise is that our society is now completely subsumed by advertising and that the roots of our unhappiness lie in our attempts to market ourselves and live the advertised life. The original PR bible, the foundation of modern marketing and politics, is called
Propaganda
. It was an attempt to use the ideas of Freud to influence opinion and was written by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays.

It’s not just that we’re being marketed to or marketing ourselves, it’s that this is all being done in a Freudian framework. I’ve always felt ambivalent about psychoanalysis. I’ve thought of going into therapy, but I know it’d be like hiring a window cleaner for a burning building. Also, I can’t help feeling that perhaps the first question you should ask your psychiatrist is why you’re such a cunt that you have to pay someone to listen to you.

I mean, I like Freud, but a culture in which dreams are interpreted as communications from a deeper self would sit pretty easily in a fantasy novel. And underneath is the idea of the primacy of sexual urges. The culture thinks that all you’re interested in is pussy.
*
Happy pussy, sexy pussy, loving pussy, warm, forgiving pussy. That’s what motivates you. Friendly pussy, plain pussy, available pussy, your friend’s pussy – you don’t care. Depressed pussy, drunken pussy, angry pussy, stripping out by the airport pussy, ugly pussy, hospital pussy, dead pussy. Is this base view of humanity, right through the wiring of our society, part of the reason our society can treat people as if they’re so base?

I wonder if a more useful idea for understanding reality might be James Joyce’s notion that we’re trying to live within the stories we tell each other as if they’re real. Do you ever try to look objectively at your own life as a narrative? Do you ever see yourself as the bad guy in the story? Hey, don’t judge me, I’m forty and I do whatever I have to do to get a hard-on together. Modern life is the struggle to awake from narrative. We now have stories fed to us from birth till death, and because they used to be a survival mechanism we take them too seriously. Stories will originally have been about
little boys who left caves when they heard noises
, and we still give them that kind of weight.

Were men of my dad’s generation emotionally withdrawn because of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, or vice versa? I remember as a teenager thinking that in a good relationship you had to have these funny arguments all the time. That’s what you saw in films and on TV. And, really, they only put conflict in stories so it’s easier to write dialogue. What would Batman and Green Arrow talk about if they were getting along
? I like your boots, motherfucker
.

My five-year-old boy has a favourite American teen sitcom, and after an episode he’ll spend an hour speaking out of the side of his mouth, trying for their brand of ’tude, and not making any sense. And it’s fun. It’s fun getting zinged by someone who I could probably convince that the moon is a gobstopper.

But your life is not a story, your consciousness is not a narrator. It’s a godless, authorless world.

In addition, you get other people trying to ‘lay their trip on you’. I love that phrase, an old acidhead shorthand for having someone try to tell you how to view the world, or yourself. The thing that middle-class critics and comics always praise in working-class comedians is self-loathing; acts producing characters or jokes where the real targets are themselves. This seems to be a quality never demanded of middle-class comedians; indeed, they generally seem quite pleased with themselves! The uncomfortable question of why they want to see their social inferiors hate themselves never really seems to come up. Like Malcolm X before me,
*
I never bought that self-hate bullshit. I don’t hate myself any more than I love myself. I’m a rich, sex-haunted, world-class nutcase who will probably die horribly. You go deal with it.

We’re brought up in a language and a culture. It’s like a prison we’re born into. If you’re a kid right now, you’re already negotiating a world filled with sexuality and violence and emptied of ideas. You must wonder why people sing in their pants, why your dad can’t look at you with the same intensity as at his smartphone. You won’t wonder when people started preferring work to life, when they became more concerned about how they seem than what they are – it’ll just be how things have always been, and the bars of your prison will be narrower than those of your parents.

Language is a key part of your prison. Taboos over language are often just a childish attempt to draw a circle round all the good people. I run into people every day who use all sorts of language that would be unacceptable on stage, but does this make them immoral? Language taboos change regularly and these people don’t get the updates, they don’t read broadsheets, they don’t watch documentaries and, perhaps most importantly, they don’t really care how society thinks they should talk. So is the taboo value of a word like, say,
retard
, really always about morality or ablism? It’s obviously also a handy way of recognising social class. This is before we even get to the fact that things have different meanings for different people. You say snapchat, I say speedwank.

I remember some nutter at a party one time telling me about his idea that jihadis would welcome a nuclear war. That they longed for the United States to turn the world into a desert, because jihadis would flourish in the desert, and it’s all part of the plan for a successful Armageddon. If the Americans blast the world into sand they’ll have created the very terrain where they’ll be defeated. I actually think that’s a pretty useful metaphor for where we’re at culturally. Let me explain.

There’s an episode of Graham Norton that I enjoy so much I watch it regularly. It’s playing now in the background as I write this. It features a bizarre central performance from Gerard Butler, who speaks in an alarming drawl and maintains an excited and distracted manner throughout.

It starts with Graham Norton dressed as one of the warriors from
300
shouting ‘This is Sparta!’ and announcing the guests in a cod Scottish accent. Because they’ve got Butler on the writers will have sat there and thought of various
300
-themed intros. The way this works in my experience is that writers produce things of various levels of wit and complexity, which the producers fret their way though, worrying about whether they’re obvious enough for the punters on BBC One. I mean, would they have had to have seen the film for this joke to work? Do you think people might just wonder why Graham is dressed as a Greek warrior this week, that maybe he’s going to do the interviews like that, perhaps adopting a classical mindset, leading to a list of questions being asked that sound outlandish to our modern ears? In the end the producers will have gone, ‘Fuck it. Let’s just have him shout “This is Sparta!” and just announce the guests in a Scottish voice.’ It’s a moment of such artistic poverty that it’s made me question the pointlessness of creativity and mankind’s impossible battle to communicate. I’d go so far as to say that it constitutes an important coda to the theory of evolution.