American on Purpose

by Craig Ferguson

  It was an absolute bear pit, where success for a performer was all but impossible. It was also hysterical.

  I had to try it at least once.

  It took a few weeks for me to come up with an act. I decided I would do a parody of all the uber-patriotic native folksingers who seemed to infect every public performance in Scotland and appeared on local television every New Year in the annual orgy of maudlin, folksy sentimentality that the Scots call Hogmanay. Though everyone I knew thought these guys were annoying as hell, I had never seen anyone publicly go after them. Perhaps it would be seen as treasonous to attack anything homegrown, but I was willing to risk it, so I wrote a little song about how sexually attractive sheep are and prepared a little spiel. I put together a costume made of my wedding suit, which had been shrunk beyond recognition by an incompetent dry cleaner, and a hideous green sweater I had been given as a present one Christmas by a relative who must have hated me. I also wore a pair of ill-fitting glasses with broken black frames held together by a Band-Aid, and to complete the look a pair of plastic zip-up Chelsea boots, pants tucked inside.

  I needed a name for my character, something that might get an immediate laugh so that I wouldn’t be gonged off the second I spoke. I remembered Bing Hitler, the name Peter Capaldi had come up with for our little drag act. Peter had by then become a well-respected working actor and I figured he wouldn’t be using it again, so I stole it. I could easily have called him for permission, but that’s not who I was then.

  Not telling anyone what I was up to, not even Anne, I finished work early one night, drank a few beers, and headed to the theater. In my outfit I waited backstage until the real folksinger ahead of me had been gonged off, and then Harry called “Next!” and out I went.

  They laughed at my look, an encouraging sign, but then it fell silent. I walked to the microphone. In the most ridiculous provincial Scottish accent I could muster, I bellowed:

  “My name is Bing Hitler.”

  “Gong!” shouted a female voice from the back of the room.

  “Thank you, Mother,” I shot back.

  The crowd laughed again. I’ll never forget the power behind that sound. I knew immediately they were with me. I pressed on with my little spiel about how Scotland was great and everywhere else was not, pursuing my point to ludicrous degrees. Why Scottish insects were better than English insects, which were effete dandies. Why the world was lucky there were only five million Scots, because if there were more we’d make everybody eat fucking haggis, which was more tasty than anything those so-called French or Italian bastards had to offer. Why being Scottish was better than having an orgasm, or sex, which never happened for Bing at the same time. For a finale I sang my fake folk tune, which I called “The Sheep Song”:

  Many years ago,

  Oor sheep ganged free,

  Roamin throo the glens in groups,

  Of two or three.

  Fear they did not know-ee-o,

  their fleece was white as snow-ee-o,

  And it didn’t tak verra long-ee-ong,

  For their little ones to grow-ee-o…

  It wasn’t much, but it represented just the kind of inane garbage that most of us Scots had been force-fed from as far back as we could remember. The audience loved it. When I was finished they shouted for more but I had no more, and told them so. They thought that was a joke. Eventually, not knowing what to do I turned to Harry and yelled, “Gong!” He gonged me off, but they were still cheering when I got backstage.

  There was a fifty-quid prize for winning, but the audience, quite rightly, gave it to the guy after me, an octogenarian in a tweed cap who played a blistering “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on the harmonica. I, however, took away a couple of bigger prizes.

  (1) When I was onstage, I had seen the theater director Michael Boyd standing at the bar, laughing his ass off; and

  (2) finally I had discovered what I wanted to do.

  22

  The Rise of (Bing) Hitler

  Bing was not an instant hit. I had no material to speak of beyond a few lines of shtick and “The Sheep Song.” I booked a few gigs in local bars but I would die onstage after a few minutes because I hadn’t enough material, and I wasn’t yet experienced or confident enough to riff. I had a woeful appearance at the Cul De Sac bar right next door to the Chip, where I still worked full time as bartender.

  The place was jammed to the gills with people I knew who had heard about my triumph at the gong show. I choked, I panicked at the awkward silence, clammed up, got sweaty, and even forgot the words to my comedy song. This resulted in the first review I ever received. It ran in an underground magazine, and though I can’t recall its name, I’ll never forget the headline: “Bing Stinks.” You get the gist.

  For some reason a bad gig didn’t bother me that much. I actually enjoyed the failure in some perverse way, and sometimes through drunken misjudgment of what people would find funny, I actively encouraged it. In one show at the Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline, on Scotland’s east coast (nowhere near as prestigious as its New York namesake), I lambasted the locals simply for being east-coasters. I told them that where I was from, on Scotland’s more civilized west coast, east coast men were considered idiots and sheepshaggers, but I told them that I empathized. It was their only option, given that the women of the area were so fucking ugly.

  This kind of comment will rarely endear you to an audience, and this one rushed the stage, grabbed my guitar, and smashed it up in front of me. I bolted out the back door and into a waiting taxi that the theater manager had ordered to take me to the local train station. As we sped away with an angry mob in pursuit someone threw a large rock that shattered the back window and showered me with broken glass. I was pretty drunk and a little alarmed, but I loved this. In an odd way I thought it was romantic. But I guess any attention is good attention for a nutcase. I gave the cabdriver the fee I got for the gig (always get the money up front) to cover the repairs.

  Michael Boyd persuaded me to do another gong show, and I survived it but felt that was enough, to do any more would be pressing my luck. Around this time, something of an alternative music-hall circuit was springing up around Glasgow and Edinburgh. There always seemed to be benefit shows going on for miners’ families crushed under Margaret Thatcher, or to free Nelson Mandela (the caving of the racist right-wing South African government later was of course due to the pressure exerted from obscure Scottish entertainers). I wrote more material and started to play these shows, usually wedged into the bill between the lesbian a cappella folk group and the performance poet. There were very few stand-ups around—actually, I’m the only one that I can recall—but there were plenty of comedy acts.

  One, called Victor and Barry, was a comedy duo who wore dressing gowns and sang campy and amusing ditties about genteel Scottishness. I wasn’t crazy about them (I was probably jealous) but most people ate it up. Victor and Barry were played by two young actors getting started in their careers—Forbes Masson, now a very successful and respected actor in Scotland, and Alan Cumming, who you may know as one of the leading ladies of Broadway. Even my sister Lynn was part of a comic double act. After attending the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, she and a fellow student formed the Alexander Sisters, a hilarious send-up of desperate middle-class Scottish matrons.

  Meanwhile the comedy circuit in London was in full swing, and unlike Glasgow or Edinburgh it was producing brilliant stand-ups like Rik Mayall, Eddie Izzard, and Alexei Sayle. I told myself it was almost cooler to be in comedy than in music, but while London was teeming with comedy clubs, Scotland had none. Most of my performances were openers for rock bands, or occurred in nightclubs, where they would expect me to entertain drunken hipsters who were instantly pissed that the music had been turned off for me. In these situations the heckling started before I even made it to the microphone, which forced me to develop a particularly aggressive style. Sometimes I won them over, sometimes I made things worse. Sometimes my aggression, combined with too much alcohol,
made for a rather difficult evening for everyone.

  One night, while performing at the Rock Garden—the bar where I had met Peter Capaldi and joined the Dreamboys, years before—a drunken heckler approached the stage to take issue with me over a joke in my act he didn’t like. I proceeded to make a fool of him, but he was too drunk to sit down and shut up, so he lunged at me, and I, being a drunk Glaswegian first and a comedian second, knocked him cold, necessitating an ambulance for him and a quick getaway for me, out the kitchen door, avoiding his friends and the cops.

  Here’s a tip for all you aspiring young comics: Don’t beat up the customers. It is very difficult to get laughs from an audience when you’ve actually drawn blood from one of their number. It kills the mood.

  I kept trying, though, gig after crappy gig, until one night at yet another benefit show at the Tron Theatre, a guy by the name of John McCalman, who was something of a big shot at the local radio station, made me an offer. He grew up worshiping BBC radio comedy shows, acts like the Goons and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Local Scottish radio was not known for programming comedy (not intentionally, anyway) but John asked me if I fancied trying to write and record some shows. I jumped at it. We recorded a few monologues I had written for Bing Hitler, who had now developed from a folk singer into a misanthropic buffoon who stood onstage, ranting about everything in the world he hated. The list included bees, whales, cats, vampires, scones, and, of course, the English.

  These tapes played into the late-night alt-rock show, and they got a pretty warm reception, though the act sounded dry—just a guy in a studio, talking in a funny voice. You need real people in front of you for that type of comedy, or at least I do. I feel more energized and relish the immediate feedback a live audience supplies. Still, I was getting my name, or at least Bing’s name, out to more people who seemed happy to watch me live. Now the nightclub patrons actually cheered sometimes when the DJ stopped the music to announce me.

  I quit my job and signed up for unemployment benefits, making me a bona fide member of the show-business community.

  Anne was very supportive when I gave up bartending. I think she felt it might keep me away from the booze. It didn’t work out like that. Anyway, we were circling the drain pretty fast by then.

  We had finally gotten a mortgage and were living in a small ground-floor apartment of our own on Maryhill Road. It was a cheap, shitty, modern building on a busy thoroughfare and I hated it. I found it hard to be around Anne, who was always angry—with justification, I hasten to add—since most nights I was coming home too late and too drunk. Some nights not at all. At one grimy after-hours party in someone else’s apartment, as I was sitting on the living room floor, talking to a very attractive girl, Anne turned up with some of her friends. I didn’t know she’d be there too, even though we lived in the same house and were supposedly a couple. We were both pretty drunk and Anne soon let me know that I had disrespected her one time too many, and although I have to say she would have been right about that on a thousand other occasions, in this instance I really was just talking to the girl. Anne was a Highland lass, though, and full of good whiskey, mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore. She removed one of her stiletto-heeled shoes and started pounding me over the head with it, causing a spectacular ruckus and no small amount of blood.

  I drunkenly told her our marriage was over, which I don’t think came as news to anybody, and I left the party with the beautiful girl. We went to her house.

  Later Anne and I tried to patch things up; she was contrite and so was I, and, as I said, there was genuine affection between us, but it was impossible. She was a generous soul who wanted a life and marriage and kids, and I was a selfish asshole who wanted booze and sex and drugs and escape and adventure, and I blamed her for our leaving New York. We were hopelessly and terminally incompatible.

  For my birthday that year Anne gave me an inflatable atlas globe, along with a birthday card in which she wrote:

  I give you the world.

  Have fun blowing it up.

  23

  Edinburgh, 1986

  Every year, usually the last three weeks in August, Edinburgh hosts the biggest arts and entertainment festival in the world. The normally sleepy Presbyterian city becomes a riot of color and noise, its dignified old buildings crammed with theater companies and circus troupes and performance artists. Every available venue has some kind of a show running 24/7. There are any number of amazing and unusual acts performing from all over the world. Russian mime artists, Italian jugglers, Belgian comedians, Finnish punk-rock balloon sculptors, and a fucking Peruvian flute band on every street corner. There is opera and ballet, and there is obscure international cinema, and because this is still Scotland, there is drinking.

  The festival has given rise to some of the greatest comedic minds in Britain. Most of the Pythons honed their skills in Edinburgh. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore started here in the 1960s. Some of the great American stand-ups of the eighties made it in the U.K. through the festival: Bill Hicks, Denis Leary, Lewis Black, along with groundbreaking improvisers like Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie who went on to create Whose Line Is It Anyway? for U.K. and U.S. television. Every young hopeful in show business heads to Edinburgh every year. The rich kids from the Footlights Society of Cambridge University, the grimy sarcastic snaggle-toothed stand-ups from London, and the pompous pretty actors from the Drama schools. All of them. It’s a thrilling hybrid of Carnival and St. Patrick’s Day. If you’ve never been, then go.

  By August of 1986, Bing Hitler had gained enough notoriety, even if it was mostly because of the shocking name, to secure me my first Edinburgh appearance. The gig was at one a.m. in a function room above the Cafe Royal bar and restaurant. It was not one of the more prestigious venues, and it was a dog of a time slot, but the location was in central Edinburgh and it was every night for three weeks, so there was a remote possibility that I could make some money if a few people turned up. My overhead was low, just my Bing outfit and travel expenses. I couldn’t afford lodging in Edinburgh, so after the show I had to wait for the first morning train back to Glasgow: the 6:15. This was fine by me since I was still sharing the house with Anne and it meant I got home after she left for work and I left before she returned. It was kind of perfect.

  At the festival I was part of a double bill with a four-piece acoustic guitar band from Dundee that played Django Reinhardt covers and was actually pretty good, but it’s the kind of act that has limited appeal. I was scheduled to go onstage after them, and they were following a play—a dark farce called Grave Plots by the Scottish writer David Kane, who went on to become a rather successful film director. (Later on he even cast me in a couple of his movies, but they turned out okay anyway.)

  The regular traffic jams that resulted from all of these different performers sharing the tiny backstage area made for a sort of repertory company feel, as if I were part of a troupe. It was like being back in the Dreamboys or among the arty people in black from Gunka James’s record store, and I loved it.

  Because I was on so late I had plenty of time to get drunk beforehand, which was necessary because I suffered horribly from performance anxiety. There was always at least one drunken heckler in the crowd, and although I had learned already that it was unacceptable to hit one of them, it was still essential that I best them verbally. I always thought I would fail at this, though I rarely, if ever, did. Bing Hitler was an angry drunken character played by an angry drunken man, so I had plenty to draw on. I could just shout someone down and it would be true to the performance. Might even have improved it.

  I’d built up to about a half hour with rants and routines and had added another song. On the first few nights, the room was pretty empty, it had a capacity of about 150 and as few as twelve or thirteen tickets sold. I was too hammered to notice.

  All the festival shows get reviewed in the local papers, but given the sheer volume of performances that have to be covered, hordes of local journalists who don’t usually cover the arts
are drafted to help. Therefore you may have a review of a serious play written by the fishing correspondent, who will moan about the show having a disappointing lack of trout, etc. The dearth of qualified professionals doing this job might be the only reason for the glowing coverage I got in the Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening News.

  Whatever the explanation, the reviews had a startling and dramatic effect. I arrived at the show five nights into the run to find a line of people waiting to get in. I asked the ticket-taker girl at the door what had happened, thinking perhaps the fire alarm had gone off during Grave Plots or something. I was astonished to hear they were waiting to see me and my acoustic-guitaring buddies, since I assumed them to be jazz aficionados, but I finally felt it when I went onstage—they were there to see me, or at least Bing.