Bigger than Hitler - Better than Christ

by Rik Mayall

  But in truth things were beginning to change now. This was a hospital I had been in before. I was beginning to come around to the opinion that I might have had a quad-bike accident. And I started telling people this. Which was lucky because I was in a hospital anyway. A lot of them, in fact, all of them seemed to sympathise and agree. Fucking hell, I’ve been seriously injured, I thought. I haven’t been a prisoner locked inside some weird jail at all. Not this time anyway. Phew.

  Time passed. I got better. I felt better. I was better – but not quite. I went for a scan. Like you do with head injuries. Especially with an unsurvivable head injury like mine. Which was far worse than any head injury anyone has ever had ever in the history of human experience – even in the movies. And I’ve been in lots of them, very successfully, and I’m currently available – not that I’m short of work of course – it just so happens that at the moment oh never mind where was I? Oh yeah – everything took a really scary swerve at this point. Just when everything was going so well. I came out of the scan machine thingy and the very high up extremely brainy brain doctor told me quietly that he’d been waiting for seven weeks (that’s how long I’d been inside), seven weeks for the loose blood to drain from my brain. But it hadn’t. It was all locked in there and it wasn’t going to come out. This was really serious, viewer. This is the big bit. The doctor said to me that he was going to have to take the top of my head off. That’s what he said. He was going to have to saw around the top third of my skull (about half an inch above the eyebrows), take it off, lay it to one side carefully and then go inside my brain and gradually scoop out the blood. He would have to be extremely careful he said not to scoop out all of the blood, just the excess blood that was trapped in there and couldn’t get out, otherwise I would almost certainly die. It’s not as easy as it sounds he said because he was going to have to dig down deep into my brain to get out every drop of unnecessary blood. Right to the very centre of my brain and beneath, removing anything that was clogging up my thought system, well, existence system really.

  “This could be a very challenging operation, Rik,” he said, “and the disadvantage is that there is a good fifty per cent chance that you will die. Now, I’m not going to do it today. I’m going do it tomorrow morning. So why don’t you go home and relax.” So I did. And I didn’t. I got home alright but the relaxing was a bit more tricky. A conversation like that can really focus your mind, I can tell you. So I avoided the subject with the family. It wasn’t really fair on them and anyway, they wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. They always put Eastenders on when I come into the room. It’s their polite way of saying, “Shut up and go away you overweight has-been.” So I sat with them watching the drivel and went back to the hospital the next day thinking it was probably my last day on earth. But I was resigned. I was ready.

  Okay, death-wish operation time. Here we go. Probably a mutilated corpse lying on the slab by midday. Not a problem for me, I’m Rik Mayall. So, straight into theatre. Like it. Never more at home. Get your cock out, get a laugh off the nurses. Never fails. Just got to remember that it’s the flesh coloured pube. Only joking, viewer, The Tripod’s in town and he’s looking for action.

  “Morning Rik, how you feeling?” said the doctor.

  “Terrific, pants are full of shit, but I don’t give a fuck. Let’s do this mother.”

  So we did. First of all, the doctor said that he was going to have to give me another scan to check exactly where all the blood was before he sawed the top of my head off. He said it was going to last a long time. Which it did. They lay me on a flat tongue sort of device which was then drawn inside a huge cylindrical barrel-type machine. There was a device to keep my head straight and there were cameras moving around my head as I lay flat, looking deeply into my soul. I haven’t been shot dead by a firing squad yet but I think those couple of hours or whatever it was inside there were my equivalent of the man in front of the firing squad’s last cigarette. So, what does he get? A minute and a half, right. I got two solid hours! And I didn’t GET A FAG! Give me the First World War anytime.

  And then the scan finished. It’s hard to describe. I came out of the machine and the doctor looked amazed. He was amazed. He was flabbergasted. So was I when I found out what had happened. All that blood that had been locked in my skull had gone. It had just gone! Overnight or something. It was a fucking miracle! All that blood had just drained away. All the unnecessary accident blood I mean. Not the proper brain blood. Everything was okay! So he wouldn’t need to operate! He wouldn’t have to cut my head off! Is that a result or what? And that’s when I started to wonder whether the clever man had just sort of scared the blood out of me. I don’t know. But thanks Mr Doctor Man. Big time. No forget that. Extremely big time. I’m alive! And my brain works. Ish.

  BIGGER THAN ADOLF BETTER THAN JESUS

  Yeah, right, so every couple of thousand years, give or take a couple of years, along comes a Christ figure. It just so happens that it’s me this time around*. So maybe now, you can fully appreciate that this isn’t just a normal Harper Collins book, this is a semi-religious testament to the legend of my life in showbusiness and if you don’t believe it, you can eat your own shit for all I care. And when you do, then phone me up and I’ll tell you that I’m not listening because that’s the kind of guy that I am. And you can come round to my house and try and show me and I’ll deliberately close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears. Because – read my lips – this is a serious book. Like The Bible. That was a good book. In fact, some of the critics even call it The Good Book. That’s clever marketing that is. I know all about that kind of thing because I’m a twenty-first century kind of guy with an inhairnet grasp of the media and communications and stuff. That’s why I am the leading voice-over artiste of my generation. Sod your BAFTAs (I’ve got plenty of them anyway).

  Everything I do is really serious and hard especially when I’m being amusing which is brilliant and hard and dead funny in its own right. So, in case you’re still confused, that is what this is. This book is better than the Good Book because it’s the Great Book. And it’s mine. And no one else’s, unless you bought it, in which case it is your book although I wrote it and if someone else says they wrote it then they’re fucking lying. You can phone me up anytime you want although I won’t put my telephone number here because you might. So think about what I said about all that and we’ll leave it there.

  And the other thing is – something else – so fuck off (I can use swear words as well, I’m that hard). Or don’t, because you’re my friend and I dig you, viewer, it’s you and me together. We’re down with life. So, I’m going to hit you with some serious shit here and I don’t mean anything lavatorial. I mean shit as in some high quality information that’ll hit you like an anthrax-tipped scud missile of light entertainment. So hold on tight, we’re going in. Get yourself a piece*, get some full body armour, double safety belts etc, put the children to bed and give them a kiss (because we’re caring and the kids are our future), close the door slowly and quietly, go downstairs, get yourself a stiff drink, a hard drink, drink it all and swallow it all in one go, lock all the doors, close all the curtains, pull down the blinds, put on the full body armour, get your favourite spectacles, put your foot through the television, write “fuck off” on a Post-It note and stick it to the front door, write “leave me alone because I’m reading The Rik Mayall’s great book” backwards across your forehead (so you can read it in the mirror), tear off the top of your T-shirt sleeves so that you look like that bloke in that one where nothing much happens at all but it leaves you thinking mmmmm, turn the lights down low (but not too low because you might not be able to read anything), sweat a bit (and if it’s not hot enough, then go to the sink and flick a bit of water on your face – acters’ trick), turn to the wife or husband and say, “Shut up bitch/bloke, I need silence,” plump up the cushions, turn on the drawing room standard lamp if it really is a bit too dark, and get the fuck in:

  FIVE REASONS WHY I AM BETTER THAN
CHRIST*

  I was dead for five days and Christ was only dead for three. There’s no quibbling with that. It’s just a cold hard fact. And it’s longer. I fell off my quad bike and smashed my head in and went into a death coma on the Thursday before Easter 1998 – Crap Thursday as it’s known amongst the Rik Mayall legions – and I rose again on the Bank Holiday Monday. That’s the day after Easter fucking Day. Christ, I mean, Jesus got nailed up by the transvestites (no disrespect) on Good Friday (Good? For Fuck’s sake – who’s in charge of the church these days? Why don’t they call it Shit Friday?) and came back from the dead on Easter Sunday which was all well and good and brilliant and he was a Christian, don’t forget, so he had to go to Church. But I came back from the dead on Bank Holiday Monday, the day after. You see what that means? Thursday to Monday! That’s five whole days being dead! And in anyone’s book, especially this one, it’s a clear winner. It’s not even really close. Let’s face it, it’s almost double the time. It’s 5 – 3 to me. That’s a big margin as they say on those football watching programmes. And I did it all on my own and didn’t need any fucking Romans to help me (and they wore skirts for Christ’s sake. Hang on. No. That’s wrong – they didn’t do it for Christ’s sake, they wore skirts all the time (except they didn’t invade Scotland because all the jocks had their own skirts, so they built Adrian’s Wall to keep the rival manufacturers out. It worked too. You don’t see many Brummies wearing skirts, do you?))

  Jesus’s biggest gig was feeding the five thousand with the fishes and the loaves. But me and Ade played The Point in Dublin in 2003 which is eight thousand capacity. That’s three thousand more people. Can you hear that Jesus? Well of course you can, you’re Jesus. And there was a much bigger selection of food. We had hamburger stalls there, hot dogs, there was ice cream for afters and that’s not to mention the bar where all the hell-raising Irish Bottom fans were drinking gallons of everything. And what did Jesus have? A bit of fish and some loaves. Jesus. He should have got himself a better tour promoter. I’m sure if he’d had Phil “shut up and sign the cheque” Mclntyre like I do, he’d have got a bigger crowd. So me and Ade blew Jesus out of the water on that one – not to mention our personal record of eleven million people watching Bottom on BBC2, although yes, we can’t walk on the stuff – yet. But Ade’s a jolly good skier.

  My miracles are better than Jesus’s. Granted, curing the leper was a good trick. But I have cured thousands of people of their misery and meaninglessless by signing autographs for them which they can cherish and frame and use to decorate their little “front rooms”. Also, I once did a telly advert for ANO-ITCH. Not only did I narrate the commercial but I also played the man who came into the shop with the itchy arse. Now, that advert reached countless millions. It was on weekend prime time*. Lazarus – again, quite impressive, taking up his bed and walking about the place like that but to tell you the truth, I would have got my people to move him and his bed out of the way much quicker. Walking on water? Well I’ve been water-skiing and I think you’ll find that that’s a bit faster than walking. Although I’ll tell you this for nothing, you need to be very careful when you’re water-skiing on a Caribbean holiday and you get into a disagreement with a snorkelling holiday maker over whose right of way it is and you swerve unexpectedly violently to the right after you’ve water-skied over his head to make your point and this catapults you fifteen feet up in the air at about sixty miles per hour, losing a ski on the way and as you cartwheel back down towards the water, hanging on to the tow rope with the wrong hand so you hit the water on the ski-less foot which acts like a Kamikaze dive without a target and forces about twenty gallons of sea water up your anal passage on impact. It doesn’t end there. It’s only after you’ve been rescued by the tow boat and hauled on board in the company of seven other (female mostly) holiday makers that you realise you’re the victim of a powerful self-induced enema which chooses to erupt like Krakatoa suddenly out of all three exits of your day-glo jet-skiing thong as they gather around you wearing very expensive (and clean) clothes and hair and faces. Not a pretty sight on a family holiday. I never heard from any of them again.

  I have brought more joy to the people of the world. A lot of Jesus’s followers are always arguing amongst themselves about stuff like the Catholics and the Protestants and who’s right and who’s wrong about this, that and the next religious thing. And then, before you know it, there’s a bloody war going on and thousands are dying in agony and all the love thy neighbour and turn the other cheek bollocks goes straight out of the window and everybody’s raping and pillerging and having a really fucking awful time generally. Despite the fact that some of my fans fight over copies of my DVDs in shops, and there has been the occasional brutal mugging for a pair of tickets to one of my great plays, overall, my influence on the world has been much more peaceful and kind.

  I have a far greater understanding of the media. I am always mind-storming ideas with myself and thinking up new ways of reaching out to more and more fans across the globe with my own unique brand of comedy wild fire and powerful drama. I think it is no exaggeration to say quite honestly and truthfully here and now that I have been featured in every English-speaking publication in the world*. AND I’ve been on the cover of the Radio Times. Whilst Jesus, on the other hand, just stuck to the one media outlet – The Good Book. But that’s a bit short-sighted really. What about the radio? What about the telly? What about the cinema? What about radical computer fan websites? I’m big in all of these. In fact, I’m huge. I don’t need The Gideons to leave copies of my book in hotel rooms all around the world. That’s so the millennium-before-last.

  And there they are: five reasons why I’m better than Christ. I could have a sixth if I wanted because I’ve never worn a dress but I’ll let that one go. I’m not one to kick a man when he’s down. Come to mention it, I could even go for a seventh because I’m pretty sure that Jesus never met Charlie Drake. But I’ll let that one go too because I’m nice. Not like that Adolf Hitler. He was a total bastard but he was a big total bastard. Not physically, obviously. But I’m bigger. And here, viewer, just in case you’re in any doubt about this, are – hey, stop! Wait a minute. Jesus has never watched Channel Five. Oh fuck, nor have I. Cunts. Okay, forget that bit, read this bit, this is good.

  TEN REASONS WHY I AM BIGGER THAN HITLER

  Adolf tried to conquer the world and failed. I didn’t (fail). I’m massive all over the world.

  Adolf only had one testicle. I have two testicles. Ask any one of a legion of lead actresses whose names I can’t even mention because it would destroy their marriages and all of them will say that I have more than one.

  He didn’t get any laughs. I don’t remember seeing anyone laughing on the Nuremberg videos. People are always laughing at me. And throwing things. I don’t remember Adolf getting dogshit thrown at him.

  I have been famous for longer than him. I turned pro (this does not mean that I got my bottom out for money – that was later) in September 1975 which was when I got my first paid gig. That was more than thirty years ago now. Did you read that, Adolf? I HAVE BEEN FAMOUS FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS! And you were only famous from 1928 to 1945. That’s a puny seventeen years you useless twat with a crap moustache. Seventeen is less than half of thirty. SO FUCK OFF ADOLF!