How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

  † 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 standup – 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 midnineties. Greg is responsible for much of the whole tone of contemporary standup 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 standup 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 standup 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 standup 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!

  And again, you’ll notice there a list of three things. Really they ought, comedically, to build. But the balaclava helmet was a disappointment. It didn’t get the laugh one would be hoping for there. Umm … And I knew that was going to happen, right, ’cause like I say, I ran this show in Edinburgh for a month last August. And I thought – I’ll be honest with you, Glasgow – I thought the balaclava helmet was going to get a big laugh. Ironically, I’ve been touring this. The only place the balaclava helmet did get a big laugh was in Aldershot, which is a military town, so they probably have a different relationship with it.* But on the whole, people don’t find it funny. Now I was confused, because for me, the balaclava helmet is one of those inherently absurd items. I thought it would be a good topper there, but it never works.

  * This is true.

  So the first kind of week of the run, the month run, I kept swapping the order around, I was going, ‘Perhaps you’d like to talk to one of my colleagues, the balaclava helmet, mitten, cardigan. Cardigan, balaclava helmet, mitten,’ whatever. And after weeks, still nothing … It never got any laughs. Then, after about ten days, um, one of my friends in the audience, the Actor Kevin Eldon, who you may remember from Channel 4’s Packing Them In in the early nineties – the best, the best work he did.* And erm … I said to him, ‘Why do you think that isn’t working?’ And he said, ‘Well, the problem is, all the items in your list are made of wool. And the tea cosy has already said to the customer that it won’t be able to help him on account of the fact that it is made of wool. So for the tea cosy to suggest to the customer that he seeks assistance from other exclusively woollen items, you know it simply adds insult to injury, it makes the situation worse.’†

  * I met the Actor Kevin Eldon, as Richard Herring and I always insist on calling him, when he and I started out on the standup circuit at around the same time in 1989, I think at a club called Oranje Boom Boom above the De Hems pub in Soho. You can look for it, it is still there. He was thirty at the time, which seemed impossibly old to me, and I wondered what he had been doing with his life. The Actor Kevin Eldon is always a great comedy problem solver, a good person to ask why something is or isn’t working, but he is a Buddhist, and conceitedly believes that he has lived a good life and so will be reincarnated as a rich king or a pop star or something.

  † Critics often talk about me ‘deconstructing’ comedy. I don’t think it’s as complicated as that. I just think it’s funny to take a joke and show the working out in the margins. If you remove the surprise of the punchline by telegraphing it, deliberately, then instead of waiting to laugh at the pay-off the punters have to enjoy the texture of the extended set-up. In theory.

  So I said, ‘Yeah, I’d never thought of that, you know. What shall I do?’ And he said, ‘Well, just think of three things that aren’t made of wool and you’ll be all right.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, I will, right, but I won’t write them down. I’ll come out every night and I’ll just make them up. I’ll exist in the moment. I’ll trust it to chance. I’ll improvise like Eddie Izzard … pretends to do.’ And … no! And, when you’ve tried to do it, you realise why he doesn’t. It’s hard. It’s hard to do. It’s much easier to just go ‘er’ in every sentence and give the illusion of spontaneity.*

  And so … So I came out … let it go, let it go! … so I came out the fi rst night, I went, ‘Yeah, perhaps you’d like to talk to one of my colleagues.’ And I said, you know, ‘The stick, the wood.’ And then I said, ‘The toaster.’ And again, there was no laughs. I thought, ‘Why’s that?’ And I went home, and I thought, ‘Yeah, the problem is the toaster is an electrical item and people are thinking, “Is that working in Currys or is it for sale there?”’

  Yeah, but I was chasing the problem down. Basically, I realised I needed three things that were neither electrical nor woollen. Right. But it’s quite hard to think of that.

  Sir, think of a thing.

  * It puzzled me that Eddie Izzard was always reviewed positively in the nineties fo
r his supposed improvisational abilities, when in fact his real skill was to make his prepared ideas look as if they were utterly spontaneous, thereby involving everyone in the room, even in massive stadiums, in a succession of beautiful moments of apparent conception that all seemed to be unrepeatable. I can’t fake things. I have no acting skills. I have to build actual improvisations in to achieve the effect, and over the course of a long run I can feel the scripted sections of a show ossify and stiffen.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Weather vane.

  Weather vane.

  AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: The act of cunnilingus.

  Weather vane. The act of cunnilingus. And …

  AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: A banana.

  What?

  AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: A banana.

  A banana. Weather vane, the act of cunnilingus and a b– … Well, admittedly, those are, those are quite good. They’re not electrical nor wool. And weather vane, banana – good. The act of cunnilingus is particularly good ’cause that takes us into an area where actual concepts, not just things and objects, are working in a shop. It’s certainly …*

  * Whatever happened here, it didn’t really matter. If the audience’s suggestions were funny, that worked, and if they weren’t, it was also fine. Something would come up. I suppose it was interesting in trying to get them to think as comedians might, to try and give them a sense of how some apparently random objects seem utterly apposite and some don’t, and to show them how this is almost alchemical, beyond reason.

  I was in Aspen, Colorado, two weeks ago, in America. You beat them hands down. Their first two suggestions were a scarf and a kettle.* Woollen and electrical, straight … Although, to be fair, this wasn’t the part of the set they liked least, you know? After the nine-one-one opening, a lot of the American audience had been shaken off in, in Aspen. If anything, arguably the New York warm-ups were worse. But …

  * These are the real suggestions of the Aspen Comedy Festival audience, many of them TV professionals. Having seen this show in Edinburgh, the Aspen Comedy Festival booked it for a short run in a room in an oxygen-free skiing hotel high above the snowline, and some short warm-ups in New York clubs the weekend before. The New York clubs were all awful, full of dreadful hack comics trying to hone seven-minute sets about nothing into tight three-minute sets about even less for Letterman and such like, standing in front of paintings of brick walls while bored people ignored them on a two-drink minimum. Needless to say, I went down to utter silence. I can’t do anything in seven minutes any more. I don’t have the skills. I wouldn’t have had time to do the 9/11 stuff there, even if I had wanted to, but I wonder if I’d ever run the show in New York, whether I’d have had the guts to do it. Would the risk of offence be worth the possibly cathartic outcome?

  It’s weird, ’cause, ’cause about two weeks into Edinburgh, some kid emailed me and he went, ‘You know that bit you do about people being so bored they wear tea cosies as hats?’ I went, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘Um, there’s a Spike Milligan or a Billy Connolly joke like that,’ he said, ‘from 1972.’ So, basically, I must have kind of remembered that and copied it.*

  * As the run progressed a number of people claimed this was either a Billy Connolly or a Spike Milligan line. See? It turns out Giles Clarke didn’t think up that phrase.

  So that bit, the first half of it is plagiarised and the second half doesn’t really work.*

  * For me it’s funny to go on this long, quasi-improvised, metatextural riff about the tea-cosy joke, and then to just piss the thing away into nothing at the end. In fairness, though, I can also understand why people might feel their time had been wasted. Having sat in on the edits of three live DVDs and a TV series, I have nothing but sympathy, generally, for people who find my work intolerable.

  But I was making a number of crass generalisations about Americans there. I don’t really believe any of them and I did it for comic effect. And I don’t understand how anyone can have a kind of generalised view about another nation or race. I certainly don’t, and I think it’s because I’m, I’m different to a lot of you. I’m not necessarily better, but I am … I’m different. And I’m better, let’s face it.*

  * I often read on the internet and in newspapers that I am arrogant. I am arrogant, I admit, but when I say things like this onstage I have chosen to be arrogant for comic effect, and hope in part that the comments reflect badly on me, creating a distancing effect between me and the audience. I hope they admire the comedy, but I’d rather they didn’t enjoy the show just because they think they liked me as a person. It seems cheap.

  But … But … And I think it’s because I feel a little bit kind of removed from your human society, ’cause I’m actually, I’m adopted, I’m an adopted man* … so I’m suspicious of notions of identity or nationhood. For example, I grew up thinking that I was English, right, but about two years ago I found out – and this is true – I found out that my real father is Scottish, right, which of course means that I’m Scottish, ’cause, as you’ll know, Scottishness is passed on through the male genes.† Like a disability. And, er … it … it overwhelms all female chromosomes. And that’s why there are no Scottish women, are there? There’s no Scottish women. There are men in kilts, but that’s just nature trying to find its own level.

  * Interestingly, about 50 per cent of the time the phrase ‘adopted man’, as opposed to the less specific ‘adopted’, would get a tentative laugh, allowing me to go off on improvisations about the specific age ranges of adoptees that seem the funniest. I think the phrase ‘adopted man’ was funny because it suggested the image of a fully grown man being delivered to a hopeful couple’s door, perhaps with his record collection and personal artefacts in tow. I think it also contains an unconscious echo of one of Harry Hill’s first jokes, back in the early nineties, when we were on bills together and he was called Harry Hall. I forget what the set-up was, but the punchline was ‘I am a diabetic man and have missed my lunch.’ To me, this always seemed much funnier than it would have done if the pay-off had been ‘I am a diabetic and have missed my lunch.’ The word ‘man’ is so utterly unnecessary here that I find it amusing.

  Here in the age of Twitter I am continually reading the wise words of Twittering comedy writers who speak of the incredible skill and satisfaction of honing their witty jokes down to the bare minimum of information, so as to maximise the value of the few characters the medium allows. Presumably, free-floating and yet inexplicably powerful words like ‘man’, as it occurs in Harry’s joke above, will be the first casualties of this charmless, technology-led approach to what’s funny, Graham Linehan.

  † I was adopted and am under the impression that my real father was Scottish. Some comics, and some whole schools of comedy, and most American standups, base their routines on a specific regional, racial or national identity, and the accepted behavioural connotations that come with it. Many of the most successful American comedians elaborate upon this idea by pretending that, or describing how, each of their parents is from a different racial or cultural background, and they are often able to derive whole seven-minute sets from the collision of these two presumed sets of different exaggerated social values or genetic traits, often involving the consumption of specific food items or the practice of particular sexual acts, presumed to be unique to the culture or race chosen. I am happy to be without portfolio. I have chosen to become what I am, a stereotype of the kind of middle-class arts graduate that would live in a beatnik enclave of northeast London, and I have chosen the character I portray to the public. You will notice there is precious little personal information in this book. This very paragraph, going into extremely dull and lengthy detail about a not especially interesting comedy trope, is in itself a diversionary tactic. I am no one. No one.

  And if a Scottish man wants to breed, of course, you have to travel south of the border. Normally, you get as far as a major English railway station, get off the train, lie down in a gutter, drunk, and hope some pollen lands on you. And … and I can say that, remember, b
ecause I … technically, I am Scotch. Yeah, Scotch, yeah.* Genetically, if not culturally.

  * I can remember the rough point at which I learned that the Scots do not like to be called Scotch, and have found it a funny word ever since. It was sometime during the period I lived with my grandparents as a child, 1971–5, and we were watching an episode of the Edwardian drama series Upstairs, Downstairs in the back room, which was yet to be knocked through into one big rectangular space, the front room still being a parlour, where tea was served on Sundays, with radishes and tomatoes from grandpa’s garden, and antimacassars hugged the backs of the armchairs in case of a visit from some heavily Brylcreemed freemason. In this edition of Upstairs, Downstairs, the family had gone to stay in Scotland, and the servant played by Pauline Collins said to the Gordon Jackson butler bloke, while he was polishing a glass, something like, ‘You must be delighted to be in Scotland, Mr Hudson, what with you being Scotch and all,’ to which he stonily replied, ‘It’s Scots.’ I have no other memories of Upstairs, Downstairs whatsoever. Who’d have thought, that thirty-five years later, the late Gordon Jackson’s words would come back to taunt his countrymen from out of my sneering English mouth?

  But I think that, even though I grew up thinking I was English, I think I always knew that I was one of you, you know. ’Cause I’d go into school, Monday mornings, and people’d go, ‘Did you see the sport at the weekend, Stew? The brilliant sport that all men must like, with England winning in it? It was good, wasn’t it?’ And I’d go, ‘No, in fact it filled me feelings of revulsion and disgust.’* Then they’d go to me, ‘What about the rich tapestry, the tableau of English culture and history? Do you take no pleasure in that?’ And I’d go, ‘No. In fact, the whole notion of English culture just makes me feel kind of mentally, physically and spiritually bereft.’ And they’d go, ‘What about the English language, the tongue of Shakespeare, Shelley, Blake? Churchill? Does that not stir some residual national pride in you?’ And I’d go, ‘No. In fact, whenever I hear an English accent, I have to be physically sick.’ And I would hear my own voice answering their question and I would start vomiting as I spoke.