by Stewart Lee
During a week of the package show in Perth, in a soldout 1,000-seater variety theatre, I did my whole half-hour set from behind the curtain, with just my feet showing, as I improvised as many variations as I could think of on an old routine I had written fifteen years ago about arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness. I was reckless. What had caused it? The threat of prosecution for Jerry Springer? Starting standup again and loving it? Jumping off the Auckland Sky Tower? Seeing The Aristocrats? Filling a bedpan with my own blood? Wondering, if only for a night or so, about dying? Being far from home for so long? Or eating only potatoes for five months? Whatever, I was not quite myself.*
* My onstage confidence was also increased dramatically by a pair of trousers I had found in Wellington in New Zealand. The Lee jeans company were experimenting, in the deep southern hemisphere, with a new trouser product, which sadly never made it out to Western civilisation as a whole, called the Stovepipe Jean. They looked like a kind of cross between power-pop skinny keks and a renaissance fool’s leggings, and were made of a stretchy denim– rubber polymer. I was able to squeeze into the largest size, a 34-inch waist. Contrasted with my thickening belly and a pair of big boots, these superb trousers had the effect of making me look as if I hadn’t realised I couldn’t quite carry them off, and seemed, in my mind, to allow me a greater arrogance in my performance, as any supposed superiority was being undercut by my subtly inappropriate and quietly ridiculous trousers. The Stovepipe Jeans saw me through the whole ’90s Comedian tour until my mother, taking it upon herself to sterilise my presumably smelly trousers in a hot wash without my permission during a weekend visit, somehow managed to dissolve them, and the already weakened gusset irreparably disintegrated. It proved impossible to replace the Lee Stovepipe Jeans, the production of which had been discontinued, but I think these trousers played a crucial role in helping me consolidate my clown.
On a west coast layover at a little town called Exmouth, staying in a deserted American air-force base abandoned at speed after 9/11 and now a motel, we jumped out of a spotter boat to go swimming with forty-foot-long whale sharks as they migrated north. The eco-tourism guide got in the sea with us and shot footage on an underwater camera. The antipodeans, Frank Woodley and Jesse Griffin, were confident and graceful deep-water swimmers. I, our tour manager Edwina Lunn and the American comic Jackie Kashian weren’t entirely at home. But I splashed alongside a whale shark all the same, even if I was spluttering through my snorkel. Months later, I received a DVD of the edited footage of us all cautiously trailing the mottled giants, set to a soundtrack of dance music and ambient house. That wasn’t what I was hearing in my head. At one point, I accidentally got above a whale shark in the water, which you’re not supposed to do, and he just sank, as they warned us the whale sharks would, slowly, slowly, deeper and deeper, until he had disappeared into the dark. All I heard was a cold and beautiful silence.
On my last week on the road, like the sinking shark, I’d finally had enough of Australia. In Perth, I went to a record store to get the new album by Oasis, who I had never previously liked, and then I went to a British novelty shop and got some Bovril, which I had never previously drunk. I am sure there were things I should have been visiting in Perth – museums of genocide and islands full of rats. But I stayed in the hotel, listened to Oasis, drank Bovril and dreamed of England, where my heart lay. There was work to do at home.
At some point while I was away my management asked for a name for the show for Edinburgh. I called it ’90s Comedian because it made me laugh, it being 2005, but as the set started to come together I wish I’d been able to give it a better name. ’90s Comedian was looking like being one smooth through-line of a single story, drawn from the physical and mental traumas of the previous few months. If I fudged the dates of my stomach illness, I could blame it on the stress caused by persecution by the Christian right. Then I could use the invasive probing of my anus in the colonoscopy I was subsequently required by the hospital to endure as a way into the second half of the proposed show. And the second half of the show would be a version of the drunken religious encounter I had improvised under the influence of Phil Nicol and The Aristocrats onstage in Auckland, during which I planned to describe vomiting repeatedly on Christ, in an attempt to explore genuine limits of expression, rather than the imagined ones the Christian right had extrapolated from exaggerated reports of the content of Jerry Springer: The Opera.
I did not conceive these two sections of the show as a Rorschach mirror image of each other, but I doubt that the second half of the show, in which I am invited by Jesus to use him as a receptacle for my vomit, would have worked so well, if at all, had I not chosen to show myself suffering my own rectal invasion, due to an illness exacerbated by pressure from the religious right, in the early stages of the piece. The gruesome subject material would also give me a chance to experiment with an aspect of The Aristocrats I’d enjoyed enormously, namely the notion that the piling up of obscenity might reach a point where it became transcendental, or even beautiful, and reveal the objections to our opera for what they were – subjective opinions about material which was inevitably altered by context and intent. But I also liked the fact that The Aristocrats was about comics talking about jokes, and I wanted to give people the same pleasure the film gave me, of letting us see behind the scenes of how a joke works. Even if the show was formed as one massive overarching idea, I still wanted it to be just a joke. I was newly proud to be a comedian once more. And whatever meanings might be laid on top of the show, I wanted to end it by reminding everyone that I was a standup comedian and this was a piece of standup comedy. Not a piece of theatre. Or an opera. Even if the arts editors of the Guardian and the Independent were suddenly fans.
It was a chance remark by the nurse who gave me that actual colonoscopy, soon after my return from Australia, which provided the structural device that allowed me to do all that I hoped to.
The behaviour of the doctor and nurses performing my colonoscopy was so strange anyway that I was already filing it away for further use, but when the nurse said I couldn’t possibly be a comedian, because a comedian should look funny, like Tommy Cooper, I realised I could lead into the stomach-illness story via the real colonoscopy story, and crank in a whole wedge of material I’d been sitting on for a decade, if I just pretended that, instead of Tommy Cooper, she’d said Joe Pasquale. For, if I could just crowbar my dormant Joe Pasquale bit into this story somehow, then I would have a show.
I’d been thinking about Joe Pasquale since 1995, ever since I wrote the following article for the Sunday Times Culture section.* But be warned: it describes a different and long-forgotten world, a world I described at the beginning of the book, where the possibility of ‘alternative’ comics crossing over to the mainstream was largely undreamed of, and where the idea of ‘one of us’ appearing in the Royal Variety Performance was ludicrous. Today, Michael McIntyre, Rhod Gilbert and Steven K. Amos have all achieved serious career boosts by doing just that, as has the Queen herself, who remains as popular as ever. Joe Pasquale, however, has just been fingered by Frank Skinner for stealing his roller-coaster routine on a poor new ITV standup show called Comedy Rocks.
* See also here how the twenty-six-year-old me, flattered to have been asked to write for a proper grown-up newspaper, is struggling selfconsciously to write in a respectable journalistic voice.
It is 1988 in some underground, underlit London comedy club. A prematurely aged Irishman stands onstage, dressed in a shabby long brown mac, all bloodhound eyes and a droopy Wild West moustache, and utters another in a beautifully understated seam of immaculate one-liners. ‘A lot of people say to me, “Hey you”,’ pauses, makes almost imperceptibly small gesture of dismissal, ‘“what are you doing in my garden?”’ The audience takes a couple of seconds to catch up, and then dissolves into hysterics.
The man is Michael Redmond. The joke defines him perfectly as an odd, outsider character and hints at a host of other weird situations as yet unrealised. For once,
the audience is made to use its own imagination. There are no clues, or helpful pointers. The line has little in common with most of the material of the other ‘alternative’ standup comedians of the time; it doesn’t ask us to share an experience, as when three of the same bus come at once; it doesn’t contain any easy cultural signifiers, such as references to 1970s television or the forgotten playground rituals and newsagent confectionery of childhood; it isn’t ‘about’ anything. The everyday phrase, ‘hey you’, is disrupted and made bizarre by being followed by the unexpected ‘what are you doing in my garden’. It is, to invoke a now wasted phrase, a moment of pure comic genius. Of course, appearing in print does no justice to it; it relies on the nuances of performance.
I first heard the ‘what are you doing in my garden’ joke in 1987, when I was 19. My friend Terry, who had been to see a proper London comedy gig, did it in a student show and cheekily let everybody think it was his own. The next time I heard it was when I shared a bill with Michael Redmond himself, in 1989, trembling with nervous admiration. And I heard it for the last time just last month, when mainstream comic Joe Pasquale told it for the delight of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at the Royal Variety Performance.
Pasquale’s act that evening was a triumph, the undoubted highlight of the show, and he worked the Dominion Theatre audience with a skill that made the huge venue seem intimate. Despite learning his trade on the mainstream circuit and working with scriptwriters rather than producing all his own material as most of the Alternative Comedians do, Pasquale feels he has more in common with the Goons than with the 1970s club acts such as Mike Read and Ben Elton’s bête noir, Bernard Manning. He’s looked past them to rediscover a delightful and engaging brand of Tommy Cooperesque silliness that stretches way back to the last days of music-hall tradition. But Pasquale did use some material that seemed familiar, with lines and visual jokes similar to a number that have been performed by ‘alternative’ acts such as Martin Soan (a balloon-modelling bit involving a catwalk-style wearing of an uninflated balloon), Boothby Graffoe (‘My girlfriend said, “I can’t see you any more.” I said, “I’m behind the settee.”’), Arthur Smith (the ‘I Know a Song That’ll Get on Your Nerves’ song) and, of course, Michael Redmond.
Soan, who says Pasquale also does a routine with a tiny voodoo doll of himself that’s like one Soan made up in the 1980s, finds this upsetting. ‘Thinking about it gives me the shivers. Not because I don’t think Pasquale’s any good, but because it’s just depressing when you see him up there. But he may have done it entirely innocently.’
Historically, so-called ‘alternative’ comedians, with their post-punk aspirations towards some vain ideal of artistic integrity, have been as quick to demonise the old club-scene comics as amoral thieving magpies as the club-scene comics are to paint them as humourless middle-class lefties who wouldn’t know a decent joke if they saw one. But now hostilities are ceasing and both camps sit comfortably alongside each other on Gag Tag, Jack Dee’s Saturday Night, Fantasy Football and Have I Got News for You.
Traditionally, mainstream acts aren’t precious about material in the way that their Alternative Comedy cousins are. To them, jokes are just jokes, naturally occurring phenomena, like wind or rain, resistant to the abstract notion of ownership. When London circuit comedian Nick Wilty found himself doing warm-up for Granada TV’s special of the old mainstream show The Comedians, in 1993, one of the performers gave him a lift back to London. Entering the Blackwall Tunnel, the comedian said to Wilty: ‘You had some good lines there, I can’t wait to put them in my act.’ ‘He wasn’t trying to hide anything,’ remembers Wilty, ‘he just genuinely had no idea that I’d be pissed off. He didn’t appreciate that my material was written by me.’ Backstage on The Comedians, the acts bicker about who is going to do which jokes and flip coins for the honour of performing any new gags that they’ve all heard.
The gag-writers who supply mainstream acts with their jokes obviously share this outlook. London clubs are regularly full of bit-writers and researchers scribbling down notes, and last November Stan Nelson, the floor manager of The Comedy Store, actually ejected a man who was surreptitiously taping the evening’s performances. Pasquale, of course, uses writers, but said that he wouldn’t wittingly use someone else’s act. ‘It’s impossible to know where to stop, though,’ he adds, ‘you get so many people telling you jokes.’ Ideally, routines as told by comedians, as opposed to jokes told by blokes in the pub and cab drivers, will reach a stage where they are impossible to plagiarise. In the year 2525, the futuristic supa-comedian in his silver suit will have developed an act so distinctive and steeped in his own individual specialised world view, that his lines would be incomprehensible in the mouth of anyone else, and we can see the beginning of this evolution in the work of Harry Hill, Simon Munnery and, er, Eddie Izzard. In the meantime, most jokes are still viewed as part of the public domain.
On the ‘alternative’ circuit the obvious fallacy of the spontaneous generation of material, authorless and fully formed, out of thin air, is vilified, and any duplication of material is seen as theft, even when it could realistically be mere coincidence. This is especially true of topical humour, dealing as it does in a limited range of personality or news-based observations. Most satire has a crushing air of inevitability about it. A member of The Comedy Store’s ‘Cutting Edge’ team, a weekly newsevents based show, told me Spitting Image had stolen his idea of Frank Bruno doing pantomime routines in a boxing ring. But there are thousands of people making a living out of topical humour in Britain today, and Frank Bruno is only known for two things: pantomimes and boxing. It wouldn’t take an infinite number of monkeys to think of these two elements and come up with the same result. In fact, it would take two monkeys, perhaps sharing one typewriter.
Musical comedian Jim Tavare says he can remember the exact moment of the birth of ‘what are you doing in my garden?’ In the summer of 1987, he and Michael Redmond had been performing at the Screaming Beavers comedy club in Macclesfield and were staying at Tavare’s parents’ house in Prestbury. Looking out of the window while they were sitting in the lounge drinking tea, Jim, Michael and Jim’s brother saw a distressed man running around in Jim’s parents’ garden. According to Jim, they rang the local mental hospital, who sent someone around to pick up the escapee. Later that evening, Redmond wrote his legendary gag. Redmond himself, however, has no memory whatsoever of this peculiar incident, which made such an impression on Tavare, but recalls the thought processes by which he arrived at the line. ‘I’d been worrying at the idea for ages. I thought of “Hey, you, what are you doing in my kitchen?”’ he says, ‘but that seemed like too much of an invasion of privacy, too threatening. I changed it to “garden” and it worked.’
In contrast, Pasquale’s manager Michael Vine says that, as far as he is concerned, ‘a new gag is only a gag you haven’t heard before’. With regard to ‘what are you doing in my garden?’, he says he ‘associates the line with the public domain’, and that it seems to suit Pasquale’s bumbling innocent persona perfectly. It is true that when Pasquale and Redmond both tell the joke the image conjured up is quite different. On seeing Redmond in your garden you would think: ‘Wow! A tired Jesse James is in my garden. Why?’ On seeing Pasquale, you would think: ‘Hey! There’s Joe Pasquale from Thames TV’s He’s Pasquale, I’m Walsh. And he’s in my garden! Whatever can he want?’ As for Pasquale himself, he has an innocent explanation for how ‘what are you doing in my garden?’ found its way into his act. In 1993, he was playing Silly Billy in Jack and the Beanstalk in pantomime. Phil Nice, the former double-act partner of playwright Arthur Smith, was the pantomime dame. On discovering Silly Billy planting beans alone onstage, Nice would shout: ‘Hey you! What are you doing in my garden?’ The following year, Pasquale had the idea to use this line of dialogue as an actual gag in his Blackpool summer-season standup set. Coincidentally, the sound technician told him it was his favourite joke, and he had been entertaining his mates in the pub with it
for years already, although even he didn’t know where it had come from. And, after a day on the phone, vainly chasing the flickering spark of the creative imagination, I, too, was none the wiser, and what has become perhaps one of the most compelling mysteries of the 20th century must remain unsolved.
For me, hearing ‘what are you doing in my garden?’ for the first time opened up a vast world of potential comic possibility, of things that could be funny without really relating to anything, bypassing logic and satire, and crudity or stereotyping, and kitschy cultural references. Even Vine is moved to admit: ‘It’s just one of those lines, so simplistic. You think, “Why couldn’t I have thought of that?”’ Indeed.
And so, to any young comedians reading this, a warning. If you are sitting at your window at night, trying to find a better word than ‘kitchen’, and you see a figure in the garden, do not allow them to look at what you are writing. Just tap the window and say: ‘Hey you …’ (Sunday Times, 1995)
