How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

  * It’s also worth mentioning that the fourth standup I ever saw live, after Peter Richardson, Phill Jupitus and Ted Chippington, was Oscar McLennan. In the early days of Alternative Comedy, McLennan was a minor player on the circuit, and I saw him at Warwick Arts Centre in 1985, touring a confrontational and compelling, but largely laugh-free, standup show about a dysfunctional family, before he finally abandoned comedy and recategorised himself as a performance artist, having produced much fine work since. I remember McLennan, thin and wiry, rolling on the floor at the edge of the studio space, lit by a low-level light in semi-darkness, snapping at the feet of the front row, while a song by the psychobilly band Turkey Bones and the Wild Dogs blared. Looking back at some of my recent standup, I think the memory of McLennan was simmering inside all along.

  Again, on some level, I think this approach was a reaction to my experience of the world of commercial theatre. ‘Let’s see the money on the stage,’ the financiers of the West End say, meaning massed ranks of tap-dancers, holograms of Laurence Olivier and gigantic swinging chandeliers. But standup’s strength, it seemed to me, was in its power to suggest, by spoken word alone, the most vivid pictures. So, how about not even being on the stage at all and giving people nothing to look at? The communal experience of being in the room was still exciting, because somewhere I was crouched down, hidden in the dark, mumbling, crying and masturbating.*

  * I had become a great fan of the idea of the empty stage, having always liked the empty frame in television and film. When I scriptedited Harry Hill’s three Channel 4 series in the late nineties, our director was Robin Nash, a bow tie-sporting septuagenarian who had been producing and directing classic BBC light-entertainment shows since the war, and who was a perfect fit for Harry’s faux vaudevillian aesthetic, approaching it without any sense of hipster irony and just doing the best possible job he could with the material. Now, we loved an empty frame, a sketch that ended with the protagonists leaving the set, but Robin simply would not have it as it flew in the face of everything he held dear about television. ‘Television is about moving pictures!’ he would insist. But, in a milieu like television where you are supposed to be looking at something happening, or in a standup gig where you expect there to be someone on the stage, sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing.

  Robin’s rules of light entertainment were an education in themselves, and having worked with him for three years I felt that I could now break them in future with the full knowledge of what I had chosen to do, and I am very grateful to him for that. Another one of his pet hates was any item longer than three minutes. He had been schooled in variety and simply would not have it. ‘But’, I countered one day, throwing one of his own anecdotes back in his face, ‘you were the producer of Top of the Pops when Queen were number one with “Bohemian Rhapsody”, and they all slept at your flat, and that song is about six minutes and presumably you let them do that.’ ‘I did,’ admitted Robin, ‘but I allowed them to perform half of the song each week on subsequent weeks.’ As far as Robin Nash was concerned, this milestone of pop history was, quite simply, ‘too long, dear!’

  *

  Reading ’90s Comedian again, with the benefit of hindsight, the repetition of the phrases, the language and the measured tone in which it was performed give it an almost liturgical quality, and I suspect this is not just coincidence. First of all, it makes sense to address the subject material, Jesus, in a manner in which He is normally discussed. And secondly, I was in a church choir from 1975 to 1980, a position which enabled me to go to the local C of E school with all the proper middle-class children and become educationally privileged, and during this time I sat through at least three services a week of High Anglican ceremony, sometimes more. To this day I can remember the exact intonation of the respective priests as they struggled, week after week, to inject meaning into the words they were obliged to repeat again and again. Canon Raymond Wilkinson, the oldest priest, was the best, and sometimes the choirboys in their pews would tear themselves away from their Michael Moorcock and Isaac Asimov paperbacks to enjoy the high drama of the ceremony. I must have listened to the Communion ritual at least five hundred times during my sentence in the choir. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suggest that some of it went in and shaped the way I look at the world, despite some sour experiences.

  I suspect, reluctantly, that the actual business of being a priest isn’t that different in some ways to the business of being a comedian. My wife took me to her church in Gloucester. I always listen to the way the sermons are pitched with interest. It was a mixed audience – old Irish fellers, lots of displaced Filipinos, Poles, general Catholic diaspora, many without English as a first language. Tough crowd. And the Father’s out of the pulpit, down in the aisle, shouting, jumping around, working the room. The priest that did our marriage course in Stoke Newington faced a similar problem of playing to an incredibly varied demographic. His approach was to speak softly and calmly about some incident or personal story that seemed a million miles away from religion, then, having drawn the punters in, to clobber them with a theological right hook. Most priests are rubbish performers, though, and one wonders how an organisation as wealthy as the Catholic Church, for example, can’t spare some money to school the poor sods in a few basics of stagecraft. That said, the good ones are an inspiration, and let’s not forget a lot of them are turning over a new twenty minutes every week, which makes even the stalwarts of The Comedy Store’s Cutting Edge team look lazy.

  Comparisons between comedians and priests are a cliché of comedy criticism. ‘Bill Hicks was more than a comedian, he was a preacher,’ offers some fuzz-faced pothead loser on every documentary you’ve ever seen about the self-styled ‘Shiva the Destroyer’ of standup. Why is a preacher ‘more’ than a comedian? Why are comedians regarded as being so low in status that the most flattering thing you can do is compare them favourably to almost any other form of performer, public figure or artist? Out in the provinces, beyond the citadel of theatre, the standup comedians that pitch up to councilfunded venues round the country are actually the closest thing punters there get to experiencing real art. In the first three months of 2010, when I was on the road, the only shows in places like the Beck Theatre, Hayes, or the Millfield Theatre, Edmonton, that weren’t hypnotists, mediums or tribute bands were me, Rhod Gilbert and Jo Caulfield: comedians. The only shows that contained original material, any form of authorial voice, had anything to say or explored on even the most basic level any degree of theatre practice were the standup shows.*

  * The comedian Simon Munnery, who invented top-selling computer games for the ZX81 whilst still a teenager, was reviewed, favourably, by the Guardian recently as ‘the closest standup comedy gets to art’, and has pointed out himself that this suggests that however good standup gets, it can never really be art. There is an impassable canyon between the two. Munnery has since decided that rather than it being good comedy, he now wants his work to be categorised as ‘shit art’.

  When I was working on Jerry Springer: The Opera at the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner called Richard Thomas and me in to discuss his anxieties about the end of the first act, which he didn’t feel was working. ‘You have to stop thinking like comedians,’ he said, his apparently endless patience finally exhausted, ‘and start thinking like theatre practitioners.’ It was a slip of the tongue that serves as a reminder of our status. In the world of the arts, a com edian, despite all the skills they pick up in the harshest environments, is never more than ‘trade’. But by the time I’d finished ’90s Comedian, I realised I was more than happy with that.

  ’90s Comedian debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2005 and became the show that gave me a career and convinced me that, while standup’s sandy coastline was clearly mapped, its uncharted interior still hid vast swathes of fertile territory. There was a lifetime in this. Thinking like a comedian meant, as The Goodies told us decades ago, you could do anything, anytime, anywhere. Leave me here, all you legitimate arti
sts, at the tradesman’s entrance, with my can of lager and my notebook. I can draw a magic circle all around myself and do whatever I want. I am a standup comedian. You can’t touch this!

  3

  ’90s Comedian

  A transcript of the show recorded on 10 March 2006 at Chapter Arts, Canton, Cardiff

  PRE-SHOW MUSIC: MILES DAVIS’S KIND OF BLUE*

  * For all performances of ’90s Comedian, the music played in the venue before the show was Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue. The flamboyant composer Richard Thomas, of Jerry Springer: The Opera infamy, and the insolent comedian Simon Munnery, from Watford, got me to listen to this album in the midnineties, when they used it as walk-in music for our Dadaist Edinburgh Fringe cabaret show, Cluub Zarathustra. Richard would argue that anyone, from anywhere in the universe at any point in time, would find Kind of Blue beautiful, and tried to employ it as a yardstick of objective artistic values. Simon, on a more practical level, just used to keep playing it, The Clash’s ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘She’s Your Lover Now’ over and over again, late at night, when I tried to sleep on his filthy floor during a lengthy period of sporadic homelessness, until I accepted that all three were masterpieces just so as to stop his damned dancing.

  The ’90s Comedian set culminated in a half-hour section which, on paper, seemed deliberately and unjustifiably shocking, but my aim, as explained in the previous chapter, was to offer this material up, not brayed at full volume as if it were intended to horrify, but calmly and quietly, without any apparent gloss, as if for your contemplative consideration. Thus, Kind of Blue’s narcoleptic calm seemed utterly appropriate, hopefully chilling the audience, rather than working them towards a frenzy. Also, the album has this air about it – sometimes it seems sinister, sometimes romantic, sometimes cold and deathly, other times warm and fuzzy – and you realise Miles Davis and company somehow created this variable emotional space, ready to be shaped in infinite ways by the ear of the beholder.

  I wanted the last half hour of ’90s Comedian to have the same kind of take-it-or-leave-it, unforced emptiness, so that what you chose to carry away from it – offence, comfort, shock, warmth, hate, love – was up to you. Don’t imagine for a moment here that I am arrogant enough to be making a case for ’90s Comedian being a masterpiece of the calibre of Kind of Blue. I am not. That is for others to say, such as the cyber-critic Steven Bennett, head honcho of the Chortle website and the Val Wilmer of the London open-mic circuit, who named it the greatest standup show of the noughties. But he is merely an expert.

  Again, it was probably a reaction against aspects of the commercial staging of Jerry Springer: The Opera that lodged this take-it-or-leaveit approach in my subconscious. When Richard Thomas’s songs were arranged and underscored by professional, commercial musicaltheatre arrangers, hot from Mamma Mia! and such like, they necessarily made interpretive choices about the intent of the material, scoring a lyric that could have been taken as ironic, sincere, delusional or triumphant with a musicaltheatre texture, such as kitsch strings or jolly staccato guitar. Kind of Blue allows and encourages you, in its glacial space, to decide for yourself how you are going to respond to it. For me, it was an antidote to the shouty certainties of musical theatre and mainstream standup, with its funny faces and jokes.

  The Go Faster Stripe recording of the show had no money to clear existing music, but we needed something on the titles for the DVD. What you hear there is a recording of a little jam I’d done on bass and guitar, with Al ‘The Pub Landlord’ Murray on drums, in about 2001, when we were toying with reconvening my vain sub-Dream Syndicate guitar-drone band, which had played all of three gigs more than a decade previously. Jim Version, of the groups Delicate AWOL and Tells, dubbed it up with some spot effects on a desk at Moat Studios, Stockwell, where the free-jazz improviser Derek Bailey recorded and where various guileless Doctor Who audio dramas were produced. He and Al allowed us to use it as intro music on the DVD for no charge. The choice doesn’t mean anything. It was simply the cheapest music available.

  VOICE OFF: Please, ladies and gentlemen, welcome onto the stage Mr Stewart Lee!*

  * Most times I performed this show I would come out in the dark and, before speaking, draw a bouffon-style circle, as described in the previous chapter, around the stage in chalk, which I would then not refer to until much later in the show. Then I’d bring the lights up and try and launch into the show in an upbeat showbiz style entirely at odds with the borderline performance-art gesture we had just seen. The show transcribed here was recorded in a venue where the angles of the stage and the seats meant no one would have seen the circle if I’d drawn it at the beginning, so I had to wait and make a point of doing it in full view later on. Strangely, as I entered the more uncomfortable areas of the show I did feel safer for having the circle around me, and sometimes I would dare myself to step outside it at key moments, as if to test my invulnerability.

  Thank you. Ah. It’s great to be back.*

  * This gets a laugh at the Cardiff taping. I’m not sure why. Maybe, as I said, it’s because it was an odd, Sunday Night at the London Palladium thing to say having just drawn a chalk circle in the dark. Or maybe it’s because this is a transcription of the second run at the recording, and the audience knew I’d already done the same set in the same venue once that day already.

  Um. Now, I’m going to, I’m going to tell you a story, right, it’ll take about, um, an hour and fifteen minutes, er, which is sort of a bit too long for a show without an interval. But it’s also not long enough to split into two halves. It’s kind of disappointing either way. But it is a little bit too long, so if you need to go for a wee during that, you can do that and I’m not the sort of person that picks on anyone. Also, if you become bored or irritated, er, you can also go. Likewise, if you’re watching this at home on a DVD and you need to go for a wee, you can just pause it and you can go and I’ll have no problem with that. I won’t even know that it’s happening, literally.*

  * This is a terrible introduction to a show, but looking back on it, there’s a sort of point to it. Received wisdom says, ‘Open with your best line,’ but this waffle has the effect of putting the audience at their ease and saying that this isn’t going to be a laugh-a-second, or a confrontational, set. I wanted to relieve the punters of the obligation to laugh, I suppose, and hope that they’d laugh anyway. This tour was booked into some comedy clubs, some arts centres and some theatres, so you had to flag up that it was a long piece in case people were expecting a club-paced set, and I wanted to try and stake out the space as mine.

  Um, so. This is a story about a load of stuff that happened to me last year. Now, on, um, Thursday 7th July – 7/7* – I woke up in London … at about midday, and already I can sense people going, yeah, course you did, Stew, you slept through that major news event because you are a lazy standup comedian, right, but that’s not strictly true. What happened was I didn’t get in till about half past three the night before because I’d been driving back from Lincoln, where I’d been doing what was optimistically billed as an Edinburgh Fringe warm-up gig, right? And what happened in Lincoln was I went out in this little club, about sixty people, and before I could say anything a guy down on my left had made the noise of an animal, which I correctly identified as being a sheep, right. To try and nip that in the bud, to try and stop it from building, I said, ‘A sheep there. And any other noises of any other animals you want to make, I will be able to identify correctly.’ But what happened was that the people of Lincoln took that as an invitation to spend the next thirty-five, forty minutes making the noises of increasingly complex and obscure animals, all of which I was able to identify correctly. Until, by about half past ten, I’d started to wonder if I’d perhaps been wrongly advertised as being a man that would come from London, the city, and correctly identify the animals of Lincolnshire from their sounds alone, in case the people of Lincoln didn’t know what we called them.†

  * In the vapour trail of the 7 July bus
and Tube bombs simply saying ‘7/7’, like the phrase ‘9/11’, had a chilling effect on a room, which created a real tension and focused the audience, especially off the back of the deliberately sloppy opening.

  † This story is entirely true, except that the animal-noises section of the evening probably lasted about twenty minutes, not forty. I exaggerated for comic effect. Again, I am indebted to Australia’s Ned Kelly of comedy, Greg Fleet, here, with his brilliant ability to make up routines about the telling of routines, such as the sharkdeath routine mentioned earlier. But I’d also been listening to Lenny Bruce’s ‘The Palladium’, a twenty-minute bit in which he tells the same story three times to three different audiences under three different sets of circumstances with three different results. Bruce is, sadly, remembered only for his superficially shocking subjects, but his restless formal experimentation also prefigures every supposed advance we’ve made in standup since.

  But eventually all that subsided, and I thought, ‘Right, I’ll get on with my ace new stuff now.’ But before I could do that, a guy down on the right with long curly hair and little round glasses, he started shouting out catchphrases from a television programme I did eleven years ago that as a rule most people have forgotten, right.* So I had to explain to the other confused fifty-nine people in the room that I used to do this thing in 1995 that used to get two million viewers, and then they started to feel like they were watching a performer in decline. OK, so, that’s why I got in late on Wednesday the 6th of July, woke up late Thursday the 7th of July.†