by Stewart Lee
* The catchphrase was ‘Moon on a stick!’ from the second, disappointing series of BBC2’s Fist of Fun, from 1996, nearly ten years earlier. In Fist of Fun, in which I was very much the Syd Little of the Lee and Herring double act, I was always described by Richard Herring as wanting the moon on a stick, a metaphor for having unreasonably high explanations and a phrase that is still often yelled at me out of passing cars to this day. In the last episode of the series I was given a huge moon on a stick by Herring, about fifty feet in diameter, which I denied ever having wanted.
Soon after this, This Morning’s Judy Finnigan, clearly grumpy at being forced to have us on her show, was obligated to introduce a clip of this sequence during a TV interview. With hollow and weary eyes, Finnigan turned to us, looking sickened and bored like a hot and bothered polar bear in a rundown Soviet zoo, and said, ‘It’s comedy about nothing really, isn’t it, your stuff?’ – a quote we subsequently and delightedly used on posters.
† Being a sometimes beloved but essentially obscure cult figure has enough drawbacks to make me realise I would never be able to cope with actual fame. Even in 2005, there’d always be a tiny minority of an audience who were audibly thrilled to see me, and their excitement made the people who were in the room but didn’t know me at all feel resentful, as if they had been judged for not being up to speed. To this day, in a pub, for example, someone will very occasionally come out of a dark corner and ask me for my autograph. Then other people, usually men at the bar, become enraged somehow that they do not know who I am, and begin to say, ‘Are you famous then? Why haven’t I heard of you?’ in a threatening way, as if I have deliberately orchestrated the whole embarrassing encounter just to annoy them.
And the first thing I did on 7/7 when I woke up was I checked all my emails, right. And the first one in was from an American comic called Jackie Kashian that I’d worked with in Perth in June. And it was just one line, it just said, ‘Are you all right?’ So I emailed back, ‘Yes, fine thanks, how are you?’ And the next one was from a New Zealand comic called Ben Hurley who I’d worked with in Auckland in May, same thing, one line, ‘Are you all right?’ So I emailed back, ‘Yes, fine thanks, how are you?’ There was about fifteen more, all saying, ‘Are you all right?’ Then I checked my text messages, there was about twenty there, from all over Britain, all over the world, from Roger in Canada, Graham in the Philippines, Jess in New York, all saying ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are you all right?’*
* All these enquiries were true. I found if I repeated ‘Are you all right’ enough times, with enough conviction, then the switch into the sentence ‘Now, as you may or may not know, I did have quite a difficult year’ would get a big laugh. I think this was mainly because elements of my life, namely my harassment alongside Jerry Springer: The Opera’s composer Richard Thomas by the religious right, had become a top national news story, and one that most comedy audiences were aware of. Thus, the laugh here is coming from an understatement, from what isn’t said. When your life becomes a news story that everyone knows about, you can use it as an unspoken punchline.
Now, as you may or may not know, I did have quite a difficult year. Um. I had to go into hospital in February.* I’ve also been going a bit deaf.† And in January, because I was the director of the controversial theatre piece Jerry Springer: The Opera, I became the co-focus of a hate campaign led by 65,000 rightwing born-again Christians … resulting in the threat of prosecution in the High Court for blasphemy and the collapse of four years of work into financial non-viability. So it had been a difficult year.‡ And while I was touched that all of my friends had chosen to enquire after my welfare, it did seem strange that they had all chosen the same morning to do that, right.§
* Diverticulitis.
† Tinnitus. Hyperacusis. The specialist said, ‘Some frequencies are gone. You may experience difficulty hearing the voices of women.’ If I were a different kind of comedian, there would definitely be a routine in this unintentionally ambivalent sentence.
‡ Understatement.
§ This is true.
So like I said, I had to go into hospital in February, right. I had this thing called diverticulitis, right. That’s where your stomach starts to kind of poison you. Normally, only very old people get it, but if you’ve been a standup comedian for seventeen years, drinking heavily and eating mainly Ginsters pies in the night, erm, that can move it on, right. So I had to go into hospital in North London, and while I was in there, I had to have an endoscopy, right. That’s where they insert a camera on a fibre-optic tube into your anus.* Now, on that occasion, Cardiff, it was my anus. But it would be your anus† if it were you that were undergoing the endoscopy, right, because in medical science as a rule there’s a direct relation between who is the subject of a procedure and the information that the doctors are trying to find out. That’s why you can’t send a friend along instead. OK? Even if they really love investigative surgery, er, it has to be you. So … It’s frivolous, anything else …
* This procedure is actually called a colonoscopy. But ‘endoscopy’ always seemed to work better onstage, perhaps because it didn’t include the telegraphing prefix ‘colon’.
† Here I stress the words ‘your anus’ so that it sounds as if I am going to make some old wordplay gag about ‘your anus’ and Uranus, the celestial body. But then I don’t do that, so there’s a suggestion of a set-up for a feeble joke that is never even delivered. As I was saying these words I always had at the back of my mind an incredible and bizarre geography lesson, which I was not even in, but which had become legendary at our school.
A beloved but slightly camp geography teacher asked the class wag, a tall and beautifully eloquent black boy, to identify a South American country on the blackboard. ‘Uruguay,’ said the boy, but pronounced it ‘You’re a gay.’ The class laughed. ‘I think you’ll find it’s Uruguay,’ said the teacher. ‘No, sir,’ said the wit, ‘I think you’ll find you’re a gay.’
This is an example of the pathetic genius of teenage boys, for whom no situation is too contrived to serve as a launch pad for some idiotic and offensive piece of wordplay, and it is a mindset I continually try to channel in order to offset my natural tendency towards incredible comic sophistication and maturity. Remember when you were thirteen and you ran as fast as you could just because you could run fast? Remember when you were thirteen and your first pint of cider tasted of all your tomorrows yet to be? Remember when you were thirteen and you always pronounced Uruguay as ‘you’re a gay’, just for the sheer pleasure of it, just to show that you were free from Their Rules?
So I was being wheeled in there, and I was lying on a slab, and I was naked except for this kind of thirdlength, floral-print hospital gown, right. Goes down to about there. Now, I’ve never understood the design of them, because as a man, right, I’m not ashamed of my breasts, OK? What I want concealed are my genitals: my penis, my two testicles.* They’re the source of my shame. But the design of the thirdlength, floral-print hospital gown makes it look as if I’ve chosen to expose them. In a coquettish fashion.† Which I would never do, I wouldn’t do that.
* I enjoyed saying ‘penis’ and ‘testicles’ here, instead of ‘cock’ and ‘balls’. Sometimes I would say ‘my testicles. My two testicles’, but only if the room was cooking, obviously. Now that even children’s TV presenters are free to say ‘cock’ and ‘balls’ with impunity, or at least imply them with their tight figure-hugging garments, it seems much funnier anyway to say ‘penis’ and ‘testicles’. And how much more vulnerable do the stringy ‘testicles’ and the floppy ‘penis’ sound than the consonant-crowned ‘cock’ and ‘balls’? There’s no shame in having a cock, in having balls. But having a penis and some t
esticles sounds awful, like an ailment, or as if a deep-sea eel and some dangly pasta have been unceremoniously stapled to a man’s groin, before he is forced to dance naked in front of a Liverpudlian hen party in a subterranean Greek restaurant.
† What a great word ‘coquettish’ is. I wish I could claim to have thought of using it myself, but I think I have leeched it from Richard Herring, whom I seem to remember using the word in an unexpected context in one of his shows, and who has a great feel for the untapped comic value of such unusual words, as befits a man who spent most of the nineties playing Scrabble against himself and weeping.
So I was being wheeled in there, I was lying on a slab, and I was naked except for this kind of thirdlength, floral-print hospital gown. And I had a fibre-optic tube inserted into my lubricated anus. And then suddenly out of nowhere, and this is true, the doctor said, ‘Oh, I see from your notes that you’re a famous comedian.’ And I said to him, ‘There’s a problem with that sentence, isn’t there, Doctor? Which is that if the phrase “You are a famous comedian” is preceded by the qualifying phrase, “I see from your notes …” then I’m not, and I’m not anyway, really.’* And then the nurse interrupted rather aggressively. She went, ‘Well, I’ve never heard of you,’ as if it were I that had arrogantly introduced this vain notion into the endoscopic procedure, which was not the case. I hadn’t done.† So I said to her, ‘Well, I am a comedian.’ And she said, ‘Well, you don’t look like a comedian.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘A comedian should look funny.’‡
* The doctor did say that my notes said I was ‘a famous comedian’, but I didn’t make the witty reply above. I just said I wasn’t. Comedy is all about timing, and sadly my witty responses to things are usually thought of days, weeks, even years later. As John Hegley concludes in his poem ‘The StandUp Comedian Sits Down’, ‘the comedian comes up with the line so apt and incisive/ that any further heckling is redundant/ unfortunately he comes up with it on the bus home’. I hope that asking someone undergoing a colonoscopy if they are a famous comedian was a deliberate attempt to distract me from the pain in my small anus, rather than just being an incredibly inappropriate thing to do at a very personal moment.
† ‘Vain’ is, I think, another word which Richard Herring became fixated on and which I now find hugely useful. When we first lived together in London in the late eighties, on subsistence rations unknown to today’s credit-card laden generation of would-be artists, Rich would, for example, accuse me of being ‘a vain man’ if I had a sausage with my baked beans, rather than just eating the naked beans alone.
‡ This conversation is recorded verbatim. Even as it was happening, and even though I was in some discomfort, this was a rare example of being aware that a routine was writing itself before my very eyes, and anus.
Now, at the time I was lying naked on a slab in a thirdlength, floral-print hospital gown, with a fibre-optic tube inserted into my lubricated anus. If I’d seen that, I would have laughed. But I suppose if you work in endoscopy, you run the risk of becoming jaded.
So I said to her, ‘What do you mean, a comedian should look funny?’ And she said, ‘A comedian’, she said, ‘should be the sort of person’, she said, ‘that as soon as you look at them,’ she said, ‘it makes you want to laugh,’ she said, ‘like Joe Pasquale.’* So as I lay there naked on a slab, in a thirdlength floral-print hospital gown, with a fibre-optic tube inserted into my anus, looking at live video-footage relay of my own rotting and bleeding internal organs, I thought about Joe Pasquale. And I’ve thought about Joe Pasquale once before in my life. They say that you think about Joe Pasquale twice in your career: once on the way up …†
* As noted earlier, she said ‘Tommy Cooper’. But I didn’t have a bit about Tommy Cooper, I had one about Joe Pasquale.
† You don’t even have to finish this joke off. People get it. I love it when you don’t even have to finish a joke off. But perhaps one reason I didn’t need to finish the joke was because people already knew it in its original form.
Back in the late eighties and early nineties, when I was starting out on the circuit, I’d always be doing try-out spots on bills with the great Irish comedian Ian Macpherson, a spindly and romantic figure whom I was quite in awe of, and who is already mentioned in the notes to StandUp Comedian for the line ‘It is not for me to draw parallels between my own life and that of Christ,’ which I did not copy off him, as I have already explained.
However, Ian also used to open all his sets with the line ‘They say you play [The Balham Banana, for example] twice in your career. Once on the way up. Once on the way down. It’s good to be back,’ which this joke consciously echoes. To be fair, as an opening line Macpherson’s Gambit, as it is known to scholars of standup, is so perfect and classic I assumed it was an old music-hall lick or an American Catskills comics line from the fifties. One almost expects to hear a snare drum and a cymbal crash after it. It is such a wonderful joke, not least because of its fatalistic optimism. The declining comedian knows he is on the way down and yet he says, ‘It’s good to be back,’ and is still grateful for the gig.
The comedian Simon Munnery, who got the highest A-level results in the country in 1985, pointed out to me that the joke is obviously relatively modern because (a) it contains within it the notion of upward and then downward career progression for an ‘alternative’ comedian, which he maintains is a relatively new possibility, and (b) it sees the comedian step outside his act to comment on his own role as a comedian, rather than as a pretend ordinary member of society, which is a post-modern device. As usual, Simon is, I think, very wrong here, and there are so many examples of very ancient comedians employing similar devices that I am not going to do him the honour of even bothering to think of any and list them here.
Also, I’d heard the late, great Malcolm Hardee, the unheralded godfather of Alternative Comedy who built a three-decade career on two jokes and his willingness to expose his unfeasibly large testicles to paying customers, do it, and assumed it was a standard opening. But it turns out there’s a superb article on the internet about the genesis of this very line, by the comedian Robert Wringham, on the website the British Comedy Guide. I stumbled across it whilst trying to find any versions of the joke that perhaps predated Ian’s by typing the phrases ‘they say you play’ and ‘twice in your career’ into Google.
In the piece (http://www.sitcom.co.uk/features/ian_macpherson.shtml) Macpherson says the joke was ‘an ad lib born out of terror. It just popped out. It was a great opener at venues like the Red Rose Club, The King’s Head in Crouch End, Banana Cabaret and so on, and for some time afterwards it carried some of my – how to put it? – more esoteric stuff. It used to fool them into thinking I was funny while I spent the next 30 minutes tinkering with their brains.’
According to Ian in Robert’s revealing piece, Malcolm Hardee came to use the joke
by nicking it. Simple as that. And, as he’d done it on some pap-for-the-masses TV programme, it looked as if I’d nicked it off him. So I had to drop it. He also put it about that he’d bought it from me. Which he hadn’t. He then offered to buy it retrospectively. ‘Fuck off, Malcolm’, I quipped. So I fined him a pretty modest sum for theft. I was pretty furious about it at the time, but he had his eye on other stuff I’d written, so I was also warning him off. He ignored the fine at first, but he was just about to open Up The Creek, so I gather some comedians refused to play there till he paid up. Which he grudgingly did. I also made it plain in words of one syllable that I was not, repeat not, selling the line. He muttered something about 6 seconds of material but, as I pointed out, ‘It was 7½ seconds, Malcolm. You should have nicked my timing.’
My own assumption is that part of the reason the audience laugh at the version of the joke in ’90s Comedian, where playing the venue twice is replaced by thinking about Joe Pasquale twice, is because they recognise it may be true. Macpherson tells Robert Wringham in the interview:
Arthur Smith told me I’d written the most stolen
line in British Comedy. Not bad for a middle class white boy from Dublin. I was told that Simon Fanshawe did it on radio. I wrote to his agent at Noel Gay Artists three years ago but he must be a slow typist. No response as yet. I’ve now got back to the standup after some years of writing the obligatory books, and it seems that various people have been paying homage to my more accessible stuff. I mean, how much homage can one man take?
I like to think that my rewiring of Macpherson’s joke was homage, but his comment ‘how much homage can one man take?’ is telling. Whether something is a homage or an act of theft depends on the relative fame, status and wealth of the homager and the homagee. When advertising scum rip off Bergman or Wenders or some obscure Brit artist for a campaign and say that it was a homage, the real effect is that simply by virtue of the mass audience their adverts achieve as opposed to the minimal audience enjoyed by most actual art, it immediately renders the subject material a cliché by association, rather than validating it in some way. Or do advertising ‘creatives’ imagine it is some kind of homage, as I did when I pilfered from the greats?
That said, ‘They say you think about Joe Pasquale twice in your career’ doesn’t work as a joke unless you already know, or at least can intuitively guess, the Ian Macpherson joke that informs it. But it did work. So people either knew it or guessed that something else that made sense of my line predated it, like astronomers that approximate the position of unknown suns by the evidence of their gravitational pull on smaller and less significant, yet more visible, bodies. So it is a homage. And not a theft. And in a single bound I am free.
