How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

  And here’s why I first thought about Joe Pasquale, right. It was in 1995 … and when I started doing the, er, comedy circuit in, in London in about 1989, there used to be this Irish comic on the circuit called Michael Redmond. He was great. He lives in Glasgow now. But he had big bushy hair and a kind of long, droopy moustache, and deep-set bloodhound eyes. And he always used to wear a long brown mac and carry a little plastic bag. And what he used to do was he’d walk out onstage and he’d stand still in silence for about a minute and a half looking weird, and then he would say, ‘A lot of people say to me, “Get out of my garden!”’*

  * Michael is best known for playing Father Stone in Father Ted. He used to write the most brilliant little gags. ‘Do you ever notice how nervous people get when you follow them up a ladder?’ There’s a clip of him, in his mac-wearing era, on Saturday Live in the eighties, on YouTube. Young hipsters creaming their twenty-first-century pants about some American space-cadet oneliner merchant from the New York alterno-scene need to realise it was all done before, better, and with less selfconscious, look-at-me artifice.

  Now I think that is the greatest opening line ever. Um … not just for a comedy set either, for anything. I don’t think there’s a book or a film or a poem or a play that couldn’t be improved by having ‘A lot of people say to me, “Get out of my garden!”’ as … The Book of Genesis would be a lot better … You feel it would, it would kind of cut to the chase of what it was really … It would save a lot of faff if you went straight in there.

  And it always used to get a good laugh, that line. But it got a much better laugh, Michael’s joke, in 1995, when Joe Pasquale did it as one of his jokes in his Royal Variety Performance set of that year. And there’s always been a kind of tradition of the mainstream acts stealing our jokes.* In fact, you might remember at the end of 2004, er, Jimmy Carr had to take Jim Davidson to task for stealing some of his material, right, although to be honest, if Jim Davidson can steal your material, maybe it’s time to think about dropping it. Although to be fair to Jimmy Carr, it was kind of a sexist, woman-hating bit that he’d written with a sense of irony that Jim Davidson was able to appropriate at face value. One of the kindest things you can say about Jim Davidson as a fellow comic is he’s not a writer-performer who’s troubled by the notion of duality of meaning.†

  * Note that I’m not saying Joe Pasquale definitely stole Michael’s line, as it’s impossible to prove that is the case. I am merely implying it.

  † No one cares about this sort of thing any more. To the average punter there’s no difference now between Jimmy Carr and Jim David son, between irony and intent, except that Jimmy Carr is much better and more original. And does secret work for charity. But ethical and political questions are largely irrelevant to today’s comedy consumers. Comedians are little more than content providers.

  There’s always been this kind of material-theft tradition. So I rang him up. I did an article for a Sunday newspaper in 1995, and I rang up Joe Pasquale about this idea of stealing material. And I said to him, ‘Joe, how did you think up that joke about the garden?’ And Joe Pasquale said, and this is true, he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I thought if someone looked out of their window and they saw me in their garden, they would say “Get out of my garden!”’ Now, that’s not quite right, is it? Because if you looked out of your window and you saw Joe Pasquale in the garden, you’d just go, ‘Is that … Joe Pasquale in the garden? What can he possibly want?’* You might even be frightened, right. ’Cause that joke only works if a kind of anonymous weirdo is saying it. As soon as you introduce a celebrity into it, it’s kind of structurally compromised, so … I said to him, ‘Well, are you sure you thought that joke up?’ And he said he couldn’t remember if, if it was his idea. And it is sometimes difficult to remember if you’ve had an idea, especially when they occur as thick and fast as they must do in the mind of Joe Pasquale. And under duress, he admitted one of his writers might have written it. Turned out what he meant by writers was not so much people that wrote for him, as people that went around writing things down that other comedians had thought of. So I said to him, ‘The thing is, it’s Michael Redmond’s joke, you shouldn’t be doing it.’ And he said what a lot of the mainstream acts say. They say that they don’t think it’s possible to own a joke. They say they don’t think you can copyright a joke. So bearing that in mind, I’ve tried to write a joke that Joe Pasquale won’t be able to steal. And it goes like this.†

  * Pasquale’s comments here are a mixture of his actual comments and things his manager said on his behalf. The pause between ‘Is that’ and ‘Joe Pasquale’ has become a stylistic cliché of my routines, which now bores even me, as I am sure it does you. My hope here is that the second part of the phrase has a feeling of inevitability and predictability about it that means the audience, ideally, laugh once in anticipation of it, and then at me having the audacity to have actually bothered saying it, even though they’ve all guessed what it was anyway.

  † The act of getting a piece of paper out to read a prepared statement accurately is something I have done in all my shows since. People seem to laugh as soon as you get it out of your pocket. Maybe it’s to do with bringing a deliberate and obvious piece of artifice into a performance that strives to give the illusion of spontaneity that makes it funny.

  [reading] ‘Joe Pasquale goes into a bar. He says to the barman, “I’d like a pint of beer please.” And the barman says, “Why don’t you just come around the bar, help yourself to the beer, and then walk off without paying for it? After all, you are Joe Pasquale. Or perhaps send in someone else to steal the beer for you and then deny that beer can actually be owned. Say that you find the very concept of the ownership of beer hard to understand. Or better still, insist that it’s your beer and that you brewed it at home. In your house. Even though your home lacks the most rudimentary of brewing facilities.”’

  Ah, someone nearly clapped alone there. But then they stopped, because of course for a comedian the only thing worse than the sound of no one clapping is the sound of one person clapping alone, as it indicates that what you have is a very specialised appeal and no commercial future. As if I didn’t know that.*

  * As previously mentioned, I usually end up doing a variation on this once genuine ad-lib at least once during any show, but it is especially important in ’90s Comedian. I was aware it would be difficult to get the average audience, in its entirety, onside for the supposedly scatological and obscene half-hour section that closes this show, and so throughout I was trying everything I could to isolate individuals in the audience, or pockets of people in the audience, and make them think about their responses. By dividing the audience into those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t, eventually, usually, the ‘don’t gets’ wanted to be part of the ‘do gets’, and gradually a strong enough coalition of the willing was formed to support the unacceptable stylistic and narrative thrust of the last half of the show.

  Right, um … So … I got home late on, er, the 6th, woke up late on the 7th of July, got all these emails, text messages, I thought, ‘Something’s up,’ right. So I put the television on. And by now, it was about three hours after the London al-Qaeda bombings. And on TV news, there was all these kind of insensitive news journalists running around trying to get statements out of bomb survivors that weren’t really in a fit state to give statements. And I started writing them down, right. This was, um, a guy that had survived the King’s Cross bomb and he said to camera, he said, ‘The rescue workers have been amazing, really amazing, I mean I take my hat off to them. I’m not wearing a hat, obviously, but if I was, I would take it off.’* And laughs over here, a smattering of applause, and then doubt spreading towards the back corner.†

  * This actually happened. I did see this interview. Since then, other comics have told me they saw it too, and wanted to write stuff on it, but I was in there already, the very next day, and claimed the territory with my big flag first. My wife is a comedian. Sometimes something funny happens to both of
us together, and we have to decide who gets to talk about it onstage. I got the rats-in-the-park routine for my 2009 show. She got the story of our honeymoon, the misguided trip to Shetland in December 2006 that ended earlier than scheduled after an incident involving a pizza and almost perpetual darkness. The smart-arse show that is waiting to happen, surely, is one where we both describe the same experiences from our very different perspectives. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, as I am sure you know, so I expect the results would be hilarious! That said, I am pretty sure that, as usual, Greg Fleet has already done this show, with his then partner Janei Anderson, in 1996.

  † Here I am again, breaking down the audience into conflicting fragments with a view to shaping them into a whole further down the line. I want them to realise I am not laughing at the man who said he would take his hat off if he had one, but at the desperate hysteria of live news gathering. But the public, they are nervous, bless them, and need to be groomed for their new responsibilities.

  Now. Don’t judge me for this, OK? Don’t be uncomfortable, I am a human being like you, I am a member of society. I watched that news report, I thought, ‘I hope these people are OK and things don’t pan out too badly, er, for the world situation.’ But on the other hand, I’m also a comedian, so I was thinking, ‘Mind you, it’s quite funny, I should write it down.’*

  * I am asking the punters to suspend their innate squeamishness by inviting them to see the world from the comedian’s perspective. Yes, it’s terrible, but imagine if your job was to try and see the funny side …

  Then on the radio I heard a woman, I heard a woman who’d survived the number 30 bus bomb, and she said, ‘After the bus blew up, I saw people lying outside the British Medical Association headquarters. Ironic,’ she said, ‘but if you’re going to do this kind of thing, that’s the place to do it, I suppose.’*

  * Again, this is a genuine quote. Everyone interviewed is clearly in such states of shock that everything they say has an edge of the absurd.

  But, Cardiff, who are these inhuman bombers that strike, they strike at the very heart of our society with no respect for human life, without even the courtesy of a perfunctory warning? It makes you nostalgic, doesn’t it, for the good old days of the IRA. ’Cause they gave warnings, didn’t they? They were gentlemen bombers, the finest terrorists this country’s ever had. We’ll not see their like again.* Let’s … let’s have a little clap for the IRA. Come on, give them a little clap. Give them a clap, right? ’Cause the IRA, they were decent British terrorists. They didn’t want to be British. But they were. And as such, they couldn’t help but embody some fundamentally decent British values. We’ll miss them now they’re gone.†

  * Once again, in a show that appears threaded through with deliberate questions about where ideas come from, here’s an accidental echo of that anxiety. By the summer of 2005, Patrick Kielty, Andrew Maxwell and I were all doing routines on this idea, all of which featured the phrase ‘gentlemen bombers’, entirely independently of each other, having never heard each other’s bits. Had there been a news story, or a think piece, somewhere which had used the phrase ‘gentlemen bombers’, and which we had all remembered without realising it? Subsequently, the rock star and archaeologist Julian Cope included a line about the ‘gentlemen bombers’ of the IRA in a song about Islamic terrorism on his 2009 album The Unruly Imagination, which means he’d either heard one of these routines, heard the same source for the phrase which we’d all forgotten, or that the phrase suggests itself to anyone thinking of the way the Western media portrays Islamic terrorists as motiveless fundamentalist psychopaths, as opposed to the more finely nuanced forms of terrorism and terrorists we have here in the civilised world.

  † It was always tremendous fun doing this bit onstage, especially, say, in Derry, where republicans in the audience didn’t know if they were being flattered or insulted. One of the few good things about being an English, as opposed to British, comedian, is that you can play with the expectation that you ought to be ashamed of your history when playing the previously oppressed parts of the UK. No one expects an English comedian to go to Derry and praise the IRA for having decent British values, and the audience there at least have to give you a grudging respect for doing so.

  And another great thing about the IRA, I always think, apart from the warnings – and the uniforms, which were stylish but also practical – is that they had achievable aims, didn’t they? What do they want? Er, a united Ireland. And of course it’s possible to imagine getting round the table and negotiating towards that. What do al-Qaeda want? Al-Qaeda want to see the destruction of Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation in its entirety. And it’s harder to imagine getting round the table and negotiating towards that, isn’t it? ‘Obviously, you’ll appreciate we’re unable to meet all your demands. But here are some areas of Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation that we’d be happy to let go.’ Like Splott.* I don’t even know what that is, I just saw it on a map. Splott and Joe Pasquale, he could be sent out as well.

  * Splott is an area of Cardiff with a funny name. It is onomatopoeic. It sounds like porridge falling onto a red-brick, terracedhouse doorstep. Splott used to be a student zone when I was young and had friends there. I was performing the show this text is transcribed from in Cardiff. I always cranked in some local reference at this point, wherever I was, as the thing that we in the West can afford to sacrifice to Islamic terrorists. These days, I try not to make this kind of local gag. Having said that, when I was last in Liverpool, the local paper reviewer hated the whole evening, apart from an obvious, off-the-cuff joke I made about housing quality in Toxteth, which seemed to her to be the only evidence I offered all night that I even deserved to be called a comedian.

  But there’s lots of good stories from the war against terror, though. I mean, I was reading this, um … I hate it when comedians do that as a kind of intro, ’cause basically the link between what I’ve just said and this bit is a bit contrived. So I go, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of good stories from the war against terror, though, but I wasn’t actually talking about that then, was I, no.’ But I would have got away with it, no one would have noticed. But. There are a lot of good stories from the war against terror, apropos of nothing.*

  * Deconstruct and do it anyway. The first place I ever noticed the phrase ‘apropos of nothing’ being used outside academic circles was in the surprisingly subtle 1994 Sheryl Crow song ‘All I Wanna Do’, where it is tossed away with grace and ease as if part of a casual everyday conversation. Since noticing this I too have tried to use the phrase in the same way wherever possible, but I am aware that in doing so I am stealing a little bit of Crow’s linguistic genius. Or paying homage to it anyway.

  And, um … I was reading this great book of, of trial transcripts, of American soldiers accused of human-rights abuses in, in Abu Ghraib, which was of course closed today.* And, um … I don’t know if you remember Charles Graner, he was a fat American soldier but he had a moustache, so you could identify him. And he was the guy that organised the photographing of a naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian being dragged out of a cell, er, on his hands and knees, er, on a dog’s lead. And, um, in his defence, er, his lawyer, Charles Graner’s lawyer said that the naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian wasn’t being dragged out of the cell but was actually crawling of his own free will. And I just wondered how many other lines of defence they rejected before they settled on that one. And also what the naked, hooded, bound Iraqi civilian might have been crawling of his own free will towards? And I like to think he was crawling towards the notion of Western democracy. But obviously he was having some difficulty knowing which way to crawl, er, because of the hood, er, and because of the fact that he was approaching a palpably abstract concept.†

  * By sheer coincidence, the American prison camp Abu Ghraib was closed on the day this recording of me doing a routine about Abu Ghraib, which I’d been doing for nine months, was made. See how professional a comedian I am, in that I mention that here, to give the rout
ine a feeling of absolute, cast-iron relevance.

  † There are few things as inspiring for good standup as utter disgust, as genuine utter contempt for a person, an event, a point of view. But there are also few things as unattractive in a comedian as appearing to occupy, deliberately, the moral high ground, especially with the degree of smugness I am prone to, even though I sometimes attempt to disguise this repulsive characteristic as a deliberate artistic choice, as if I were inhabiting a subtly crafted role rather than just being an actual wanker. That said, when I was in Aspen doing this bit, I didn’t really care what the people there made of it, such was my self-righteous hatred of Amerikkka, which you will notice I have spelt with three ‘k’s, despite the fact that its current president is black. Of course, within a few months, when evidence of similar British abuse of detainees emerged, it wouldn’t have been possible to go over there and take this tone with them. They should have all stood up, as one, and spat in my face.

  OK? And so there’s good laughs for that over here in this area, and those tail away towards that corner there. When it’s late at night, there’s a long set to get through, as I said, there isn’t going to be time for me to work a mixedability room tonight. No offence, right, but time’s money, you know. Now. So. Everybody over here, for the rest of the night, you’re on board, you’re going to be Team A, OK? And you won’t mind if I don’t play over here too much, I’m going to be mainly concentrating on Team F in that corner. Don’t cheer that you are better than them, right, Team A, for some of you it’s just the luck of random seating, isn’t it, right? I don’t want you … Don’t laugh at them or cheer yourselves, right, we must do everything we can to make them feel comfortable and we will bring them along with us. Don’t laugh at them, don’t even look at them, right? Look at me, Team A. But if you’re sitting next to an F and they laugh at a clever bit, right, you can just reach over and give their hand a little squeeze, and we will bring you along. I will not leave anyone behind, I swear. All these jokes have worked before at some stage, they are about things in the news and people who exist, so you have … Don’t laugh at them, Team A. There’s Team … you are … right? And I know it’s weird, what’s happening now, ’cause you’ve thought, ‘Ooh, let’s go out and sit in the dark and judge someone,’ right? But now you’re being judged and it feels strange, right, but don’t worry, you will … I will … you will not be … look, it’s fine, OK? You’ll be all right. There’ll be a point in about eight minutes when you’ll be … when you’ll laugh at something. You won’t know why. But you will laugh. And it will all be fine, right? Sometime … I’ve, I’ve done this before when there’s been a kind of split in the room. Usually it creates an atmosphere of bonhomie. But tonight, it’s made it worse, hasn’t it? It’s made it worse. There’s a tension in the room that’s now ‘the gig is lost’, right? It’s lost.*