How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

  * This was just a throwaway comment made in an email from my friend, the notorious bluestocking and radio comedy producer Louise Coates, which I asked her if I could have. Louise wrote me a facetious email while I was in Australia, keeping me up to date on world news events which she felt I might have missed. Louise is a natural and caustic wit whose arrival in a room spells either delight or disaster, but is always certain to bring about an exciting change of some sort. So much of what she says could be strip-mined for laughs that were I ever to face total artistic block I would secretly follow her around, writing down her indignant expressions of outrage at facets of modern life which I would have placed in her path to provoke her. Then I’d have her killed by a hit man and pass them off as my own.

  † I added this bit to the bluestocking’s bon mot, and it relies on the audience’s innate understanding of the way standups usually structure this kind of gag. The implication, of course, is that the wrinkled old corpse is Camilla Parker Bowles, and not Pope John Paul II. Ideally, I wouldn’t have to finish the joke, as the whole crowd would anticipate the end, and this would be the point at which I would be able to congratulate them at having begun to work as a unit, where there were no stragglers. I needed them pleased with themselves and confident by now, as this is the last possible point to try and get them on my side before we launch into the difficult second half.

  Sometimes, if the audience hadn’t anticipated the correct ending to the joke, and hadn’t laughed ahead of it, I would deliberately spoil it by saying, ‘The public veneration of a wrinkled old corpse … or the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.’ I don’t know why I would do this. I don’t know what I was trying to achieve. In the cold light of day, it seems extremely self-indulgent and futile.

  You all right now?*

  * In April 2000, in an Australian wildlife park, I saw the raspyvoiced American comedian, rancher and renowned horse whisperer Rich Hall bring a fully grown bull kangaroo to its knees by talking calmly to it and gently stroking its furry face. He was on the horizon, some distance from us, and the sun was behind him. Perhaps he had positioned himself there on purpose, aware of how the mythic status of his kangaroo-mastering abilities would be magnified were he to be backlit by the sun. Talk softly and sweetly to a confused and frightened audience, like Rich Hall would to a kangaroo, and do not threaten them, and soon they may submit. Or not.

  OK, the problem we’ve got now, right, is that there are … There’s a section of the room are ahead of the punchlines. You have to be up to speed now. ’Cause the first half of the show, this is the kind of fun bit. And the second half is awful. Right? So you have to … And if you, if anyone had anticipated that joke and was holding back from laughing out of kind of politeness to me – thinking, ‘Oh, he won’t like it if we guess his jokes,’ right – I don’t care. I would welcome it. I think it’s good, right. ’Cause if you think about it, I have to write about an hour and a half of jokes every year, that’s quite hard, right?* But what’s just happened suggests that with the correct encouragement of audiences, I wouldn’t have to write any jokes. I could just come out with a list of topics and read them out. And you could think of something amusing about them in your own heads.† Then if you didn’t like the show, that would be your fault, ’cause you hadn’t been very funny. It’s about the apportioning of blame, I think.‡

  * I meant this genuinely. It is quite hard to write ninety minutes of jokes a year. But the audience would always laugh, as if I were being sarcastic and admitting that my job is much easier than theirs. But it isn’t. Comedy, as Jimmy Tarbuck once told the young Richard Herring, is the hardest job in the world, a comment which, as Herring has noted, managed to be both encouraging and nakedly territorial.

  † Here I flatter the poor fools. I make them think they are as clever and funny as me, so that we are all in the game together come the difficult second half.

  ‡ Back at ya! See how I toy with their affections!

  Now I was talking about religion there. Um … And it wasn’t something I really wanted to talk about, ’cause I was one of a bunch of people that got in trouble with religious people, er, last year. Er, but I am going to talk about religion for about twenty minutes and then I’m going to run away. Um, but before I do that, I’m going to draw a little circle on here in chalk, right. People are going, ‘Oh, why are you doing that?’, right. OK, what this is, is …

  About four years ago, I went to, er, Languedoc in the south of France, right. Because I wanted to see this week when they recreate medieval clowning techniques, the ‘bouffons’ they were called. And what they do is they, they run through all these French mountaintop villages. And outside the baker’s, they make fun of the baker. And outside the town hall, they’ll take the piss out of the mayor or whatever. But before they did stuff about the church, right, outside the church they drew this kind of shape round them in the dirt, so they were kind of protected from prosecution, if you like, under the kind of magic spell of comedy. So that’s what I’ve done here. Now, it doesn’t work at all, OK? But it is a kind of concession to theatre, and this building receives some arts subsidy, so I have to do this. Otherwise you’d be just watching a piece of standup comedy, which is of course of no value.*

  * I flatter myself and I flatter them. Of course, we all know, the audience and I, that comedy can be art. It’s the others, the others out there, beyond our circle, who don’t get it. Re-reading this makes my skin tingle. I am not religious or superstitious, but it always felt great stopping to draw the circle, engaging in the briefest nod towards ritual magic. I shared a dressing room with Ram, a Haitian voodoo band, for a month in Edinburgh in 2000. Before every show they poured rum on the floor, set fire to it and danced over it, as a good-luck charm. How I envied them the certainty of their belief. Before I go on I just have a cup of tea and go to the toilet.

  So, um … So, yeah, like I say, I, I worked on this opera about Jerry Springer. And, um, we got accused of being blasphemous, which was, came as a genuine surprise, ’cause it honestly had had really good reviews in the Church Times and the Catholic Herald when it first went out in the theatre.* So it was kind of weird, it all came a bit out of nowhere. We got 65,000 complaints when it went on television. The BBC executives that commissioned it had to go into hiding, with police protection. And me and the composer were going to be taken to court and charged with blasphemy. But at the end of June, the High Court threw the case out on the grounds that it isn’t 1508.

  * This is true. Proper Christian academics are, by necessity, comfortable with the idea of using an untrue story to tell a truth. Meeting them, one sometimes suspects they admit, privately, that they’re involved in propping up a great big metaphor, which they doubt the reality of, whilst at the same time thinking it’s the best hope we’ve got. It’s the angry Christians in their sheds, with their laptops, who struggle with the slippery meanings of words and ideas.

  But … It is … Hey, and before you all write in, I know that the first blasphemy prosecution was 1628, right, but there’s something rhythmically pleasing about 1508.*

  * 1508 is funnier than 1628, isn’t it? I don’t know why. In the end, in 2007, a blasphemy charge was brought by Christian Voice, not against the composer of Jerry Springer: The Opera, Richard Thomas, and me, but against the producer, who was also our manager, and the head of the BBC, which broadcast a version of the piece. Even Christian Voice, it seems, realised that prosecuting writers doesn’t play as well with the public as prosecuting the BBC, which was then, as it is now, the tabloid whipping boy for everything that’s wrong with the world. Christian Voice lost their case, and soon after this, in July 2008, the Blasphemy Law was scrapped, though there is currently the threat of the UN’s so-called ‘Global Blasphemy Law’, which would muddy the waters once more, and the Republic of Ireland is also in the process of doing something very stupid.

  By the time it went to court, I couldn’t have cared less about the whole case. Christian Voice wanted to use the opera to pub
licise their own reactionary agenda. Our manager and producer wanted to make loads of money out of it or, to be fair, to try and make back some of what he claimed to have lost, much of it on behalf of other people. Neither party reflected the spirit in which the show was conceived and devised. The court case felt like a bar-room fight in a silent comedy, and Richard and I were Laurel and Hardy, crawling out of the bottom of a brawl we’d begun, but which had now taken on a life of its own irrespective of our absence.

  So, um … But it was kind of weird. ’Cause I’ve got a website and whatever, so I was getting all this kind of hate mail all the time. And, er, it was – it still goes on now – it was quite distressing. But there was … I did get one funny one in March last year where someone wrote to me and they said, ‘I enjoyed listening to you defend your work on Radio 5 yesterday. You seem like a very intelligent and thoughtful young man. What a pity you’ll be going to hell.’*

  * Ah! He got me. There were usually hate letters waiting for me wherever I played, but they tailed off as nutters found new people to berate.

  And you have to admire that, don’t you, the kind of construct of it, you know, it’s beaut– … It takes you one way, and then it goes the other. It’s a classic Pasquale move. We thought he was at home in his bedroom, naked. Turned out he was on a bus. So … That’s how that works. We got to the end of the sentence, we found out he was on a bus. We thought he was in his house, naked – he’d given us no reason to believe he was on a bus till he got to the end of the sentence. Then we realised the nudity was amusing.*

  * This riff, which was played out differently every night, is clearly indebted to an old Lee and Herring routine which we called ‘And Then I Got Off the Bus’, broadcast during the second series of BBC2’s This Morning with Richard Not Judy in 1999. It is not commercially available but can be downloaded illegally and free from my website without the consent of the BBC. Young upstarts that we were, by the age of twentyfive Richard and I had of course swiftly seen through the entire apparatus of all comedy and quickly and brutally set about dismantling it, arrogantly proving our innate superiority to thousands of years of existing comic traditions, with no thought for the pleasure of future generations.

  There is a classic joke mechanism, called the Pull Back and Reveal, of which audiences never seem to tire, the fools. The first half of a sentence creates a certain set of expectations, concerning the location, age or social status of the participants in the story, which is then reversed in the second half of the sentence as the frame of the picture, so to speak, widens to include details which, had they been evident initially, would have clarified the situation immediately: e.g. ‘Every day at school I used to get bullied, kicked, spat at, and pushed into a urinal … so after a while I resigned from my job as headmaster.’ If it had been clear that the speaker were a headmaster at the start of this sentence, the joke would not have worked: i.e. ‘I am a headmaster at a school and every day at school I was bullied, kicked, spat at and pushed into a urinal so … so after a while I resigned from my job as headmaster.’ Or, ‘So, I was lying there, stretched out on the seat naked, masturbating … and then I got off the bus.’ If we had been aware, at the beginning of the scene, that the masturbating, naked speaker was on the bus, then we would have realised immediately that he was a sexual deviant, rather than simply a man masturbating, harmlessly, alone at home: i.e. ‘I was lying there, stretched out on the seat on the bus, naked, masturbating … and then I got off the bus.’ Why not try writing your own Pull Back and Reveal jokes? And then why not try smashing yourself repeatedly in the face with a claw hammer?

  These days I love a good Pull Back and Reveal. Not in the way you are thinking, madam! I just wish I could still write them. I don’t do Pull Back and Reveal any more. Instead, with painful slowness, I raise a ratty curtain that was covering something which we had already seen quite clearly anyway through holes in the tattered fabric, and display it shamefacedly, with an air of crushed inevitability, as if to say, ‘Here you are. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy now? Do you feel entertained?’

  So … But it is weird, getting accused of blasphemy. I don’t know if any of you have ever been formally accused of blasphemy* … but … And I’m always relieved when people laugh at that idea, because everywhere round the country … when I say … ‘Hey, I don’t know if any of you have ever been accused of blasphemy,’ people go, ‘Ha ha, no, it would be ridiculous.’ Except in, er, in Builth Wells, I don’t know if you know that. It’s kind of … I said that, there was kind of silence of people going, ‘What have you heard about here? What have you heard about this apparently normal market town with a stone circle on the rugby pitch? What have you heard?’ But it is, it is weird, right, joking apart, to be accused of blasphemy, right, because I’m … I don’t, I don’t … I don’t believe in God, thousands of people do, they might be right. OK? But even if you don’t believe in God, the idea that you have offended a superbeing is quite intimidating, right. It makes the idea of having made Robbie Williams bored seem inconsequential. Do you know …? That’s, that’s water off a duck’s back to me. ‘Oh, were you bored? Oh, are you God? No.’ Right, so …†

  * The joke here, of course, is that it is rare to be accused, formally, of blasphemy. Now, hopefully, in this country at least, it will never happen again.

  † As someone who doesn’t believe in God, I wasn’t really worried about the idea of having offended God Himself. But for this whole forthcoming section to work dramatically, I needed to be in jeopardy. I needed to entertain the possibility of God for this half hour to work, and every night I would try to rephrase this section, to keep it sounding real, so that I could scare myself at the enormity of what a charge of blasphemy might mean, if there actually were a God, or if one were prepared to consider the possibility of there being a God. And by the end of doing this show, I’d played this part out so many times that I think that whilst onstage I was actually afraid of God and what He might do to me. I made Him real to myself.

  In the same way, in the late nineties Johnny Vegas performed a routine about being a Redcoat at a fifties Butlin’s holiday camp so many times, and with such conviction and depth of local colour and period detail, that when I asked him about it in 2002, he seemed uncertain whether he’d actually been a Redcoat in the early days of rock and roll, until we worked out that this would have meant he would have to have been born in the forties at the latest. Johnny did not look especially well at the time, but was clearly not of pensionable age.

  But also I’m not a religious person but loads of people are, and they might be right. And even if you aren’t religious, I suspect like me you entertain the fact that it’s your right to change your mind, and you might want to go back towards faith. But the idea that you’ve been cut off kind of legally is quite a frightening idea. So that, and the threat of prosecution and the threats and whatever, it did kind of really stress me out, this idea of being cut off …*

  * I don’t really imagine making the journey back to the religious faith that I had briefly in my teens. But it was dramatically necessary for me to have something at stake here, and it was easy to extemporise something convincing every night when I put myself in the position of an agnostic, or even a faltering believer, rather than an atheist, worrying that they might be shut out of God’s light for ever. The visible Stewart Lee onstage in this show needed to be more uncertain of his beliefs than the Stewart Lee inside his brain controlling him, so that the charge of blasphemy had an emotional impact for him and for the audience.

  I also wanted to make the piece relate to everyone, irrespective of their religious beliefs, and to invite believers to put themselves in my position. After all, the issue that I was seeking to explore here was a human-rights issue about freedom of expression that everyone should be able to support, regardless of the red herring of their actual religious beliefs.

  In the six years since I wrote this, atheism or agnosticism has become the default setting for many more performers, writers and audiences,
probably as a reaction against the rise of religious fundamentalism. It’s no fun preaching to the converted, even when you agree with them. Recently, the comedian Marcus Brigstocke toured a show, God Collar, which examined the emotional limitations of atheism, the piece being an alternative to a glut of rationalist comedians currently making a progress round the mid-scale art-centre circuit. As the comedian Simon Munnery once quipped, ‘If the crowd gets behind you, you are facing the wrong way.’ Luckily for Simon, this is not a situation he has ever had to deal with.

  And so in February, I … I left London where I live and I went to stay with my mum, where she lives, in a little village in Worcestershire, right.* This is the kind of little village it is. I got there early to see her once and she wasn’t in. So I walked round to the village shop and I bought a muesli bar and I ate it in a lay-by, right. And about four hours later, my mum said, ‘Oh, the woman next door said she saw you eating a muesli bar in a lay-by earlier.’† That’s the kind of little village … This is the kind of little village it is, right. The house opposite my mum’s, on the lawn the guy’s got a white flagpole and occasionally he runs the Union Jack up it.‡ And if he does, you know that British troops have committed an atrocity abroad, OK? That’s … that’s the kind of little village it is, right.

  * I did not go to stay with my mum during this phase of the Jerry Springer blasphemy scandal. I was actually in Germany at the time. But I had been to my mum’s two months previously, in November and December 2004, after I was discharged from hospital with diverticulitis, and it was this period, as explained in the previous chapter, and this memory of my mother’s home and the landscape around it, that I used as the basis for the rest of the show.