by Stewart Lee
5
41st Best StandUp Ever
A transcript of the show recorded on 7 April 2008 at The Stand, Glasgow
PRE-SHOW MUSIC: RIDDIMBUGZ BY DAVID ROTHENBERG*
* The pre-show tracks for 41st Best were a recording of the American musician David Rothenberg improvising on the saxophone to a tank full of chirping insects called Riddimbugz, followed by lengthy blasts of Evan Parker playing saxophone to field recordings of birds and bugs made in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly by Ashley Wales. Rothenberg’s recording is not commercially available, as far as I know, but I tracked it down via the art radio station Resonance FM, which broadcast the Pestival Insect Festival cabaret evening at which we both appeared, and where Rothenberg and his unwitting insect slaves performed this piece. The Evan Parker tracks appear on Evan Parker with Birds, on the Treader label.
The Rothenberg piece is quite ambient, but the Parker tracks were mysterious and arresting. I played these to punters on the way into the show in Edinburgh in August 2007, when I found myself in an acoustically problematic circus big top, The Udderbelly. Here, crowds of meandering weekenders, who just wanted to see ‘some of that comedy’, wandered into my dreary and pretentious show by mistake, resulting in inappropriately packed Friday and Saturday sets and predictably sluggish response times for the weird stuff. The insect-based improvised music was just the beginning of their nightmare.
I take no pleasure in the fact that during the show’s Fringe run, the alluring title of the piece, and its prime location in Bristo Square, drew to it many people who just wanted a fun night out and would probably prefer to have seen something else rather than me, such as paint drying, for example. Daniel Kitson won’t even play weekends in Edinburgh, for fear of short-changing these legitimately aggrieved fun-seekers. Next time I did a standup show at the Edinburgh Fringe I went to The Stand, a small room stuffed with dedicated aficionados of comedy, and left a far smaller number of people bored and annoyed.
As a younger man, looking at the fed-up faces of a minority of an audience amused me, in my conceited insolence, but now, as a parent of a young child, for whom organising any night out is a logistical nightmare, the thought of grown-ups having gone to the time and trouble of leaving the house and then being subjected to something that wearies and irritates them fills me with nothing but shame. I regret wasting their evening and babysitting costs. I try and make it clear that the shows are not for everyone, and indeed the poster and publicity material for 41st Best included one Chortle website punter’s review – ‘The worst comedian I have ever seen’ – in an effort to deter the casual comedy consumer.
Of course, it was always possible that someone who came in hoping for something that they didn’t get actually preferred what turned out to be on offer. These were the key marginals I was interested in winning. In theory there were enough threads to grasp in 41st Best to continue building the new audience, as well as satiating those who had particular expectations of me.
VOICE OFF: Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome the 41st best standup ever, Stewart Lee!
Thank you very much, thank you for coming. Thanks for coming to this show, which is called Stewart Lee – 41st Best StandUp Ever. It wasn’t originally going to be called that. I started writing it in about May last year. I didn’t know what it was going to be. And then, as luck would have it, about that time I appeared in one of those programmes – you know those terrible Channel 4 programmes, they’re about nineteen hours long and they go out on Friday or Saturday nights, and they’re a countdown of the hundred best things of a thing, ever. And each one of the things is separated from the next thing by a bought memory from Stuart Maconie. He is an amazing figure, Stuart Maconie. He is able, if the price is right, to recall almost any aspect of the entire spread of all human existence. He’s an incredible figure, Stuart Maconie. He’s rather like an omniscient alien superbeing, a giant baby that lives in space, bald, wearing only a toga, orbiting the earth, able to view the entire span of all human culture and existence, and yet tragically, by the creed of his alien race, Stuart Maconie is forbidden from ever intervening directly in human affairs.*
* This is, as everyone knows, a reference to The Watcher, the Marvel Comics character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963 whose physical appearance – that of a giant and wise baby – and his role as an omniscient but noninterventionist observer make him very similar to the TV pundit and DJ of worthwhile pop music Stuart Maconie. And also similar, perhaps, to the idea of the noninterventionist God that New York comic-book writers, drawn from the post-war Jewish diaspora, must have felt had abandoned their people, looking on, unable or unwilling to act. Only a minority of the crowd would ever spot the reference, so I would then stop and talk to these people about it, and explain to them that they were my target audience, and that the show was not really aimed at the rest of the room. The same Chortle punter who described me as ‘the worst comedian I have ever seen’ said my act was aimed exclusively at ‘atheist, comic book reading, Morrissey fan nerds’. This is, of course, entirely accurate, and I am delighted that my marketdriven attempts to win the loyalty of this key consumer base came across.
If you didn’t get that reference, this show isn’t really aimed at you. You may enjoy it anyway, the words and shapes, but it isn’t aimed at you. This is not for you. You are welcome to stay. But this is not for you.*
* Someone emailed me after the Edinburgh run of 41st Best in the big top quoting an exchange in Bristo Square after the show, where a disgruntled punter had come up to me and said, ‘I didn’t enjoy that very much, to be honest,’ and apparently I’d said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you expect me to do about that now.’ I don’t remember this. Although I regret wasting people’s time, the work is what it is, and I can’t go back in time and change it now. I am like The Watcher myself in that respect.
So I was on this programme, right, the hundred best standups of all time. And I came in at number 41, and I was very, I was very surprised to be placed, I was very pleased to be placed, um, er, you know, I’m not exactly a household name. I’m the only person on that list of the hundred best standups of all time who regularly plays in this venue, for example. And is glad of the work, is glad of the work.*
* No matter how big or prestigious the venue I was playing, this line would always get a laugh. Most people think we are all doing much better than we really are. But you can be a megastar in the Edinburgh Fringe and find your mother’s friend still doesn’t believe you when you say you are doing well, otherwise she would have read about you in the paper.
Um. I was surprised to be placed. I’ve had a sort of an odd relationship with the press. In fact, when this show was running in London in December, I got a review describing me as looking like a squashed Albert Finney. Nine years previous to that, the same paper, the London Evening Standard, described me as looking like a crumpled Morrissey. And it’s good, you can see a kind of trend developing there of comparing me unfavourably to various stocky, greying celebrities in increasingly terrible states of physical distress. And a squashed Albert Finney is arguably worse than a crumpled Morrissey. As a crumpled Morrissey, there’s the possibility the Morrissey could be straightened out, put to work. But, er, a squashed Albert Finney is of no value. Except perhaps as a coaster made of meat. Um. Or a white pudding, as I believe you Scots would call them.*
* It is a shameless hack move to open a set with a line like, ‘Hey! I know what you are thinking – it’s the bastard love child of Mark Knopfler and Iris Murdoch,’ or whatever combination of recognisable faces one resembles, and something I suspect vulnerable young people are encouraged to do on these standup comedy courses that they have now. But here I disguise this same hack move as a discussion of some admittedly genuine reviews. In the past I have been described as looking like Ray Liotta, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edwyn Collins, kd lang, Morrissey, Albert Finney and a heraldic lion or lamb on a medieval tapestry (by Richard Herring); and I have irritated members of the public, who w
ill not take no for an answer, by denying that I am Mark Lamarr, Roland Gift, Ben Watt from Everything but the Girl, Terry Christian, Todd Carty, the bloke who committed suicide that Todd Carty replaced in EastEnders, and the lead singer of UB40. Basically, they half-recognise me because of my carefully cultivated F-list celebrity status, and their brains misfile me into the nearest possible fit.
My mother pointed out that I looked like Terry Christian in the early eighties, before he was even famous, when he was interviewed as a teenager by Gus MacDonald on an ITV discussion show about young people’s attitudes. ‘That boy looks like you, but less scruffy and miserable,’ she said, and the comparison went on to haunt me. I had a twenty-minute conversation with a polite man in a Thai restaurant in Stoke Newington in 1999, during which I gradually realised that when he was asking about my cancelled television series and absence from our screens he actually thought I was Terry Christian, and it got to the stage where it would have been embarrassing for both of us for me to explain that I wasn’t. Instead, I continued to pretend to be Terry Christian, improvising successfully around my limited knowledge of Christian’s current projects, until the man paid and left. Perhaps I should have carried on being Terry Christian from that point. We have aged in the same way, same receding hair, same sagging jowls, though I am fatter than him. Perhaps I could have faked a Manchester accent, killed Terry Christian, usurped him and lived his life, like Martin Guerre or the bloke in Mad Men.
Last year, I found myself sitting next to the Fine Young Cannibals’ Roland Gift, who is of mixed race, outside a crêpe stall in Edinburgh. Like some kind of delusional fantasist, I said, ‘I expect you find this hard to believe, but I have been mistaken for you in the past.’ He said, ‘I think you look more like Ali Campbell from UB40.’
In order to save waste, I recycled a variation on this mistakenidentity theme in my 2009/10 show, If You Prefer a Milder Comedian Please Ask for One, adding Hattie Jacques and a thirties newspaper cartoon of Tarzan’s face to the lookalike list.
So it was weird, I was surprised to be placed, number 41, I thought, ‘It’s not bad’, you know, number 41, it’s quite good. And in fact soon after that list was announced, Bernard Manning, who was in the top forty, he died and I thought that meant I would move up a position. But it wasn’t the case, even with, er, a letter-writing campaign to the family; they were distressed, if anything. ‘Why, why are you doing this? Please stop.’*
* I’m sure the tone and delivery of this ‘Why, why are you doing this? Please stop’ is copied from somewhere, but I can’t place it. It sounds like something the comedian and man Richard Herring would have said, or at least would have had said to him on numerous occasions, in his everyday life.
So you know, it’s great. I’m not joking, I was pleased, I was pleased and surprised, but you might have a similar experience to me. You might be supposed to be good at something, but it doesn’t necessarily count for anything with your family ’cause they know who you really are. And my mother, for example, is still as ashamed and embarrassed as she ever was of me being a standup comedian. It’s not something that she’s interested in, standup comedy. My mum’s main area of interest is quilts.* Making quilts and talking about making quilts. And a new kind of quilt she’s been making lately, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, it’s called a quillow. And that is a quilt which rolls up into a pillow. Although it comes with its own unique set of problems, ’cause if you think about it, for a relaxing night, you need both … you need both a quilt and a pillow. So with the quillow, you either are cold with a comfortable neck, or are warm with backache. And the only solution, of course, is to use two quillows – in many ways, defeats the unique selling property of the quillow – or alternatively, to revert to the traditional quilt–pillow combo.†
* My mother is unpredictable and mysterious, like God or the sea. She talks to me for hours about things I am not interested in, such as golf, and then quietly and fascinatingly becomes a master quilt-maker, fashioning award-winning quilts inlaid with beautiful designs, without really ever seeing fit to mention it.
† I am being facetious of course. The quillow is superb.
But my mum’s not impressed by me being a standup, it’s not something she’s* … For my mum, me being the 41st best standup of all time – which I am, remember, they can’t take that away now – that’s about as impressive to my mum as if I were to be voted the world’s 41st tallest dwarf. Taller, admittedly, than many other dwarves, but still essentially a dwarf, and as such prohibited by law from applying for any job with a minimum height requirement, such as policeman, basketball player or owner-operator of an enchanted beanstalk.†
* It’s hardly surprising that I would assume my mother is not interested in me being a comedian. She struggled to bring me up as a single parent, blagged me into the local Church of England junior school, where I studied alongside the middle-class elite of Solihull and got an inroad to a life of educational privilege, took on extra evening jobs and took in student lodgers to make up the shortfall in my fees after I got a charity bung and then a part-scholarship to the local independent boys’ school, and then watched me get a place at Oxford University, an opportunity of the kind she never had, only to blow it outta my ass by becoming a standup comedian.
I’m not even sure my mother really believed I was making any kind of living as a comic until the 2009 TV series, as I was never really written about in the normal newspapers, except as a scourge of society and proponent of mass choral swearing. But she came to see me twice on the 2009 tour, having not seen me since 1990. The first time, I think she mistook my whole onstage approach for me being actually unable to do comedy properly, and seemed to pity me afterwards, but after the second show, in the company of some enthusiastic former workmates, my mother seemed to have really enjoyed the event. I was surprised how relieved this made me feel. I suppose I didn’t want her to feel I had wasted my life and, by association, her efforts to give me a good start.
Earlier this year, I found out that my mother had been keeping a scrapbook of press cuttings about me all along, so this whole routine, about my mum’s supposed indifference to my work, is based on a false premise. She’s just a quiet and modest woman, and probably worries that anything she said about my work would be the wrong thing, me being a temperamental artist and that. And in 1992, my mother recently reminded me, she even wrote to the Daily Mail radio critic, the dishonourable Quentin Letts, to reprimand him for failing to credit the writer, me, of a show he had reviewed favourably. At the time I was faintly embarrassed by my mother’s behaviour, but now I am very proud of her. More people’s mothers should write to Quentin Letts, and Daily Mail journalists generally, and tell them off. Perhaps Richard Littlejohn wouldn’t have said that the murder of all those prostitutes in Ipswich was of no consequence if some nice mums had written him a few stiff letters earlier in his career of evil.
† The comedian Simon Munnery, who was once an expert swordsman, has since stolen this idea. He says – onstage, mind – that the title of Celebrity Mastermind, which I won, entirely legitimately, on the BBC show in January 2010, is of no value, as the Mastermind part of the title is degraded by the appending of the word ‘Celebrity’. ‘Celebrity Mastermind’, he says, ‘is a bit like being Tallest Dwarf.’
I don’t know if you can hear that at home but there’s a strong uptake for that joke in this area, and the laughter ebbed away as we went towards the bar. Now, there might be a lot of you in who’ve not seen me before. If you’ve not seen me before, right, a lot of what I do, er, it’s not jokes as such, it can just be funny kind of ideas or little, er, weird turns of phrase like that, yeah? So, ‘owner-operator of an enchanted beanstalk’, yeah? And that’s a giant, isn’t it, a giant. Yeah? It’s a giant. Little turns of phrase. So all I’m saying, all I’m saying if you’ve not seen me before, yeah, is the jokes are there, they’re there, but some of you, you might have to raise your game. We’ll be all right, we’ll be all right, we’ll be all right. ’Cause the
re’s harder stuff than that in this show, there’s a bit that’s borderline incomprehensible, about insects, even to me, right, so, um, and I wrote it and I don’t know what it is, right.
So my mum’s not impressed by me being a standup. My mum has already seen the best standup she’s ever going to see, she is adamant about the fact that it isn’t me. My mum’s favourite stand up is the nineteen-seventies-strokeeighties TV comedy-quiz-show host of Name That Tune fame, Tom O’Connor.
A couple of people, down here, remember Tom O’Connor, but on the whole the demographic of this room is such that no one knows who Tom O’Connor is really, no one remembers him. And that’s a shame, ’cause I’m now going to talk about Tom O’Connor for about twentyfive … twentyfive, thirty minutes.* Tom O’Connor, he was a Liverpudlian comic in the seventies and he … and then he ended up doing game shows. And my mum saw Tom O’Connor doing standup on a cruise that she took ten years ago when she retired, and this had always been a dream of hers, yeah, to go, to go on a cruise, not to see Tom O’Connor doing standup on a cruise. Seeing Tom O’Connor do standup on a cruise, it’s not even a dream of Tom O’Connor’s. In fact, in many ways it’s his worst nightmare. And one that Tom O’Connor has now been trapped in for ten years. Like some kind of silver-haired Scouse groundhog.†
* I realise that I often do this – point out that the majority of the audience aren’t interested in what I am talking about, and tell them that I’m about to discuss it for half an hour or so anyway. Again, it’s a counter-intuitive move, but one that tells them they may not be getting what they want, so they may as well try and like what they are given.
† I regret being cruel to Tom O’Connor here. He is, after all, a fellow comic, and therefore by default I have more in common with him than with any actor, musician or member of the public. But the problem is, it was Tom O’Connor that my mum saw on a cruise, and I cannot tell a lie. On this occasion.
