by Stewart Lee
* The best and most economic parody of observational comedy comes, as usual, from the comedian Simon Munnery, who simply says to the audience: ‘Anyone ever noticed anything, ever?’ A more elaborate one was an early nineties act by the sometime local-radio DJ and full-time loony Tom Binns called Some Kind of Comedian, where he stood in a metal dustbin and said stuff like, ‘Think of a thing. Think of a thing, right. Are you thinking of it? Now, think of that thing on drugs.’
This observational-comedy section was one of the rare occasions onstage in which I try to act, as I take on the amped-up persona of a formerly fêted midnineties hit Edinburgh Fringe solo-show comic, now working the length and breadth of the country with the same twenty minutes every night to support his mortgage, kids, maintenance payments and coke habit, with flashes of genius filtering through a firewall of saleable content. I have no one specific in mind here. In the midnineties, many circuit comics imagined they were Britpop rock stars, and then came down from the contact high and realised they were still variety turns. We’re all turns. There’s no shame in it! Turn, turn, turn again!
[sniffs] ‘Wa-hey! Who’s, er, who’s married? Who’s married, who’s got a girlfriend? Who’s ever seen a woman, you seen a photo of one, you know what they are, you’ve seen them around, yeah? Yeah? Not men, with the hair. Are there any in? Any women in? Any women? Girls, answer me this. Why do you take so long to get ready, what’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on? Why do you take so long to get ready? What’s going on? What’s … Who’s got kids? That’s finished, that bit. Who’s got kids? It’s finished! It’s finished! It’s fini– … Who’s got kids? I’ve got a little boy. Have you got a little boy? How old is he, fourteen? Mine’s three. It’s the same, it’s the same. It’s the same! Some of the things he says, though, they’re mad, it’s hilarious, it’s mad. It’s like he can only understand the world from the perspective of a child.’
Anyway. I’ve got a terrible feeling there’s some people at the back there going, ‘Now he’s cooking, now he’s cooking.’ Why do they take so long to get ready, the women, if only we could ask them, but they’d go mad. So, I thought, what’s the best way to do a parody of observational comedy? And the best way to do a parody of observational comedy, I thought, was to do it from the point of view of an insect, about being an insect, whilst dressed as an insect, right. So, I’m an insect comedian, right, it’d be like this. I’m an insect, yeah?*
* As explained in the previous chapter, this was a genuine idea I had for my proposed BBC TV show, but as I began to make plans to try it out, performing onstage as an insect at various comedy venues, I felt executive confidence in the programme gradually ebbing away.
[sniffs] ‘Right, who’s er, who’s killed a grasshopper? Come on, we’ve all done it, haven’t we? Friday night, we’ve all done it. There’s a bloke down there laughing, he’s on film now, he’s on film, and he’s done it. And um … We’ve all done it, Friday night, killed a grasshopper, you get ’em, don’t you, in your mandibles, yeah, and er – not what you were thinking, mandibles, yeah, what are you thinking, what are you thinking – you get ’em and you spit your enzymes onto ’em, don’t you, yeah, your enzymes, yeah, you spit your enzymes on ’em, on the grasshoppers, to dissolve ’em, yeah, into a liquid, yeah, you dissolve ’em into a liquid, yeah, so you can feed ’em to your grub. Who’s got a little grub, who’s got a little grub? I’ve got a little grub, honestly, some of the things he says, they’re mad, it’s hilarious, it’s like he can only understand the world from a larval perspective.’
So. I wanted to do that insect comedy but I didn’t know where to film it, right, for this programme that I was given. And then it turned out, as luck would have it, that in May last year there was a three-day event happening at Barnes reservoir, the wildlife reserve in south-west London, and there were entomologists, insect scientists, coming from all over the world for a three-day celebration of insects, and this event was called Pestival, right.* Pestival. That’s not my joke, that’s an entomologist’s joke. Don’t judge me. And on the opening night I found out they were having an insect-themed cabaret to welcome all the entomologists, and they’d already booked Robyn Hitchcock the singer-songwriter, ’cause he’s got loads of songs about bees and ants and things.† And they’d booked this saxophonist David Rothenberg, who was going to improvise live to a tank of crickets and stuff, right. So I – no, he was, it was good, actually, so – so I rang up the organiser Bridget Nicholls and I said to her, ‘Can I come to Pestival and do half an hour of standup about being an insect whilst dressed as an insect to the world’s three hundred leading insect scientists?’ And she said, ‘Yes, that would be exactly appropriate. But’, she said, ‘we can’t pay you. Do you love insects?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I love insects. I luv them.’ And then she said, ‘Also, there’s a party of entomologists in from Prague and we’re excited to have them ’cause they made a breakthrough study last year into the life cycle of the peach potato aphid, so it would be really great’, she said, ‘if most of your, er, gags, quips could be about aphids.’ And I said, ‘That’s fine, I’ve got loads. I’ve got loads, ’cause I started out doing standup in the eighties, you remember standup in the eighties? It was all aphid stuff, wasn’t it, aphids and, er, Thatcher, the milk snatcher, remember, snatching all the milk?’‡
* As explained in the introduction to the show, Pestival was a real event which now goes from strength to strength. 2006 was the inaugural year.
† Pestival approached me, rather than me approaching them. I changed it for the story to work. I often seem to share backstage space with the psychedelic troubadour Robyn Hitchcock at benefits for every lost cause going. I remember once we tried to Stop George Bush. In the end, George Bush stopped anyway, irrespective of our best efforts.
‡ I was booked by Bridget Nicholls to appear as an insect at Pestival, but the idea that she insisted I do stuff about the peach potato aphid is a fabrication.
So I, er, so I rang up this guy Martin Soan and I paid him 500 quid to make the insect costume.* I thought I’ll get that back from the programme eventually, and the producer said he could secretly film it for this TV series. And then about two days later, my then manager Don Rodeo, he got an email from the BBC withdrawing the offer of the whole series, out of nowhere.† Now, I mean, I was disappointed obviously but it was a strange disappointment, ’cause the whole thing had always seemed too good to be true.
* I didn’t ring up Martin Soan. I rang up a guy who had made a dolphin costume for Jo Neary or something. But back in the Cluub Zarathustra days, I would have rung Martin Soan. Martin was one of the naked balloon dancers in Malcolm Hardee’s Greatest Show on Legs, and we heard about him earlier in the book when he noted some crossover between his material and that of Joe Pasquale on the Royal Variety Performance. Martin is really your man for crazy home-made props.
For Cluub Zarathustra, our Dadaist cabaret of the midnineties, Martin built us, amongst other things, a CUNT Ray, an anti-audience defence weapon conceived by Simon Munnery. The CUNT Ray was a massive black tube, about four feet wide, with black gauze on one end with the word ‘CUNT’ written backwards in a fine transparent mesh over it. Concealed inside this comedy cannon was a powerful flash gun of the type used on industrial-strength fashion shoots. The CUNT Ray was suspended at the back of the stage to be activated at persistent hecklers individually or at unsatisfying audiences en masse. After the powerful flash blast from the CUNT Ray, as soon as the audience shut their eyes the word ‘CUNT’ would appear flashing beneath their eyelids, burned semi-permanently into their retinas.
† I had begun to make enquiries into having the costume made, and Armando Iannucci had begun making arrangements to film my performance at Pestival, when this cancellation was announced on Friday 7 April 2006. There was still over a month until Pestival, enough of a window for me to cancel the costume and save myself the money which I could not now claim back, so I did. But I changed the story here, saying I had already had
the costume made, in the interest of high drama. On Jerry Springer: The Opera, our chief investor, a sixties Mod hairdresser who was now a big TV exec in America, kept repeating the mantra ‘Where’s the jeopardy?’, which we secretly found amusing, but actually it’s always a question worth asking of any script.
You don’t get what you always want, it just doesn’t happen, getting what you want, but what had happened … It’s like going up to a little child and going, ‘Hello, what thing would you like to have most in the world? What’s your favourite thing? What?’ ‘A toy red fire engine.’ ‘Is it? Well, I’ve got one for you. There you are, that’s for you. And that light flashes and the ladder goes up … No, it is, it’s for you, you can have it, really. Take it, there it is. [shouts] Oh dear, it’s been smashed in front of your stupid, crying face.’*
* On a good night, the brutal enactment of smashing the child’s toy could silence the room.
Don’t ever dream.
But there were some practical problems with the sudden withdrawal of this work. First of all, um, I’m self-employed, I hadn’t really earned much out of Jerry Springer: The Opera because it kept being banned, and I hadn’t set up any other work because I assumed I was doing this TV series, we had a little baby due at the time, and, er, the other problem was it meant that I was now contractually obliged to go to Pestival at Barnes reservoir and do half an hour of standup about being an insect whilst dressed in a now unjustifiably expensive insect costume to three hundred of the world’s leading entomologists for no fucking reason at all.*
* Here I’d leave a big pause and then head off into the crowd, unplugged, for a fake nervous breakdown, Johnny Vegas style.
And all I’m saying, Glasgow, is does that seem to you like something that should happen to the 41st best standup of all time? [shouting] Twenty years, twenty years, twenty y– … I should not at this stage in my career, I should not have to go to a reservoir to do half an hour of standup about aphids for no … I should at least be paid for that. And after twenty years, the places I perform, their principal purpose should not be the storage of water. They should be theatres or whatever this is, a cesspit with lights. I shouldn’t even be in Glasgow at all, I should … I do a month in Edinburgh every summer, you should just travel, just travel … It’s so near it’s the same city basically …*
* This would be different every night, but it was very easy for me to find things to feel aggrieved about.
It’s a joke, isn’t it, 41st best … I don’t even have to … I can come, what, five feet from the front row, I don’t even need to look round to know that there’s people that can’t even be bothered to turn thirty degrees. ‘We’ll just … He’ll come back probably … I don’t know what this bit is anyway. Is it innovation or a mistake? I’ll just look at nothing, I’ll look at nothing. Or at that …’ ‘Can I have a backdrop?’ ‘Yeah, what would you like?’ ‘Can it be of my face?’ ‘Yeah, we’ll just distort it a bit.’ ‘What?’*
* Here I am referring to the arty photo manipulation of my face put up as a backdrop for the DVD shoot.
I should get respect, I should get … At the very least from children. There shouldn’t be seven-year-old kids shouting out at me that I’m fat. I am fat, but not by the standards of a comedian. Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown is fat, that’s in his name. And Fatty Arbuckle, and Fatty Arbuckle, yeah? And Large. They were fat. If you saw, if you saw me here on the tour for the last show, I have put on weight since then, I admit. And coming back here, I thought, ‘I like The Stand, it’s really nice, I’ll try and lose some weight so I look nice for them.’ But, you know, I’m glad I didn’t actually, ’cause there’s people going, ‘Oh I won’t even look at him. I’ll look at a distorted, bad acid image of his own face rather than actually look at him.’*
* If I’d had the guts, I’d have cut the following bit about Weight Watchers, and this clanking segue into it from the offstage rant. It’s the only part of the show that isn’t necessary for its forward narrative thrust. Tellingly, it’s the only section, apart from the deleted Del Boy bit, that I was able to reuse for the BBC2 series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, in 2009. By which I mean that it was free-floating and inessential to the 41st Best show as a hermetic whole. But it gets us into the realm of discussing political correctness, which gets us into the harsh routine about Richard Littlejohn, the uncompromising tone of which proves why, when I then come to conclude the show, I can’t do the cruise ships.
(goes back onstage) I’ve been going to Weight Watchers anyway. I have been going to Weight Watchers. But I’m forty. I was forty two days ago. And it’s hard to go to Weight Watchers as a middle-aged man, it’s embarrassing. Everyone else there is women, so you feel embarrassed. And you have to be brave as a middle-aged man to keep going back to Weight Watchers, brave, braver in many ways than a fireman or someone fighting in a war. And I’m the only person currently failing to lose weight at Weight Watchers as a result of Islam. Some laughs here, mainly an anxiety in the room. Don’t know what you’re scared of. Haven’t you got a bloke, an airport baggage handler, who can pretend to have kicked someone? It’s an empire built on sand, that man’s career.*
* This was a comment, off the top of my head, relating to John Smeaton, an airport baggage handler who kicked a terrorist with one of his two Scottish feet at Glasgow airport during a failed attempt to blow up the place. He subsequently became a minor celebrity, though there were doubts about the full extent of his hero ism. I don’t have a genuine opinion on the matter. I just said it in the heat of the moment to be annoying.
Don’t worry, I’m going to talk about Islam, don’t worry. There’s people walking out, they’re so afraid. Ben Elton says we can’t talk about Islam because we’ll be killed.* Well, I don’t care. Don’t worry, right, don’t worry about where this bit’s going, ’cause this, don’t worry, ’cause this bit, if you’re nervous, this bit was reviewed in the London Evening Standard as being ‘tediously politically correct’. So, don’t worry about where it’s going. In fact, if you were confused so far, you can now add boredom to that.†
* The month prior to filming this, in March 2008, the eighties comedian Ben Elton had told the Christian magazine Third Way that the BBC were too scared to broadcast jokes about Islam because he had had a line about ‘taking the mountain to Mohammed’ cut. I wrote a piece for the same paper at the time defending the BBC’s position, and saying that Ben Elton had missed the point. But then the only piece of material cut from my subsequent 2009 series by the BBC was one that the compliance unit were worried broke an Islamic cultural taboo. Sorry, Ben Elton.
† I was so bored of the way that being politically incorrect in comedy was being seen as an end in itself that I was actually very glad to be described by a reviewer as ‘tediously politically correct’, and decided henceforth to adopt the criticism that I was ‘politically correct’ as a positive thing, as something to aim for. (One way of defeating critics is to embrace their criticisms as positive things. I had ‘surly, arrogant and laboured’ made into a badge.) Over the preceding year, I had become more and more interested in all the right-wingers’ exaggerated urban myths of political correctness, and this culminated in me losing my temper, quite unprofessionally, in a discussion on the subject on David Baddiel’s Radio 4 show Heresy in May 2007, when the majority of the audience voted for the suggestion that ‘Political correctness had gone mad’, and Harry Enfield agreed with them.
Now. I go to Weight Watchers where … I go to Weight Watchers, ladies and gentlemen, I go where I live. And I go to Stamford Hill library, Stoke Newington, in northeast London. And, um, there’s only two men in my Weight Watchers group, me and an old Polish man in his late seventies. And everyone else is women, women of all races and creeds and colours and cultures and shapes and sizes. It’s like a United Nations day out to a funfair hall of mirrors. Which they have actually, they have those. And um, I was in the queue waiting to get weighed, you queue up to get weighed, right, and three in front of me there’s a young Muslim woman
about twentyfive years old, and she was wearing the hijab, this is the headscarf they wear ’cause there’s an Islamic taboo about men seeing hair. And she turned round to me and she said, ‘I do apologise but I’m about to get weighed, would you be so kind as to go out in the corridor?’ Now, at the time, I mean obviously in retrospect, um, it was ’cause she was going to take the headscarf off and I couldn’t see her hair, but I didn’t make the connection then and I thought she just didn’t want me to see how much weight she’d put on. So I said, ‘No, I’m not going out, and I don’t know what you’re worried about, love, you’re not even that fat.’ And then she said, ‘No, it’s the …’
And then I realised, right, and I started to apologise, but in-between me and her was a Hassidic Jewish woman about fifty years old, and she sort of budged in and she looked at the young Muslim woman and then she looked at me and then she sort of went [sigh of exasperation] like that. [sigh of exasperation] As if to go, ‘First the suicide bombings and now this.’ But the irony was that the Hassidic Jewish, they have a thing where they shave their hair off and the women wear wigs over it. So she’s in a wig, the young Muslim woman’s in this headscarf. Me, I’m an atheist, right, a fat atheist we’ve established, but I didn’t see why my attempts to lose weight should be compromised in any way by the hair anxieties of a God I don’t necessarily believe exists, right. But it looked like there was going to be a three-way argument. Everyone was looking at each other. And then I thought, ‘I can’t stay here to debate this,’ I thought. ‘I can’t stay here. ’Cause if we ever are going to decide how exactly, if at all, God wants hair to be concealed, that’s not going to happen at Stamford Hill Weight Watchers. It’s Stamford Hill Weight Watchers, not Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle.’ Although I would go to that.*
* Everything here happened exactly as described, except that I didn’t say, ‘No, I’m not going out, and I don’t know what you’re worried about, love, you’re not even that fat,’ to the Muslim woman. I just looked confused. When I did this routine on Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle for BBC2, they made me change the location of the Weight Watchers to Finsbury Park, to avoid the possibility that I had libelled anyone.
