How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

  And I tell you what, it’s really nice being back in a kind of cosmopolitan city like Glasgow, where you can say the phrase, er, ‘Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle’ and you people realise that that is a joke, there’s no such thing. Because what I’ve found is, in the north of England, right, in Carlisle or Derby or somewhere, when I say ‘Stamford Hill Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle’, there’s no laugh, ’cause all the north of England people are going, ‘Well, they would have that in that London – the kind of stupid thing that they would have there.’ And what I say to people in the north of England is not every town has to have a cake named after it, yeah. And it’s not strictly true, they haven’t all got cakes named after them, right, but enough of them have, if you say that to a north of England person, they go, ‘Oh, Bakewell, Eccles …’ and then they get confused. So … ‘Yorkshire pudding, is that …?’*

  * I found that this routine worked better in cities. Perhaps in more rural areas of the UK, people genuinely believe their pretentious urban counterparts might actually be attending, in the interests of multiculturalism, a ‘Weight Watchers and Religious Hair Taboo Discussion Circle’.

  So, anyway, I went out in the corridor. And the young Muslim woman had already asked the old Polish man to go out in the corridor, and he was out in the corridor, and he looked at me and he made this kind of angry face, right.* And I looked away, ’cause I was worried he was going to say something like ‘fucking Muslims’ or something, yeah, and I looked away. ’Cause I didn’t want to have to agree with something racist out of politeness. ’Cause I can do that whenever I go home at Christmas. I say quilts, but they’re flags really. Banners.

  * The Polish man’s face wasn’t really angry. He just looked more like he was wryly amused but wasn’t sure if he even ought to communicate this with me. I made him into a worse figure than he was to make this story work. When I did this routine on Radio 4’s Political Animal, I asked them to check it at length with lawyers before wasting everyone’s time and getting me to record it and then having to cut it all out, as I had just had to cut a load of stuff that I wrote for Kevin Eldon’s Radio 4 series Poet’s Tree on the grounds of blasphemy, which wasn’t even a crime any more by that stage. (I would like to do more BBC radio comedy, but the bullshit factor of the process massively outweighs the pleasure of doing it.) The lawyers of Political Animal’s production company said the routine was fine, I could even set it in Stamford Hill, and I recorded it for the show in front of a live audience. Then, after recording, it was decided by Radio 4 that the Polish man might sue. Was the man Polish? I wasn’t sure. Would it be possible to cut the word ‘Polish’ in the edit? No, because it was important that the story was set in a multicultural area and that the man was also non-indigenous, to play up to the cross-cultural tensions, and to not make him the usual straw man of the supposedly racist white working-class male. Could the man’s nationality be changed to some other Eastern European country? Yes, but as I didn’t know if the man was really Polish, as I just identified him as having an Eastern European accent and assumed he was Polish, there was every chance, if we changed him to Hungarian or Czech, that we would be changing him from something he wasn’t into something he was and thereby worsening the problem. Despite this, it was decided that this was the best course of action and I went in and overdubbed a new Eastern European nationality onto the now not Polish man. Honestly, it’s political correctness gone mad. Or, as Simon Donald from Viz put it so brilliantly, ‘It’s political correctness gone mad gone mad’.

  So … And then I was out in the corridor, and I was annoyed initially ’cause I thought, ‘I’ve gone out, I’ve left the Weight Watchers now, and I’m going to lose my nerve and I’m not going to go back in, and I’m going to get fatter and fatter.’ But then I thought, ‘You know what, it doesn’t matter, right, it’s ten, fifteen minutes out of my day, I can rejoin the queue.’ And if I was a young Muslim in Britain today, maybe I’d feel quite put upon and maybe these kind of cultural signifiers would take on an extra importance – it doesn’t matter. Then I thought, ‘You know what, it doesn’t matter, it’s ten, fifteen minutes out of my day, I can rejoin the queue.’ And if I was in a queue for something and there was someone behind me who was, like, blind or on crutches or mentally handicapped or something, I would let them go ahead of me. And then I thought, ‘That’s a bit weird, isn’t it, ’cause I’ve just equated having a religious belief with being mentally handicapped.’ Which obviously isn’t appropriate. Even though it is correct.

  And then I got annoyed, right, and I thought … I got annoyed, I thought, ‘I’m going to go back in, I’m going to go to her, “You, a Muslim, may be a contributing factor in my ongoing weight gain. Driving me out, you know … And if you must wear your hijab to Weight Watchers, then what I suggest is that you take it off at home and weigh it separately before you come out, and then deduct its weight from your Weight Watchers total, giving you your correct weight, using maths, which I understand your people claim to have invented.”’ Yeah? But I didn’t say that, right, I just went back in and er, you know, and I had, um … gained some weight.*

  * Although I intended this bit to be absurd and silly, and I don’t think any right-thinking fat person would be that bothered about having to leave Weight Watchers for a moment while a Muslim was weighed – I certainly didn’t mind – the joke does have a serious resonance. As I write, Ed Balls is trying to standardise sex education across the school system to minimise teenage pregnancy, STDs and the bullying of homosexuals, but is, predictably, encountering religious resistance from faith schools, some of which believe their theistic scruples set them above the duty to help implicate generally applicable, across the board, ethical values in sex education. What is the politically correct response to this?

  Now, one hesitates in the current climate to make a joke onstage about the Muslims, right, not for fear of religious reprisals, right – when’s that ever hurt anyone?* – but because of a slightly more slippery anxiety, which is, like, basically, when you do, like, standup in a small room, it’s like, ‘We’re all friends, hooray, and we can make a joke.’ But you don’t really know, you don’t really know how a joke’s received, and it could be that it’s laughed at enthusiastically in a way that you don’t understand, particularly out there, you don’t know who’s watching on television. I mean, if it’s on telly on Paramount, probably someone horrible, an idiot, um … The kind of person who’s awake at five in the morning, who knows what, it could be anyone laughing at this, you don’t know, awful people. And um … So … um …†

  * This line was getting laughs for two reasons: (1) because I was known by some of the room to have had work closed down by religious people; and (2) because it is an understatement and people are being threatened all the time by the religious.

  † As the missing presumed dead comedian Jason Freeman said as the punchline to a joke I’ve already quoted but long forgotten the set-up for, ‘context is not a myth’. It’s worth saying again. In the early nineties, Frank Skinner was able to break various taboos of gender-and sexuality-based political correctness, back when standup really was still in the shadows of a polytechnic-lecturer liberal orthodoxy, by using his easy charm and casually confidential air to make everyone in the room feel they were amongst friends, and that anything that was said was really just a joke.

  So you don’t know. And the problem is 84 per cent of people apparently, of the public, think that political correctness has gone mad.* Now, um, I don’t know if it has. People still get killed, don’t they, for being the wrong colour or the wrong sexuality or whatever. And what is political correctness? It’s an often clumsy negotiation towards a kind of formally inclusive language. And there’s all sorts of problems with it but it’s better than what we had before, but 84 per cent of people think political correctness has gone mad. And you don’t want one of those people coming up to you after the gig and going, ‘Well done, mate, er, well done, actuall
y, for having a go at the fucking Muslims. Well done, mate. You know, you can’t do anything in this country any more mate, it’s political correctness gone mad. Do you know, you can’t even write racial abuse in excrement on someone’s car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat.’ And you don’t want those people coming up to you after gigs, ’cause that’s Al Murray the Pub Landlord’s audience, missing the point and laughing through bared teeth like the dogs they are.†

  * This statistic is based on my aforementioned unprofessional appearance on David Baddiel’s Heresy in May 2007, when 84 per cent of the clever Radio 4 studio audience thought that political correctness had gone mad.

  † I hope I didn’t upset Al Murray personally by saying this, if he was ever made aware of the joke, as his nineties shows as the Pub Landlord were amongst the greatest standup I have ever seen. Back then, the Pub Landlord was a bulletproof satire of the soft right, with a prominent back story that informed his prejudice, played out to packed Fringe festival attics of adoring liberals. I am sure Al had legitimate artistic worries about the point of preaching to the converted, whilst also wondering how to broaden his appeal to achieve the premier-league position he craved (Al was subsequently to cook a high-profile fish pie on a celebrity chef show, which helped secure his Pub Landlord character a wider audience of ITV viewers). But the places the character appeared and the attitudes of the punters who flocked to see him in the noughties have inevitably changed the way the material is received. Some might say it’s patronising to assume that not all the audience get Al’s joke, but I wanted to be able to talk about race, for example, onstage without any risk of racists thinking that, covertly, I was trying to agree with them.

  Even in my carefully filtered crowds, to which I attempt to apply the most thorough social-screening procedures, there could be trouble. When I did this bit in Hastings, where a sixteen-year-old Qatari student was randomly murdered by a white gang in 2008, some guys started shouting out ‘rag-heads, rag-heads’, and it was hard to plot a course back to the core of the routine as I saw it when the vibe of the room had been thus altered. They apologised, embarrassed, at the end, and I think they were just overexcited. In the words of the alleged murderers of Stephen Lawrence, justifying their racist language when interviewed by Martin Bashir: ‘It was just banter, Martin, harmless banter.’

  ’Cause I’m forty, like I said, I was forty last week, and I can remember before political correctness, that’s why I think it’s better. I remember … It’s better now.* I remember when I was twelve, there was one Asian kid in our class, and every day when he read the register out, for a year, the teacher, instead of using his name, called him ‘the black spot’, every day for a year.† The street I grew up in, just south of Birmingham, there was I remember, 1972, a black family that wanted to move in and all the white families put pressure on the guy not to sell the house. And eight years previous to that, David Cameron never mentions it, but the Conservative Party won a by-election in Birmingham and they sent out little kids with leaflets that said, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour.’ And if political correctness has achieved one thing, it’s to make the Conservative Party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language.‡ But …§

  * The following routine, about examples of pre-politicalcorrectness racism, is more or less what I said on David Baddiel’s Heresy show. I just got a tape of the rant, transcribed it, cleaned up the factual inaccuracies a bit and spared the blushes of people I’d mentioned by name, and slotted it into 41st Best. It was a rare example of something you say on the spur of the moment being worth repeating.

  † I have seen people online saying I made this up. I didn’t. And this sort of thing was common at the time. When the old-school comedian Mike Reid hosted the ITV kids’ game show Runaround, I remember him routinely referring to black children, to their faces, as ‘little chocolate drops’, in an avuncular fashion, meaning nothing by it really. And I don’t think my teacher meant any malice at all by saying ‘the black spot’ either. He liked the boy. I think he was being friendly in his pre-PC way. But I noticed one of my old schoolmates from the same class just popped up on the leaked BNP membership list, the twat. These two facts are, of course, related.

  ‡ For the TV series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, I was obliged to tweak this line, legally, to ‘… it’s to make racists in the Conservative Party cloak their beliefs behind more creative language’. Again, I’ve seen people online saying this slogan was never used, and as it was before my birth how could I remember it if it was. It was used, in 1964 by the Tory candidate Peter Griffiths, and I remember it still being used by grumpy Brummies where I grew up in the early seventies while they were out shopping for bananas to throw at black Aston Villa players. The granddaughter of Patrick Gordon Walker, the Labour MP who lost his seat to Griffiths as a result of his racist campaign, contacted me having seen the show live to say how much she liked the bit.

  The reason young people assumed these bits were made up was because, I think, nobody under thirty would believe that they ever could have happened, living as they do in a society that has, at least cosmetically, benefited from political correctness.

  § The ‘but’ here is appended directly onto the end of the phrase ‘cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language’ as a standard standup comedy trick known in the trade as Ó Briain’s Truncated Appendage, as it was at its most obvious in the nineties work of the Irish funnyman Dara Ó Briain. If you are unsure as to whether an audience will laugh at something, because it is too risqué or contentious, you begin the next sentence immediately, as if you hadn’t intended the line to get a laugh anyway. This relieves the audience of the obligation to laugh, and they then sometimes laugh anyway, as they don’t mind giving you something you aren’t waiting around begging for. It is possible to begin the next sentence with a half-formed word or non-specific vowel sound and then to wait for the delayed laugh, as in me saying ‘but’ in this instance. Or you can do what Dara did for a decade, which is just to make a funny, upwardly inflected noise, a sort of crescendoed mix of ‘ah’ and ‘um’, which, if snappy enough, will also provoke the laugh. Dara doesn’t do this any more, and his clever live shows, which sneak subversive political comment and beautifully expressed social observation past hate-filled Mock the Week viewers who would presumably be happy with any old shit, are largely free of the Truncated Appendages he helped standardise. But if you find clips of the nineties and noughties Irish TV hits Don’t Feed the Gondolas or The Panel, you will find Dara using the ‘aaaaahh-uuuuuum’ gambit in frequent full effect.

  But on the whole, when people say political correctness has gone mad, I think, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ Unless it’s my nan, right. When my nan says to me, ‘Oh, Stew, that political correctness has gone mad,’ I go, ‘Why is that, Nan?’ She goes, ‘Well, I was in the hairdresser’s yesterday, Stew. And they said to me, “Would you like a cup of tea, Mrs Harris?” I said, “Yes please.” They said, “Well, you can have one but you have to drink it in the waiting area, ’cause we can’t have hot liquids at the work station.” It’s political correctness gone mad, Stew. It’s old Red Robbo, Stew, he’s saying that we can’t have tea any more in case it annoys a Pakistani.’*

  * Red Robbo is the seventies trade-union leader Derek Robinson, a demonised figure in my family when I was a child who was routinely tutted at on television, as members of my extended family were employees of the Longbridge car plant, where Robinson frequently brought the workers out. To anyone of a certain age, ‘Red Robbo’ is subliminally associated with the now discredited idea of the seventies left, but find some YouTube footage of him and you’ll see a self-taught Marxist locking horns with public-school-educated bosses on an equal footing, and find yourself longing for the days of a definable left and right, rather than the mid-mass mush of today.

  Basically, there’s a whole generation of people who’ve confused political correctness with health and safety legis lation.* �
�It’s gone mad. They’re saying I can’t have an electric fire in the bath any more, Stew, in case queers see it. In the old days you could get your head and you could submerge it in a vat of boiling acid. And now they’re going, “Oh, don’t do that, what if Jews see it? Might annoy Jews …” You could get your whole family and you could jump in a threshing machine and dance around. All your arms would fly off and it was fine. And now they’re going, “Oh …” They’ve banned Christmas. They’ve banned Christmas now.’†

  * I’m absolutely sick of people blaming the restrictions created by health and safety culture, itself exacerbated in turn by a trend towards increased litigation, on the political and ideological doctrine of political correctness. They aren’t the same thing, and are not symptomatic of each other. My nan wasn’t especially concerned about political correctness, and none of this is based on anything she ever said. Instead, I made this Nan character a composite of every piece of anti-PC bullshit I had ever heard over the years, and the exaggerated voice I’d do for her left me free to improvise a stream-of-consciousness splurge of different made-up examples of political correctness gone mad every night.

  † Did anybody ever really ban Christmas? Edward Stourton, in his brilliant book Living in a PC World, sees this as the ultimate anti-PC urban myth.

  On the whole, when people say … I mean, there’s a columnist for the Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn, and he’s got two catchphrases. One is ‘political correctness has gone mad’. And the other is ‘You couldn’t make it up’. You couldn’t make it up, which is ironic, given that the vast proportion of what he writes has no …* And about a year ago, Littlejohn did a whole page on political correctness gone mad. And it’s gone to court now, this thing, but it’s when there was a serial murderer killing sex workers in East Anglia, and the police and the broadsheets at the time routinely referred to – some of them were teenagers – and the papers would call them ‘women that worked as prostitutes’, rather than just ‘prostitutes’, and Littlejohn did a whole page on how this was political correctness gone mad, and you should call them ‘prostitutes’ and not ‘women that worked as prostitutes’, and anyway, it wasn’t like any of them were ever going to find a cure for cancer. But it wasn’t political correctness gone mad, it was the papers and the police thinking, ‘Some of these people are really young, you know, and they have surviving family and friends and … and what can we do to cushion this ugly word “prostitute”? We’ll blanket it in a, a qualifying phrase,’ you know. It was a nice thing to do.†