I only have two reservations about gay marriage. First, it’s against the holy teachings of our Lord. Second, it could fundamentally undermine ratios at wife-swapping parties. Of course, the official Catholic position is against. As opposed to the unofficial Catholic position, bent over the font biting down hard on a hymn book.
Plans for gay marriage have been approved by MPs despite opposition from nearly half the Tory party. They’re worried their rent boys will propose. One chief opponent is Tory MP Peter Bone. A little rich, as I’m sure I saw his name on the credits of Dishonourable Members 2. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say afterwards they had to take a nailbrush to the Mace.
It’s astounding that in 2013 there’s still currency in hinting at people’s sexual preferences. So, to help this practice wither in the bright light of public exposure, I’m going to reveal my own. I’m happy to admit I like being filmed being mounted by a giant screeching eagle with a four-metre wingspan. There, I’ve said it.
ENDGAME
My premise is that our society is now completely subsumed by advertising and that the roots of our unhappiness lie in our attempts to market ourselves and live the advertised life. The original PR bible, the foundation of modern marketing and politics, is called Propaganda. It was an attempt to use the ideas of Freud to influence opinion and was written by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays.
It’s not just that we’re being marketed to or marketing ourselves, it’s that this is all being done in a Freudian framework. I’ve always felt ambivalent about psychoanalysis. I’ve thought of going into therapy, but I know it’d be like hiring a window cleaner for a burning building. Also, I can’t help feeling that perhaps the first question you should ask your psychiatrist is why you’re such a cunt that you have to pay someone to listen to you.
I mean, I like Freud, but a culture in which dreams are interpreted as communications from a deeper self would sit pretty easily in a fantasy novel. And underneath is the idea of the primacy of sexual urges. The culture thinks that all you’re interested in is pussy.* Happy pussy, sexy pussy, loving pussy, warm, forgiving pussy. That’s what motivates you. Friendly pussy, plain pussy, available pussy, your friend’s pussy – you don’t care. Depressed pussy, drunken pussy, angry pussy, stripping out by the airport pussy, ugly pussy, hospital pussy, dead pussy. Is this base view of humanity, right through the wiring of our society, part of the reason our society can treat people as if they’re so base?
I wonder if a more useful idea for understanding reality might be James Joyce’s notion that we’re trying to live within the stories we tell each other as if they’re real. Do you ever try to look objectively at your own life as a narrative? Do you ever see yourself as the bad guy in the story? Hey, don’t judge me, I’m forty and I do whatever I have to do to get a hard-on together. Modern life is the struggle to awake from narrative. We now have stories fed to us from birth till death, and because they used to be a survival mechanism we take them too seriously. Stories will originally have been about little boys who left caves when they heard noises, and we still give them that kind of weight.
Were men of my dad’s generation emotionally withdrawn because of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, or vice versa? I remember as a teenager thinking that in a good relationship you had to have these funny arguments all the time. That’s what you saw in films and on TV. And, really, they only put conflict in stories so it’s easier to write dialogue. What would Batman and Green Arrow talk about if they were getting along? I like your boots, motherfucker.
My five-year-old boy has a favourite American teen sitcom, and after an episode he’ll spend an hour speaking out of the side of his mouth, trying for their brand of ’tude, and not making any sense. And it’s fun. It’s fun getting zinged by someone who I could probably convince that the moon is a gobstopper.
But your life is not a story, your consciousness is not a narrator. It’s a godless, authorless world.
In addition, you get other people trying to ‘lay their trip on you’. I love that phrase, an old acidhead shorthand for having someone try to tell you how to view the world, or yourself. The thing that middle-class critics and comics always praise in working-class comedians is self-loathing; acts producing characters or jokes where the real targets are themselves. This seems to be a quality never demanded of middle-class comedians; indeed, they generally seem quite pleased with themselves! The uncomfortable question of why they want to see their social inferiors hate themselves never really seems to come up. Like Malcolm X before me,* I never bought that self-hate bullshit. I don’t hate myself any more than I love myself. I’m a rich, sex-haunted, world-class nutcase who will probably die horribly. You go deal with it.
We’re brought up in a language and a culture. It’s like a prison we’re born into. If you’re a kid right now, you’re already negotiating a world filled with sexuality and violence and emptied of ideas. You must wonder why people sing in their pants, why your dad can’t look at you with the same intensity as at his smartphone. You won’t wonder when people started preferring work to life, when they became more concerned about how they seem than what they are – it’ll just be how things have always been, and the bars of your prison will be narrower than those of your parents.
Language is a key part of your prison. Taboos over language are often just a childish attempt to draw a circle round all the good people. I run into people every day who use all sorts of language that would be unacceptable on stage, but does this make them immoral? Language taboos change regularly and these people don’t get the updates, they don’t read broadsheets, they don’t watch documentaries and, perhaps most importantly, they don’t really care how society thinks they should talk. So is the taboo value of a word like, say, retard, really always about morality or ablism? It’s obviously also a handy way of recognising social class. This is before we even get to the fact that things have different meanings for different people. You say snapchat, I say speedwank.
I remember some nutter at a party one time telling me about his idea that jihadis would welcome a nuclear war. That they longed for the United States to turn the world into a desert, because jihadis would flourish in the desert, and it’s all part of the plan for a successful Armageddon. If the Americans blast the world into sand they’ll have created the very terrain where they’ll be defeated. I actually think that’s a pretty useful metaphor for where we’re at culturally. Let me explain.
There’s an episode of Graham Norton that I enjoy so much I watch it regularly. It’s playing now in the background as I write this. It features a bizarre central performance from Gerard Butler, who speaks in an alarming drawl and maintains an excited and distracted manner throughout.
It starts with Graham Norton dressed as one of the warriors from 300 shouting ‘This is Sparta!’ and announcing the guests in a cod Scottish accent. Because they’ve got Butler on the writers will have sat there and thought of various 300-themed intros. The way this works in my experience is that writers produce things of various levels of wit and complexity, which the producers fret their way though, worrying about whether they’re obvious enough for the punters on BBC One. I mean, would they have had to have seen the film for this joke to work? Do you think people might just wonder why Graham is dressed as a Greek warrior this week, that maybe he’s going to do the interviews like that, perhaps adopting a classical mindset, leading to a list of questions being asked that sound outlandish to our modern ears? In the end the producers will have gone, ‘Fuck it. Let’s just have him shout “This is Sparta!” and just announce the guests in a Scottish voice.’ It’s a moment of such artistic poverty that it’s made me question the pointlessness of creativity and mankind’s impossible battle to communicate. I’d go so far as to say that it constitutes an important coda to the theory of evolution.
The guests are Butler, Martin Freeman and Amy Pond from Dr Who, who enter one after the other with a real frisson of tension, as if Butler had tried to finger everybody in the green room. This is quite a common set-up for the Gr
aham Norton couch, where one alpha male flirts with an attractive woman, while a less potent man looks on, stricken.
What follows is a shifting and uneasy dreamscape that can be seen as a satire on the nature of celebrity, a chilling expressionist commentary on how we can never truly communicate, and even just a show that was knocked together with a kind of bored contempt for the human mind.
Butler lunges at an anecdote about a kilt but claims never to have worn one. A fan in the audience shouts out that he wore one to a première that Tuesday. Butler’s eyes swivel with the amazed wonder of a time traveller. He then attempts an anecdote about surfing that falls a little flat. Norton shrieks, ‘Not exactly comedy gold!’, idly dismissing this little tidbit of Butler’s life that’s offered up to him, like some mischievous sprite from a lost Shakespeare play.
There’s a heavy, musky sense of sexual threat throughout. Amy Pond looks both excited and frightened, and would clearly bolt if she were a horse. Martin Freeman wears a mask of acceptance that he’s to be overshadowed both professionally and sexually. It’s a mask that questions how appalling Butler would have to be to lose the admiration of the crowd or the girl, that says even a sudden shift into a spasmodically delivered murder confession might not be quite enough.
Then somewhere, somehow, a complex helmet that boosts the wearer’s psychic abilities must have been handed to the young William Burroughs, because it transpires that the little Jack Russell from the film The Artist is to make an appearance, re-enacting Butler’s surfing anecdote to thunderous applause.
We have to weave our own dramas around shows like this simply because to take them as they are meant would be too harrowing. This is the kind of imagination that our dead culture has forced on us. Like a kung fu monk, held by his enemies at the bottom of an old well, we use the power of our minds to create a paradise of rolling hills, peopled by imaginary families, having imaginary kung fu themed adventures in our starless prison.
So, we’re in a cultural desert. The great TV and cinema and public intellectuals that I grew up with have been blasted into sand. What qualities there are in our culture now are just the mirages we project on to great piles of nothing. But what’s culture, anyway? Culture is simply a machine designed to get you to think within certain fixed parameters. Culture isn’t your buddy. Your culture is a series of products designed to advance the status or wealth of a stranger, and anyone who it hasn’t caused to completely give in to despair by their late twenties is just shallow.
Everything produced in culture nowadays has a minimal impact because of the increasing speed of information. Let’s say you can write a TV drama and succeed in producing something interesting in the face of all the practical problems and restrictions. I don’t think you can, but let’s imagine that you do. Fewer people than ever before will watch it, and when they do they’ll be texting, tweeting, watching a five-second mpeg of someone masturbating onto a photograph of Vanessa Hudgens. It has taken me about an hour to write this paragraph because that sentence made me go and look at nude photos of Vanessa Hudgens. Modern life is really only about learning the bare minimum you need to know about a subject to have an argument. You can write a bestselling book but half the people who buy it won’t read it and the ones that do won’t finish it. A lot of your prospective audience is now on prescription medication. With an increasing demand for never-ending content, we all plagiarise and parody ourselves.
So give it up. Stop trying to do something for posterity, because posterity doesn’t exist anymore. Stop living for tomorrow, because there’s really no guarantee of that, either. Yes, you live in the discarded carapace of a dead civilisation, but you can turn it into the beautiful life of an apocalypse survivor. Enough good books and films have been made that you can watch or read something mind-blowing every day until you die. You can thrive like a jihadi in the desert of our culture. Show me the most intellectual nihilist and I’ll show you someone who’s simply ignoring a lot of really good reggae.
If you’re truly wise you’ll see ahead of you days of war and nights of love. Yes, you’re stalked by corporations, but they’re just monsters. Monsters are things you learn how to kill – they have weaknesses and obey the rules of stories. And, as you fight, put aside your differences. However much your comrade annoys you, rest assured that these beasts are going to have the same serial number for your world-view in their camps. Make a break from a world of hate crimes without returning to one where we let people die through sheer fucking indifference.
And the key to happiness? I don’t know. Meet someone beautiful who’s aroused by failure? Really, it’s to escape your own ego, not just on a personal but on a political level. We live in a society of elitism and exceptionalism, and it has seeped into all of us. Bombing civilians is an attempt to export democracy. Civilians fighting back are terrorists. What’s OK for us is not OK for you. Pussy Riot are the victims of tyranny, but not the people we jail for throwing a custard pie at Rupert Murdoch or swimming in front of the Boat Race? They were actually doing something selfless, however foolish, and we can’t have that. The self has to be before you at every turn, every sentence that’s spoken weighed up for its impact on your status, every person you meet reduced from incredible possibility to a very poor mirror.
The self is just an excuse to pour endlessly into a leaky bucket. Why not focus on your real mirror, your children? I was in the swimming pool the other day and as I floated listlessly in a corner I suddenly realised that I wouldn’t do comedy again, that the day I’d have needed to start warming up for a new tour had long gone and I hadn’t even noticed.
My boy was on one of his periodic anti-social highs. So, I’d grab him, imprison him in a hug and whisper this deliberately boring story in his ear in a low, doleful Irish voice that was a partial satire on his grandad. ‘The Story of the 100 Sheep,’ I began, listing all the different places a forsaken sheep would go looking for a friend. ‘He looked in the hills and he looked in the meadow and he looked down by the stream. And he didn’t see any sheep. Then he looked in a hedge and he saw a sheep. Then there were two sheep! The two sheep were lonely and decided to go looking for a friend . . . They looked in the hills . . .’
When it got to about five sheep, a few of them got lost in the fog and it was back to two sheep. Then one sheep sat down to begin telling the other ‘The Story of the Thousand Crabs’. As the laughter shook him, it rose through me like music.
*Female heterosexuals and male homosexuals should here read ‘pussy’ as ‘cock’.
*It feels great to write that phrase down. Try it!
ALSO BY FRANKIE BOYLE:
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‘Boyle has made his name with the kind of acerbic comedy that takes no prisoners and leaves those of a timid disposition gaping, slack-jawed.’
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© Frankie Boyle 2013
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Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian Page 23