by AA Gill
Dear Sir,
I’m a stand-up comedian. I do observational monologues rather than tell jokes. My act takes a great deal of time to work out. The humour is often oblique, making unexpected cultural references that grow on the audience. The thing is, I suffer from hecklers. If someone shouts out from the audience, I’m thrown. And the narrative bond with them is broken. I’m not an aggressive or combative performer. I tried reasoning with them, pleading. I’ve even tried paying them (that got the biggest laugh of the gig). I’ve developed dreadful stage fright. And eczema. All I ever wanted to do was be a comedian. Please, please help me.
Paddy, London
You’re shit and you know you are, you’re shit and you know you are, you’re shit and you know you are . . . LOL
AA,
I’m really, really excited about outdoor sex. My girlfriend says we should try everything. What do you recommend?
Tom, by email
Tom, the world’s your oyster. I’m not sure how qualified I am as an erotic tour guide. I’m assuming you and your girlfriend are just setting out on life’s sexual pilgrimage. All the kit is still new and shiny, a little stiff, a bit tight, and you’re both dewy thighed about it all. I don’t want to be a party pooper, but then poop and parties pretty much go together. Most of the things you think you want to do aren’t anything like as much fun as they’re cracked up to be. All the stuff they get up to in porn movies, it’s like doing an assault course while desperately trying to think of Megan Fox. Most of the people who regularly have sex under the stars do it because they don’t have an indoors to go to. Doggers are homeless wife swappers. Outside, you may have noticed, doesn’t have a roof. It’s cold, wet, hard, lumpy and dirty, none of it in a good way. There are some places that should be sued under the sex descriptions act. Attempting coitus in a jacuzzi is the most overrated and unpleasant experience in all of civilisation. Sex on a beach is cold, clammy and uncomfortable; you really don’t want sand up there. Sex in the sea is impossible unless you’re the passive partner of a dolphin. I do, though, recommend sex in a tent: half inside, half outside. Or a balmy veranda in Provence. The floor of a box in the Royal Albert Hall during Elgar’s Cello Concerto worked very well for me once. Sex is about physics and engineering. It’s simple. Bridge and tunnel. Love is different. You can have the best sex of your life anywhere if it’s with the right person at the right moment. Wherever you do it, all sex is inside.
Dear AA,
I’m in love with a fantastic girl and we’re thinking of taking it to the next level: moving in together with the option of marriage, kids, the whole nine in-laws. The trouble is, she believes in fairies. I’m embarrassed just writing it. Suzie’s perfectly rational in every other way. She trained as a lawyer, she works for a charity, has a nice, agnostic family, isn’t superstitious, just adamantly believes in fairies. They’re fucking everywhere. Hiding the car keys, bringing luck, looking after special places. It makes me so mad. I get unpleasant, make jokes in public, and tease her. I know it’s unkind, but fuck it, she believes in fucking fairies. How can I convince her the goblins have eaten them all? My future depends on it.
Rob, by email
Indeed, Rob, it probably does. At the moment your future looks decidedly pixie-lated. Let’s step back. You believe in football, don’t you? Ah, you riposte, but football is real; everyone else can see it too. True. But is your belief rational? Is crying over the achievements or failures of men you don’t know normal? Is the votive belief in signed T-shirts and hallowed turf sensible? Is hating other people because they love 11 different footballers? Is putting off sex to listen to Alan Hansen the behaviour of a rational human being? You see, Rob, it’s not what you believe. It can be transubstantiation, Genesis, the divine right of kings, the free market, Bolton Wanderers, or fairies. What matters is how you believe it. Does it make you a better, more empathetic, kinder, more charitable human being? Or does it make you worse? Now I gather that the girlfriend is charming, clever, decent, imaginative and long-suffering. Because it’s not fairies you don’t believe in, it’s Suzie. If you love someone, you do it because of what they are, not despite it. She loves you with the football. That almost certainly makes you a less attractive man. And as we speak, the little people are probably whispering in her ear that you are a judgemental, earthbound, self-reverential, unimaginative, selfish twat. And the stork’s never coming anywhere near you.
Dearest Uncle D,
I couldn’t ever love a Tory.
Jocasta, Gloucestershire
Quite right. You don’t want to go breeding with Tories. No one loves a Conservative, particularly other Conservatives. To be a Tory is the antonym of lovable. They’re there to make the world safe and comfortable and solvent, so that other people who aren’t Tories can have sex in a land fit for Lefties. That’s the terrible dichotomy of Conservatism. If you want lovable, go and grab a Green Party member. They all fucking ooze lovability 24/7.
Sir,
My girlfriend says size doesn’t matter. Is she right?
Peter, by email
She’s right. She’s right for you, wee man. She’s a thoughtful liar. Put it this way: in which other area or aspect of your life does size not matter? Is a double the same as a single? Is a three-room flat the same price as a one-room flat? Is horsepower all in Clarkson’s imagination? Would you not give a fig if your holiday were 10 instead of 14 days? Or your girlfriend 14 instead of eight stone? Exactly. So do you really think the only thing in the world where size doesn’t matter is your peepee?
Dear Uncle,
I’ve just discovered my fiancé is shagging a girl I’ve asked to be a bridesmaid. We’re supposed to be getting married next month. What surprised me wasn’t that he’d hump the sad, stupid, diseased little tart, but that I don’t feel heartbroken. I’m not in bits, I’m not devastated, there is no sobbing. I am not writing this from a humiliated pool of desolate rejection. I am cool and focused. I am steely and smiley. But mostly, I am furious. Incandescently, levitatingly, titanically, stratospherically, scorched-earth angry. I am so angry I could sack a city. I am angry enough to become a child’s dentist. I could stamp on kittens in stilettos (me, not the kittens). I am so angry I could tweet. But I am also contained. He doesn’t know I know. Like a thermos, I am cold on the outside; inside I’m a meltdown of boiling broccoli and stilton. I don’t want your pity, or caring strategies for coping. I don’t need homilies on forgiveness. I want vengeance. And you are obviously a fickle and twisted man. I’d bet you’ve taken a loved-one’s trust and cynically used it to seduce another. You’ve looked into a partner’s eyes and lied into her teeth. So I need you to tell me what will really hurt. What will inflict the most agonising and lasting damage. I want his entire existence to be bitter gall and wormwood. I need him humiliated and ridiculed. The rest of his life must be a long and bleak plodding repetition of remorse, punctuated with bouts of incapacitating self-pity. For him, happiness must be a stone in the shoe that momentarily takes his mind from what a fucking monumental cunt-struck irredeemable tragedy he’s made of his sorry existence.
Fiona, by email
Marry him.
Dear AA,
I’m bored.
Matthew, by email
Ah, the authentic siren call of civilisation’s descent into decadence. Of course you’re bored. Everyone you know is bored. You’ve been bored since you could fling Lego. Boredom is the waste product of choice. The more there is on offer, the more you don’t want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite. Boredom is not a thing. It’s not a feeling or a condition. Boredom is the echo in an empty box, a single glove, the sound of an abandoned piano. It can also be a calling, a hobby. People collect boredom, they hoard it, they wallow in it, hoping that one day it’ll be of interest and become an effete ennui. Let me tell you, it doesn’t. Boredom is an addiction without a high, a disease without a symptom. I once had it. I would say I suffered from it, but you do
n’t suffer boredom. That would be interesting, or at least engaging. And then something interesting happened, or at least the promise of something interesting. I was at a party I didn’t want to be at, as usual standing in a corner with a look of ineffable disinterest, and as usual I was being droned at by a man who was either writing a thesis on Colette or about to go potholing in Cheshire. When, blessedly, his bladder finally called him away, an old girlfriend who I’d become tired of sauntered over and asked how I was. I said I was being bored, without the option of death, by the Pope of Bores. “Yes,” she said, “I was watching. Only one of you was bored. He was having a wonderful time. Animated, expansive, discursive, verbose. He was entertaining himself royally. In fact, he was having so much fun I see he’s on his way back.” And in that moment I had an epiphany. Perhaps epiphany is a little too interesting. It was a spark of understanding. Just as the great panjandrum of boring got back into the saddle to once more scale the foot-hills of French literature, or bird table etiquette, I held up a limp hand and whispered, “Before we once again embark on this treadmill of loquacity, perhaps you could spare me a couple of minutes to explain how it was you became such an accomplished and polished bore. Please, don’t spare me a single detail.” The chap looked first startled, and then his eyes narrowed and one eyebrow arched knowingly. A smile flickered over his wet lips and he turned and walked away without uttering a word. And for the first time in, ooh, a great many grey years, I felt elated. I buttonholed the old girlfriend and said, “Let’s get out of here. I have something very exciting to tell you.” “Oh, couldn’t we just have sex instead?” she replied. And from that day on, I have devoted myself to being a bore. Not just any old bore. Not just a common or garden, end-of-the-bar bore. But the greatest bore that ever lived. I wake each morning quivering and alive with the joy of the hunt to find new things to bore on about. Sometimes I forget to eat I’m so entranced with boredom. There are so few subjects I can’t bore on about at length, with footnotes. And I am asked to bore professionally. My boringness is a regular fixture at the literary festival at Hay. Just last week, I was boring schoolteachers at Wellington College’s Education Weekend: a tricky professional audience, but I think I ground them down. Oh! And what’s this? Look here, I’ve been boring on about boredom for over 800 words and you’re thinking, is there no end to this answer? But you see, I get paid by the word, so whilst you’ve been sitting there thinking, “Oh, get on with it!” I’ve made [editor-redacted sum] and enjoyed myself enormously. So let this be a lesson to you. If you’re bored, it’s because someone else is fulfilling his dream. Become a bore. It’s the most interesting thing you’ll ever do.
Sir,
I’m getting a little portly. But I fancy I still cut something of an elegant dash. Can I sport a cummerbund?
Lionel, Hampshire
Of course you can. You could also sport tasselled nipple clamps, a barbed-wire cock ring and a peacock feather butt plug. What you’re asking is: will people think me a fine and well-dressed fellow in a cummerbund? And the answer is, probably not. In fact, the only people who will ever appreciate you in a cummerbund are other men in cummerbunds. The sight of a similarly accoutred fat bloke will give them a sense of relief that they have turned up dressed correctly. Cummerbunds are the dinner dance equivalent of tasselled nipple clamps in a convent. Cummerbunds were first adopted by Indian Army officers stationed on the North-West Frontier, where they would wrap the turbans of their troopers round their waists. The military fashion spread round the world. The French Foreign Legion still wear cummerbunds as part of their dress uniform. The word cummerbund comes from Hindi. Or, more probably, Hindustani, the military pidgin language used in India. It means loincloth. Before that it possibly originated in Persian . . . Sorry I think this is supposed to be part of the answer to the previous question.
Dear Sir,
Last month, I read an article in Esquire about the woman’s view of a well-dressed man and I haven’t been able to leave the house since. It was rough. I’m standing naked on a pile of my so-called clothes. I don’t even know what pants to put on any more.
Colin, by email
We are now all imagining you nakedly waiting for this month’s Esquire to land on your mat so you can shiveringly flick through the pages to see if there’s an answer and you can get dressed. Well, there is. But not so fast, shrivel dick. Before we get to what looks good on you, let’s spend a moment on what looks good about you. Most men spend far longer looking at their clothes than they do at themselves. Go and stand in front of the mirror and have a forensic gander. Now breathe out and do it again. No man has ever seen himself breathing out. Now pretend you’re a potentially hot date. What is it about you that’s make or break? Ignore the things you can’t change. You can’t be taller, and you can’t change the colour of your eyes. What are you going to do about the other stuff? For instance, do you have any idea how hairy your arse really is? Before you worry about trouser length and colour blocking, have a look at your toenails. If there is only one piece of advice I’d give to you it’s have a pedicure. Really. Nice feet go a long way. (And if you’re a chiropodist, I’ll give you that as your slogan.) As for the rest of the schumtter, men’s clothes have nothing to do with fashion or style or even tradition. All the blokes in the article you mention were good-looking to begin with. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Marlon Brando, Ryan Gosling, Jon Hamm: they’re dudes who make clothes look good, not who are made to look good by their clothes. Cary Grant looks wonderful in his Anderson & Sheppard suits. You could put Rab C Nesbitt in one and he’d still be Rab C Nesbitt only in a really good suit. I’m going to make this simple, because I realise you’re cold. There are only two words you need to remember. You could have them tattooed on your knuckles, but only if you had 11 fingers on one hand and four on the other. They are “nonchalance” and “elan”. The problem is they are usually mutually exclusive, but you need to dress with elan and wear your clothes with nonchalance. How you wear is more important than what you wear. The worst dressed man in any room is the one who won’t order spaghetti because he’s got an Hermès tie on.
To Uncle Dysfunctional,
My best mate is going to ask his girlfriend to marry him. I think it’s a mistake. She’s a fit bird, but she’s a flirt. I know she’ll cheat on him – she’s always giving me the eye. He says I’m being overprotective. We’ve been best mates since infant school. He’d trust her with his life. So I said, I’ll prove it. And to make it more interesting, let’s put a grand on it. Anyway, I’ve got to go into hospital for a routine hernia, but I’ve told her it’s cancer of the bollocks. And I’ve only got a couple of months. And that I’ll never have sex again. And I begged her to come down to the hospital to help me out with one last how’s-your-father just as me best mate’s mate. And then I’ll arrange for my mate to find her there, prove the point. Knacker the nuptials, collect a grand. Job’s a good’un.
Dwayne, East London
Dear Adrian,
This may seem like an odd question. I’m engaged to a really great guy. We’re getting married in the autumn. The only problem is his best man. They’ve been friends since the sandpit. The thing is, my man has outgrown him. The guy’s a real loser. He’s also a creepy letch who’s always trying to touch me up. But my fiancé’s too nice to move on. Anyway, the “best friend” has to go into hospital for something embarrassing. And all larky, he’s asked me to go and give him a handjob for £500. He’s such a sordid creep. But I’m planning on going ahead, getting the money up front and then having my boyfriend come in and catch him.
Holly, Shoreditch
Mate:
I’m getting married to this great girl. There’s only one problem. My best man and her don’t get on. It really upsets me that the two people I love most in the world can’t see how brilliant each other is. I’ve arranged for them to be in hospital at the same time so they can spend some time together and see what really matters. They both think I’ll be there but I won’t. I know this sounds desperate but it
’s really important to me as time is short. My mate thinks he’s got a hernia. But really it’s a terminal tumour. I really want him to be happy and find peace before he dies.
Graham, London
Nothing I can say will improve the perfect circular tragedy that you’ve all cleverly made out of your lives. Let me guess: you all studied Jacobean drama at university.
Dearest Adrian,
Why can’t everyone just be happy?
Rufus, by email
The world is divided between those who read your question and said, “What a good question! We could all be happy if we were all really nice. And if we were happy we wouldn’t be so ambitious. We’d just be satisfied with what we had and we’d share with others and make them happy, too. And their happiness would make us more happy. And we could all get happier and happier until we were in a mutually happy inflation of smiles. That would carry on to escalating bliss because everyone knows that happiness is catching; happy begats happy.” But on the other hand, there are those who read your question and thought, “You dope-addled, hippy dipshit. Of course everyone can’t be happy because if they were, happiness would be meaningless. We’d be happy when our kittens died. Our friends would be happy at our cancer of the bollocks. Mums and dads would be happy when the kids fell into the canal, strapped into their pushchairs with a smiley nanny who can’t swim or shout ‘Help!’ in English. We’d be happy at earthquakes and Ebola and Vin Diesel box sets. We would live in a syrup of happiness.” Everything that is worth having or doing is made or inspired by unhappiness, ranging from unease to abject misery. And the least you need to run a civilisation is a sense that things could be better. But the real reason we can’t all be happy is because the second lot of people are going to make the first lot of people really miserable. There is nothing as attractive as a happy person and nothing more infuriating than their happiness. The most unedifying and secret guilty pleasure of a dystopian life is taking away the happiness of someone else. Happy people, of course, are blind to anything but kittens and moonbeams. They never see the miserable thief in the night. Now you can tell from this answer I’m not one of life’s Pollyannas. But, then again, neither do I believe we are designed to be disappointed and depressed. Protestantism came up with the idea of original sin. If you take it out of the Garden of Eden, you can see it as being a human default setting of self-interest, which is constantly uncomfortable and which in turn sets us to strive for happiness. It’s like fishing. You bait your hook with good intentions and hope, and you sit around moaning and bitching and every so often you get a tug at the end of the line and it’s happy. And you hold it for a bit and have your picture taken and then you put it back and go on complaining and getting wet. And after a bit, when you’ve caught happy a few times, you realise that what you’re really after, what actually sustains you, is the anticipation. The happy in happiness is the expectation of happiness. Of course, if you kill the fish and eat it, it’s just fish and you’ll probably get a bone in your throat.