March of the Lemmings

by Stewart Lee

  A lot of people voted to leave Europe as a protest vote, which I – I understand that. I sympathise with it. If you – if you spend your life driving around the country like me, you can see the disparity that would25 – that would drive that. My – my best friend of thirty-five years, Ian, actually voted to leave Europe as a protest vote.26 But I believe it was I who wrote –27 [There is a lone group of people laughing.] Still these people doing the work, isn’t it, down here. There’s a big laugh there that was missed, right, and I’m filming this and I would appreciate …

  OK, where – what – where the – d’you know what, I’m gonna try and – well, I’m gonna try and sort this out now, for the filming. So where the laugh should’ve been there, right, is when I went – I know you know, when I … [There are more isolated laughs.] I know, sir. That’s the kind of people that like me, isn’t it? Yeah, you. Cackling sycophants. The people that are with him hate him ’cos he – he goes to them, ‘Have you not heard of Stewart Lee? He’s amazing. I can’t believe you … Probably the best comedian … no, he’s not been on Live at the Apollo, obviously. You know, I think when you’ve seen him, you can’t really watch other comedians. More like art really …’ Yeah, that’s the kinda people that like me, isn’t it? Wankers.28

  But you know, without them, that was a bit – OK, that was a – the laugh there should’ve been when I said, ‘I believe it was I who wrote …’ all right? What they’re laughing at down there, they’re going, ‘Oh yeah, I …’ It’s parodying the idea of the perception of myself as a sort of patronising elitist who would quote his own work as a – but you know, you’re just going, ‘What an arrogant man,’ aren’t you?

  But anyway, try and listen and close the gaps up, ’cos we need to – So I believe it was I who wrote – [The whole room laughs now.] I don’t accept the second laugh, I only take the first one, so … It was me. It was in the Observer. It was a very clever piece. David Mitchell’s away a lot, isn’t he?29 So I wrote, ‘Voting to leave Europe as a protest vote is a bit like shitting your hotel bed as a protest against bad service, and then realising you now have to sleep in a shitted bed.’30

  And my friend Ian, my best friend Leave voter, he said to me, ‘Your metaphor doesn’t make sense, Stew,’ he said. ‘By your own admission, the EU is institutionally flawed and freedom of movement can lead to exploitation of the labour market, so in a way,’ he said, ‘there was already some shit in the bed.’ And I said, ‘Yes, Ian, but if there’s already some shit in the bed, you don’t fix that by doing even more shit into the already shatted bed.’ And my friend Ian said, ‘No, you move into a different bed.’ And I said, ‘Yes, Ian, but what if that different bed, instead of some shit, has got Boris Johnson in it?’ And my friend Ian reluctantly conceded that he would remain in the original shatted bed.31

  Now that joke initially appeared in the Observer, as I said, leading to a lively below-the-line online debate among readers as to whether the past participle of ‘shit’ was ‘shatted’ or ‘shitted’. Very much a key market for me, those people. The left-leaning scatological pedants community.32

  But the out-of-touch metropolitan liberal elite, they didn’t see that Brexit vote coming, did they, the out-of-touch metropolitan liberal elite? Who are the metropolitan liberal elite? Well, according to Garry Bushell in the Daily Star, if you’re in my audience, it’s you.33 Never has that been less true than it is here tonight in – in Southend-on-Sea, in a hive of racists.34

  So who are – who are the metropolitan liberal elite? The metropolitan liberal elite, I think, are – they’re the sort of people who preferred the Labour Party in the ’90s, when they looked like a load of coke dealers at an advertising agency. As opposed to now, when they look like Catweazle35 and his army of furious tramps.36 Fighting each other to the death over the last bottle of Diamond White in a burning skip in a Lidl car park.

  But I live in London, in N16, north London, which is classic out-of-touch metropolitan liberal elite territory, N16, north London.37 This is how out of touch the metropolitan liberal elite are where I live in north London. The weekend before the vote, the Brexit vote, bloke I vaguely know, er, he sent out a tweet and he said, ‘Don’t worry about the Brexit vote,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been out for brunch in a gastro pub in Islington and absolutely no one there’s voted to leave.’38 So in a way they had it coming, didn’t they? With their spiralisers. Yeah, the courgettes taste the same, don’t they, whatever shape … [There is some isolated laughter.] That tells you a lot about the room, doesn’t it? Look, down here, among the elite, the spiraliser jokes, ‘Ah-ha! Spiralisers!’ And as we spread up there, friends of the theatre, ‘What is a spiraliser?’ And then right at the top, some lone usher, ‘What’s a courgette?’ The joke, the joke failing on three levels. Three levels simultaneously. Only I can give you this, triple simultaneous joke failure there.39

  So, but, whatever your line of work, whatever your politics, you’re gonna be affected by the Brexit. I am a content provider, that is my job, and I’ve spent the best part of, er, three decades now travelling around the country, providing stand-up comedy content from a sort of centre-left liberal position. I’ve done very well out of it, I’m not gonna lie, but the problem I’ve got now is, how do you write a one-size-fits-all stand-up show to tour around divided Brexit Britain? It is very difficult, you know. You might have a joke, Tuesday night, you’re in Harrogate, Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, round of applause. Next night, Lincoln, glassed in the face. By the mayor.40

  So I don’t know what this show’s gonna be when I finally abandon it at the end of the tour. All I know is, whatever it ends up being, it will always open with the following sentence:

  THE LIGHTING CHANGES TO A SHOW STATE, THE WORDS ‘CONTENT PROVIDER’ DISAPPEAR FROM THE SCREEN, AND STEW ASSUMES A BUSINESS-LIKE STAND-UP TONE. THE SHOW PROPER HAS BEGUN.41

  So my multiple British Comedy and BAFTA award-winning BBC2 series got cancelled, presumably because it was unprecedentedly critically acclaimed while also being incredibly cheap to make.42 Although I notice there is money at the BBC for a proposed remake of Are You Being Served? Educate, innovate, entertain.43

  Now, the weird thing I think about trying to remake Are You Being Served? at the moment is that the British retail industry doesn’t really exist any more, does it? The new – the new Are You Being Served? should be set in an Amazon delivery warehouse. Mrs Slocombe stands in a massive shed off the M6, making incomprehensible cat-based double entendres about her own vagina to loads of poorly paid and soon-to-be-deported east European workers.44 [waits for a laugh that isn’t there] No, again, nothing from you on that.

  It’s a big – a big news story, that, the, er … Actually, you know what? That used to be a big – all last year that was a big laugh, that joke, but it’s sort of gone off the boil since Christmas.45 It’s not – it’s not really your – your fault. It stopped working, that joke, and I was, erm, I was trying to think why it was. It was good. It was all last year it worked, and it – what it is, I think, is, OK, you think about how stand-up works, right, you basically – you either overstate a perceived truth for comic effect, or you overstate a contrary position for comic effect. And all stand-up is basically those two, er, binary positions recombined. Er, yeah, that’s ruined it for everyone, hasn’t it? That’s bankrupted Netflix.

  But – so why that was working last year was ’cos the perception was, wasn’t it, that the – the Europeans weren’t being told they could stay after Brexit, and that was a sort of a negotiating tool for Theresa May in Brussels. So I’d go, ‘Soon-to-be-deported European workers,’ and the audience would go, ‘Yeah, that’s true,’ like that. But then, last gig I did before Christmas was December the 9th,46 and I did that joke in London and it sort of went off half cocked, like tonight. And I thought, ‘Well, why is that?’ There’s normally some reason.

  So I went home and I googled it, and what happened that day, or the day before, and I didn’t know but the audience obviously did, was that in Brussels Theresa
May had said that the Europeans could remain after – after Brexit. So I went, ‘Soon-to-be-deported east European workers,’ and some people went, ‘Ah-ha, ha-ha!’ And then other people with them went, ‘No, she said they can stay now.’ ‘Is that right?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, it’s not funny then.’

  So that was the last gig before Christmas. Next one was January the 2nd,47 and I thought maybe I should cut that line, but I didn’t want to ’cos it gets me from the joke about Amazon into another joke about, er, charity shops, right, and it’s just a smooth … So I thought I’ll hold on to it, see what happens, you know, and then – So I did it again January the 2nd, ba-ba-ba, and – and it’s a well-constructed joke as well. I know that ’cos it goes – it goes, ‘Ne-ner-ner-ner-ner – ne-ner-ner-ner – ne-ner-ner-ner, soon-to-be-deported east European workers,’ bang!48 Like that, it’s got hard – it ends – it ends on or near a hard consonant, which is important as well. ‘Work! Workers!’ Bang! Like that.

  That’s how – if you look at Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr, all their jokes end on hard consonants, bang! And that sort of triggers the laugh. With me it’s a little bit different. I – I – I don’t always end on a hard consonant. Sometimes I put an extra beat in after it, and that’s why a lot of you are sitting there going, ‘This guy’s hilarious, but I don’t know why.’ And it’s because I’m, I’m – the comics you go and see normally, they’re sort of in four–four time, but I’m like – it’s like a jazz thing really, it could go – I know where the beat is but I’m – it’s probably too advanced.49

  So it’s … I’m not saying it’s better than them but it’s – it is. Right, it’s … but so – anyway I did it again on 2nd of January, ‘soon-to-be-deported east European workers’, bang! And there was even less laughs than three weeks previously. So I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ So I went and looked on all the news. What had happened, I didn’t know, was a few days after Theresa May had said that Europeans could stay after Brexit, somebody – a reporter – said to David Davis, the negotiator, said to him, ‘So the Europeans can stay?’ And he went, ‘Well, we said that in – in Brussels, but we can just change it, we don’t have to abide by it.’

  So I think what happened on the night was I went, ‘soon-to-be-deported east European workers’, and some of ’em went, ‘Ah, yeah,’ and then other people went, ‘No, she – Theresa May said they can stay.’ ‘Oh.’ And then someone else went, ‘No, David Davis has said it’s …’ And in that moment the laugh … the laugh had gone really, ’cos if you think about it, laughter’s a very instinctive thing, isn’t it? You just laugh. You don’t sort of canvas opinion about … from the people around you and then decide.

  So it doesn’t work, that joke, but what I’m saying is, it’s not my – it’s not my fault. It’s because there’s not – there’s – we don’t know what the government position is, so it’s – you can’t write a joke in relation to it when it’s not clear – see what I’m s— … what I’m saying is, there’s no – it’s not my – there’s not enough – the problem is at the moment there’s not enough clarity in the negotiating position for that joke to work. Do you know, I dread to think how this is affecting people in other lines of work.50

  Because, you know, I mean I – I’m trying to – I’m just trying to get a joke that will get me from Amazon to charity shops, and the lack of clarity in the Brussels negotiations means it’s – you know, what if you’re trying to order staff or supplies, it’s just … I’m not trying to make this all about me, I’m saying it’s a – it’s a bigger – you know, whatever your politics, you’ve gotta admit it’s a difficult – I mean, I don’t know if there’s enough trained negotiators in this country for vast swathes of this show to ever be funny again, to be honest.51

  But anyway, what I’m saying is, it’s – there used to be a big, big laugh there, but the – the – the circumstances haven’t so much changed as they’ve just become unclear, so it’s very difficult to know whether to cut it or rewrite it, because you could change it, couldn’t you, and then the next thing you know …

  Who even goes shopping now?52 Yeah? See? That feels weird now, doesn’t it, ’cos that’s – that’s supposed to come off the back of ‘blah-blah-blah, Amazon, who even goes shopping now?’ Who even goes shopping now? Even the – oh, come on. Even – yeah, but I can hear one person clapping on their own. You know, and that’s the terrible thing, I’ve got hear— … I’ve got hearing aids now the last couple of years, so in the – in the silence I could hear one man clapping in a sort of encouraging, patronising, ‘Go on’ way. People up there, the friends of the theatre, I can hear them going, ‘He doesn’t seem to be able to do stand-up.’

  I can, I – I’m very good at it. I can do what you think stand-up is. This is what you like, isn’t it? ‘Who even goes shopping now?’ [runs round and round the stage like a TV comedian for ages]53 ‘Who goes shopping now? Oh, I don’t, do you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh.’ That’s what you like, isn’t it? ‘Who even goes shopping now? You know – even the charity shops are doing home deliveries, aren’t they?’ No. They fuck— … they fucking are! If I say … ‘Who even goes shopping? Even the charity shops are doing home’ – they’re not, they are, so, they are, so if you ever fancy getting a hundred copies of the last Rufus Hound live stand-up DVD for a pound, 1p each, yeah, you don’t even have to leave the house. ‘Why?’ ‘’Cos the charity shops are doing home deliveries.’ ‘They’re not, mate, it’s not cost effective.’ ‘They are. They’ve got kids on bikes. Got drones doing it. If you – if you – if – the charity shops are doing home deliveries.’ ‘They’re not.’ ‘They are, so if you ever fancy getting a hundred copies of the same Alan Carr live DVD for a pound …’ ‘1p each?’ ‘… Yeah, you don’t even have to leave the house.’ ‘Why?’ ‘The charity shops are doing home …’ You know what? Forget it, forget the fuck— … I don’t wanna do this routine.

  I’m on high-blood-pressure medication.54 It’s not – it’s not safe for me to perform this routine with the level of commitment the upper circle of Southend appear to require. I’m gonna die doing this here. I wouldn’t mind dying on stage if it was like Tommy Cooper. D’you remember that, older people? Tommy Cooper when he – he died on stage at the London Palladium.55 And I’m not trying to take the piss, it was an amazing thing, a brilliant way to go out for a comedian. 7,000 people in the room, all laughing, and he’s died and he thought – they thought it was a joke. It was an amazing way to go out for a comedian.

  But I wouldn’t wanna die here in this gig. [A man claps alone.] With him, clapping, a sycophant, on Twitter afterwards. ‘Uh, I’ve just seen Stewart Lee’s last gig.’ ‘What was it like?’ ‘Well, it was a struggle for him, in many ways. It’s a shame, a lot of people weren’t that into it, but yeah, it was a – it w— … it was not his best. He looked ill, actually, he looked ill. He looked like he was struggling, you know?’

  We’ll drop the charity-shop routine, we’ll move on to the next bit. [There is audible disappointment in the room.] There is no charity-shop routine. There is no charity-shop routine, mate, every night I’m gonna pretend. It’s the best bit as well. What a shame, what a shame.56

  All I’m saying is this, right. All those ’90s and ’00s TV panel show, Live at the Apollo, Netflix comedians, right, you can get all their live DVDs second-hand on the Internet, on Amazon, on eBay for 1p each, all of them 1p! But the cheapest that you can get – [A woman laughs.] Well, we’ll see how funny it is, won’t we, madam, when we hear – when we hear how much it is. The cheapest that you can get my 2004 live DVD for, second-hand on the Internet, how much d’you think it is, madam?

  [The woman he has chosen mumbles incoherently.]

  This is a quick little exchange usually.

  [The woman says, ‘£5.’]

  £5? Have you seen this show before? Have you tried to fuck this up on purpose?57 For God’s sake, tonight of all the – it’s not £5, no. You panicked, didn’t you? You were asleep? £5. It’s £3.67. Now, right, what’s h
appened the other 208 nights of this tour, it’s – it’s £3.67, my DVD, I go to the person there and say ‘How much d’you think it is?’ And they go, ‘50p’ or ‘A pound’ or ‘10p’ or something, which is less than £3.67. And then I say, ‘No, it’s £3.67!’ and there’s a kind of mock-heroic triumph in the room. ‘Yeah, ha! More than they said, yeah!’

  But what’s happened tonight … you weren’t to know, were you? It’s very kind of you to think that it would be five. What’s your name, madam? What is it? No, you ha— … Don’t shake your head, you have a name. Listen, what is it? Annette. Yeah, Annette very kindly has massively overestimated the – she’s gone £5, I’ve gone £3.67, and where there’s normally joy, the people of Southend are already struggling. Look at them, they’ve gone, they’ve gone, ‘Oh, that’s awkward, isn’t it, ’cos it’s less. It’s much less than he said.’ So that’s ruined. But that’s normally another bit where there’s a bit of a lift where all those bits tonight are being sabotaged. So that’s good. But, erm, so, er, I’ll – I’ll be really amazed if this makes the edit, but if it does, then that’s the camera to get it on, there.58

  So, it’s – it’s £3.67, right, which is still – yes, that’s right, cry and blow your nose – it’s, it’s still 367 times more than anybody else’s second-hand live DVD, right? But that would’ve been … you could’ve cheered a little bit there, couldn’t you, and recovered from the damage that your representative has done to the evening, but instead, Brexit-voting Southend just sat there and thought, ‘Let’s make this bloke suffer and then …’

  It’s 367 times more than anybody else’s, right, which is – Oh, you know what? [The audience cheer.] Don’t patronise me, it’s too late. No! Forget it. The moment … [The audience cheer and clap.] Right, you can clap! You can clap and cheer as sarcastically as you like, Southend! But it doesn’t change the fact that I am the £3.67 king of the obsolete-physical-media market.59 Right. But there’s a reason for that, and it’s this, OK. I always sell DVDs and books after the gig. I probably won’t bother tonight, to be honest, but I normally do, and the cheapest that I can get the 2004 live DVD at source, new, from the warehouse in Colchester, is £3.50. OK. So I have to put it on for ten quid, right, ’cos I have to give 10 to 25 per cent commission to the venue, that’s £2.50 off the ten. 15 per cent to the promoters, that’s another £1.50 off the ten, that’s four gone. Another 15 percent to the, er, agent. That’s £1.50, that’s £5.50 gone off the ten. £3.50 for the DVD in the first place, that’s £9 gone, er, off the ten. [There are a few isolated laughs.]60