by Stewart Lee
And they say you shouldn’t keep dolphins in concrete tanks, because the endless sound of their own sonar bouncing back at them eventually drives them mad, like someone locked in an aluminium-lined cell listening to an endless loop of every ill-considered 2 a.m. tweet they ever sent out. And that is you, you are the mental dolphins of now. Inward-looking, self-obsessed people with no attention span, hurling yourselves fatally out of your tanks in the self-inflicted wounds of your imagined democratic choices. And it’s no surprise to me that you’ve all gone mad. ’Cos you’ve all got phones on you all the time, haven’t you, with cameras, and they all take photos all the time, don’t you, with your face over and over again, your face, your face, your face, your face.182
Why? Surely you all know what your own faces look like now. And your entire online digital history is just an endless succession of images of your face, obscuring an endless succession of things that are all more interesting than your face. ‘Here’s me at Stonehenge. Here’s me at the Taj Mahal. Here’s me at the Deacon Blue reunion concert.’183 And I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to you, or what anyone is supposed to say to anyone, because nothing that anyone could ever have to say could possibly be as interesting as the ongoing moment-by-moment documentation of your entire lives.
And so when I look at this painting,184 Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 German Romantic masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, I see a man like me, two hundred years ago now, looking out into the world and trying to make sense of it, and his place in it, instead of just using it as a backdrop for his own narcissism.
But this is you.
Now.185
1 I met the designer Louie Whitemore to talk about the set in the spring of 2016, in a pub on Camden Parkway called the Earl of Camden. I wanted there to be some way of projecting an image onto a back wall, but the wall shouldn’t look like it was just sitting there waiting to be projected onto. I wanted a staircase and a surrounding flange to the set, perhaps made of electrical junk, which would look like jagged clifftop rocks when seen in silhouette, as in the painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. I wanted the stage to be covered with thousands of genuine second-hand stand-up DVDs. And all this had to be collapsible into a smallish white panel van, so that the usual one-man touring machine of James Hingley could handle it all, as I remained sceptical of touring overspends since the decade of loss-making live work I enjoyed in the ’90s. In the end, Louie sourced a whole new type of screen, one where the image was sort of pre-sewn into the cloth but didn’t show up until light hit it, so a canvas tower was constructed with lights concealed inside it. When the crowd came in, the screen merely showed a gobo of the name of the show, projected from the balcony, leading the punters to suspect it would never be used for anything (most theatre-touring stand-ups’ set design stretches only as far as having their name, or the name of their meaningless show, written in big letters behind them, the lazy twats). Initial scouting of the comedy DVDs was done by the stage manager, Ali Day, and her son, Ed, himself a new comedian, who saw the death of physical-media comedy before his young eyes as he scoured the second-hand shops of south London for my smashable stash, under instruction not to spend more than 50p per item.
2 Blueswater are a superb Edinburgh-based blues band whose edutaining Fringe shows mix erudite commentary on blues history with visceral interpretations of the songs referenced. I have seen them about a dozen times, as well as their superb torch-song spin-off group, Smitten. I knew exactly what I wanted for my intro music, and commissioned Blueswater to write and record it, with the pauses and surges just where I needed them to be for me to speak over. The resulting track, ‘Stew’s Blues’, is available to download free on my website in its fully realised ten-minute form. Like King Alfred’s Jewel, I commanded this to be made, and I love it.
3 I wanted to record the show in a town that (a) had voted Leave, and (b) had a nice Victorian theatre, with good sightlines and nice architecture. Southend fitted the bill, and the Comedy Vehicle TV team, headed by producer Richard Webb and director Tim Kirkby, were assembled, with financial assistance from my live promoters, Password, my agent, Debi Allen, and Colin Dench, who flogs my DVDs out of the back of a van to Netflix. Even though I had done Brexit material in the leaviest of Leave places, like Lincoln, and hadn’t had mass walkouts, despite the fake news spread by right-wing newspapers and websites, I knew that if I recorded Content Provider in a Remain area, critics would say I had taken a soft option to avoid being booed off. Even in leavy Southend, which was 58 per cent Leave, the awkward truth is that Leave voters aren’t heavily represented in the Theatre-Going Class, a statistical fact that probably tells us some sad truths about cultural identity and disposable income and voting intentions. My rooms would always be skewed to Remain anyway, whatever I did, because they were in theatres, but it was fun and appropriate for the angry Remain-voting character of the comedian Stewart Lee to excoriate Southend-on-Sea for its perceived crimes. Interviews with the mighty and accommodating comics wizard and novelist Alan Moore, destroying my confidence in the way Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris had done for Comedy Vehicle, were cut in with the show about half a dozen times, but you’ll have to buy the DVD to see them, as I didn’t want to break the flow of this stage transcript with what was a device for the broadcast version. This text is assembled from a broadcast edit of two performances.
4 It was on purpose. I did it every night, so the audience, subconsciously, would appreciate the stage was made of thousands of actual loose DVDs, not just blocks stuck together. I wanted them to know it was difficult to assemble, and real, and also to create the impression, by staging a minor accident, that anything could happen and that this was live!
5 In the spring of 2001, I was asked at the last minute by the producer Richard Webb, who later became my Comedy Vehicle confidant, to direct the comedy genius Simon Munnery’s cheapo BBC Choice series Attention Scum, as I had been privileged enough to play supporting roles in various live incarnations of the project. Simon wanted to achieve an epic comedy travelogue on a tiny budget, though he was not necessarily forthcoming in communicating this, and the experience was one of the best periods of my life, giving me a purpose during a particularly meaningless and depressing period. I remember with great fondness the blue-sky summer days when we dragged Simon’s un-roadworthy mobilevan stage around remote parts of the English landscape on a low loader. I am not sure I was ever happier. I learned TV directing on the job from the patient and supportive cameramen, Peter Loring and John Walker, and formed lifelong friendships.
In the end, I think we let Simon’s vision down, though the series looked beautiful and the live sequences had a dream-like weirdness to them. To be fair, though, the original shooting script comprised a shoebox of crumpled notes. Nonetheless, Attention Scum was nominated for a Golden Rose of Montreux, embarrassingly, after the BBC, having deliberately scheduled it in a graveyard slot to bury it, had already declined to recommission it. Initially, we were forbidden from attending the Swiss awards ceremony by the top brass, but after Johnny Vegas threatened to do a benefit to raise funds for some of our travel, we were allowed to witness our loss, if we paid for the travel. As part of the series, in Tintagel, I chose to shoot Simon’s League Against Tedium character, in his top hat and tails and holding a walking stick, with his back to the camera, ranting from a Cornish clifftop out into the blue horizon. I knew I had a half-remembered image in my head. That night, we stayed at the Rosemullion Hotel, near Falmouth, where my mother had spent some of her final holidays, and in the bar there was a framed print of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, the very half-remembered image I had been trying to recreate. I had looked at Friedrich’s work when a teenager, after one of his paintings was used as the front cover of a 1985 compilation of new British psychedelia I really liked called The Waking Dream. (The album featured three tracks by Palace of Light, and I ended up writing sleeve notes for the 2017 reissue of their sole album, the 1987 classic Beginning Here
and Travelling Outward.) I can’t remember when I had the idea that the Wanderer image could form a central plank of the next live show, but photos were shot in the spring of 2016 for publicity purposes, in which I tried to dress like the character in the painting, and was indeed thin enough at the time to do so. Once you are aware of the painting, you see its echoes everywhere – in advertising, album sleeves and film and theatre design. I believe young people call this idea a ‘meme’. It is a pre-Brexit referendum painting. The man is looking out into the world.
6 This section has subsequently been shorn of context by alt-right types and put on the Internet to prove that even I realise people on the Left merely clap the things they agree with. I don’t recognise this as being especially true of my audience, and the bit is meant as (a) a parody of this assumption, and (b) playful mockery of my own audience for their perceived folly, in the way one might make fun of a friend and expect that friend to understand that it was meant in a spirit of fun. I hate the Internet. Here’s an example of the misappropriation of the bit, from Twitter: ‘Stewart Lee’s criticism of his own audience – “I didn’t laugh, but agreed the f*ck out of him” They don’t turn to this “comedy” to laugh, fir humour, they go to clap! To sneer. But never to laugh. They don’t humour in them. Only sneering derision.’ Thunderchunky
7 He probably didn’t do this, but it said he did in the 2015 biography of Cameron, Call Me Dave, by the toilet-tax fugitive Lord Ashcroft and the journalist Isabel Oakeshott.
8 I am married to a woman who once worked at the Daily Mail, but only as a temp who ended up staying and operating beyond her portfolio.
9 Boris Johnson had described the newly disgraced columnist and educationalist Toby Young’s approach to humour as ‘caustic wit’.
10 While this may have been arguably true when this joke was written, I think that now, in early 2019, perhaps even the Tories don’t quite know what to do with Boris Johnson, who has rather outlived his usefulness. His future depends on how totally fucked the party is, but if calling for Brexit in order to end up leading the party pays off, it will be one of the worst things ever to happen in politics.
11 I somehow mistakenly cut a section of the show here for the TV broadcast. It was this: ‘It’s a very difficult time to do stand-up. Because we live in a post-factual era, where any comment based on facts is dismissed as being the sort of thing one of these experts might say, you can’t really do fact-based comedy, so you have to resort to petty scatological insults. For example, the observation that Nigel Farage looks like the sort of person who, before masturbating, would put on a pair of driving gloves. Ideally made of calfskin. So it felt like a calf was doing it.’
12 This is a rare example of a line that worked equally well in print as on stage. Usually, I think the two media are mutually exclusive.
13 Don’t worry, folks. I make these jokes fail on purpose, at the same points, night after night, using vocal inflections, anti-comic timing and neurolinguistic programming. It’s like when Les Dawson couldn’t play the piano and Tommy Cooper messed up his magic tricks. And when Lux Interior, from The Cramps, fell off the speaker stacks in just his pants and twisted his legs up, night after night. It’s showbiz!
14 This ‘white supremacist theme park’ bit is one of a number of standardised local references that can be used in various parts of the country, especially those characterised by the phenomenon of ‘white flight’.
15 Oddly, Colin Dench, who has ended up releasing my work on DVD, ran an alternative comedy gig in the cellar of the Southend Cliffs Pavilion in the late ’80s and early ’90s. This was a bold move. In February 1990, on a bill with Frank Skinner, the much-missed Donna McPhail, The Calypso Twins and Bob Mills, I was booed off for being gay. Even though I wasn’t gay, I must have looked gay to the people of Southend. Earlier in the evening, future TV chef Ainsley Harriot, in his Calypso Twins double act, had been booed off for being black. And yet I read that the early circuit was a politically correct utopia. Luckily, compère Bob Mills handled all this professionally, gently rebuking the crowd, before bringing on the final two acts: a pottery-making lesbian and a recovering alcoholic. I think I wanted to record my snowflakey show Content Provider in Southend because it was the only town where I ever saw an act get properly racially abused, and that makes it a special town.
16 I am aware that the Internet is awash with justifiably aggrieved hardcore comedy fans complaining that they have no wish to see me doing this ‘pretends to complain about sections of the audience not getting it’ shtick again. Well, (1) from where I am standing, every night, there are people who have been brought along and aren’t getting it, for whom the show bears no relation to what they expected from stand-up, and who then go online explaining how much they hated it, and whom this stuff helps to put at ease or, at worst, neutralise. (2) Though there are hardcore comedy fans who know these moves, every time I tour there’s at least 30 per cent more people hitting it for the first time, and the TV screening of this set won over people who have never seen that kind of shtick before in their millions. (3) If people tell me to stop doing something, I just do it more, which annoys my wife a lot more than it annoys comedy fans. (4) The fact that these audience-hating bits aren’t totally set in stone and are fluid and tonally different every night keeps the show alive for 250 performances and makes for genuine surprises most nights. (5) It’s necessary, I think, for the comedian to be a low-status figure, which is a hard persona to maintain where you are clearly playing a sold-out room, so I try to self-sabotage like this to bring myself down a peg or two. (6) I might stop doing it now, though (I definitely won’t).
17 As long as I don’t go through major ticket agencies and avoid theatres run by Ambassador Theatre Group, which tend to be a bit porous to touts, I can usually avoid my sell-out shows ending up being overpriced on the kind of quasi-legal secondary ticketing sites that when he was culture secretary, the would-be Conservative Party leader Sajid Javid described as outlets for ‘legitimate entrepreneurs’. I always try and put on enough dates to ensure the touts have no market, and when StubHub started pimping my tickets at five times their value, I just went into their Upper Regent Street office and hung around being weird and eating all their sweets, until they finally stopped ripping my punters off. I think most fans of mainstream shit have got to the point now where they never expect to be able to get a ticket for Springsteen or some boy band or TV comedian at face value, and regard getting one at all as some kind of lottery win. What should be a normal, easy process is obstructed at every turn by criminals and bots and bent industry collaborators who should be legislated out of existence. My son, who loves the band Twenty One Pilots and wanted to see them as his first stadium-rock experience, was taught a horrible lesson in criminal reality as we watched their tour tickets vanish offline and into the hands of organised criminals the moment they went on sale.
18 This section is clearly having fun with the Remainer bubble’s perception of the land beyond the Remain constituencies as a horrible wasteland, a self-mocking bit appreciated by the crowd, the self-awareness of which buys me the right to make frustrated attacks on Leave voters in the next section. Ideally, it shouldn’t be sectioned off from it, but I don’t control, or profit from, anything anyone chooses to post up on YouTube.
19 This bit has a structural relationship with a line from the brilliant late-’80s/early-’90s double act Chris and George, whom I saw dozens of times in the early days, though I can’t remember any of the nouns in the original bit: ‘But, Chris, don’t you think you should be careful. We are in …’ George (Jeffrie) went on to write The Windsors and your favourite bits of lots of TV sketch shows, and Chris (Murray) writes loads of ace TV things, like Lewis and Midsomer Murders, and is currently in Amsterdam working on a reboot of the Dutch cop show Van der Valk.
20 How does this joke, which drew tears and cheers, even though I say it myself, night after night for the best part of two years, work? (1) Firstly, shock. I rarely swear on stage, and compared to most e
dgelord standups, my swears count is probably only one level up from the sort of acts who market themselves as ‘clean’ to get gigs at hospices run by bornagain Christians. So it is a funny shock to hear me abandon my usual vocabulary and say the c-word (cunt). The c-word (cunt) is probably a way-too-heavy word weapon to use here, and the deployment of such a disproportionately heavy weapon is part of what makes choosing to do so funny. (2) The structure of the bit has a relationship with the muchtouted idea that liberal Remainers should look outside their bubble and seek to understand the fears and concerns that drove 17.4 million people to vote Leave (‘People voted to leave Europe for all sorts of different reasons, and it wasn’t just racists that voted to leave Europe …’), but then subverts that progression of thought by just calling them the c-word (cunts). To quote an old Lee and Herring routine, or possibly Viz’s Mr Logic, ‘Our expectations were subverted, from whence the humour arose.’ (3) This second idea is then given what we in the trade call a ‘topper’ by doubling back on the initial premise and conceding that some Leave voters may also have ‘legitimate anxieties about ever-closer political ties to Europe’. There is then a second topper, in the form of a letter from a punter, which is a real letter (with the name changed) received during an early stage of the show at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe try-outs, which just replays the joke again but in a funny voice and with more swearing, and with the town the complainer comes from changed to some local place every night – in this case, Burnham-on-Crouch.
The Tory Brexiteer and Sun columnist Tony Parson, in the February 2019 edition of GQ, the sort of style and status bible Patrick Bateman in American Psycho would read in-between dismembering prostitutes in a penthouse apartment, wrote, on the subject of the c-word (cunt):