by Stewart Lee
In the little corner of Essex where I grew up, ‘c***’ was practically a punctuation mark among men and boys. It was in the foul air we breathed. But it grates now. It feels like the rancid tip of a cesspit that is the modern male attitude to women. And what I find bewildering is that it is not just thick ignorant oafs who use the c-word with such abandon. It is the woke. It is the enlightened. It is the professionally sensitive. It is the Guardian columnist, the BBC-approved comedian who can be guaranteed to dress to the left. ‘It wasn’t just racists that voted to leave Europe,’ Stewart Lee recently quipped. ‘C***s did as well. Stupid fucking c***s.’ Does Lee’s relish of the c-word sound rational or healthy? Does it provoke tears of mirth? Do you think it might persuade the 17.4m who voted to leave the European Union – the largest vote for anything in the history of this country – they were wrong? Some of my best friends are Remainers, but such spittle-flecked fury when using the word ‘c***’ makes Brexit sound like the very least of Lee’s problems.
Obviously, like Julia Hartley-Brewer and other Conservative Twitter types who alighted on the Brexit bit, Parson removed the qualifying section that followed it, where I acknowledge the out-of-touch nature of the so-called liberal elite in north London, which in turn buys me some leeway, and also makes the subsequent attack on the so-called non-liberal non-elite more of a surprise; and Parson, presumably knowing little of my work, doesn’t appreciate that the use of the c-word (cunt) reads to my audience here in a comical way precisely because using it is so out of character. It is not the swear word in and of itself that brought the house down nightly. It has to have context.
And, of course, the word isn’t delivered with ‘relish’, and it isn’t ‘spittle-flecked’ either. The c-word (cunt) is delivered here with a kind of despairing calm, as if the cuntishness of the Brexit c-words (cunts) was just a sad matter of fact. When I was directing Richard Thomas’s Jerry Springer: The Opera at the National Theatre in 2003 (as I am sure I have written before), we were given the benefit of the theatre’s voice coach for one session, who took the singers aside to teach them to enunciate all the libretto’s swear words and curses, to spit them out with relish. I waited for the session to subside, respectfully, and then had to unravel the work that had been done. The swear words weren’t necessarily to be sung in that spirit at all. For the most part, they represented the disenfranchised American protagonists working, in heightened emotional states, at the edges of the limited vocabulary that was available to them, and had to be used to convey not simply hate and venom, but also love, hope, despair and longing, the feelings expressed in Richard’s music. If I’d really wanted this particular c-word (cunt) to read with spittle-flecked relish, you’d have known about it. There’d have been spittle on the lens. I’m not averse to spitting on stage (on an imaginary Graham Norton, for example), so a lens would hold no terrors for me. To me, the c-word (cunt) here was mainly about how utter despair drove the beaten and frustrated Remainer character on stage (me) to the outer limits of his inarticulacy, painstakingly logical arguments against Brexit having broken down into mere swears.
And I didn’t ‘quip’ the line either. One thing you will never see me doing is quipping. My work is too laborious and self-aware to ever include a comic device as light-hearted as a ‘quip’, and if I see one, I usually have it surgically removed from my script, or at least quarantined behind ironic inverted commas (‘Oh yeah, I can do jokes’). And obviously, the bit was not in any way intended to ‘persuade the 17.4m who voted to leave the European Union – the largest vote for anything in the history of this country – they were wrong’, so it is stupid to criticise it for failing to achieve something it never set out to do. That’s like saying that Fawlty Towers, for example, was written to encourage hoteliers to control their tempers; or that the really funny playground joke that ends with the line ‘Lemon entry, my dear Watson’ was written to encourage Sherlock Holmes to keep suitable anal-sex lubricants close to hand for his congress with Watson, rather than relying on whatever out-of-date fruit preserves he could find in his larder.
Maybe I came onto Parson’s radar of late because I talked about Brexit, which he and his employer the Sun support, or because I am now one of those ‘cultural figures’ that informed commentators like him are supposed to know about (‘God! Haven’t you heard of Stewart Lee, Tony? I can’t believe it!’), who get praised in the London Review of Books and called the greatest living stand-ups in the world in The Times, irrespective of their perceived market penetration or popularity. For Parson, I am a ‘woke … enlightened … professionally sensitive … BBC-approved comedian who can be guaranteed to dress to the left’, which is hardly news, as it’s essentially what I describe myself as on stage, having done lazy Parson’s work for him.
Nonetheless, it’s odd to be called out as evidence of ‘the rancid tip of a cesspit that is the modern male attitude to women’ in a magazine whose website has a ‘Hottest Woman of the Week’ feature. It’s such an odd phrase, ‘the rancid tip of a cesspit’, that I had to go online and google pictures of cesspits to make sure I had understood what one was.
In my newspaper columns, I deliberately try to mangle my metaphors, writing in character as a man with imposter syndrome who is out of his depth in a posh newspaper and is trying to overcompensate with complex language that is beyond him. But Parson’s incoherence, as brilliantly parodied each month in Viz, is effortless. A cesspit is, literally, a pit full of cess. It can’t have a tip as it is not a conical solid. The only way a cesspit could have a tip is if it were somehow upended and its contents swiftly hardened in some kind of large-scale commercial drying unit, and the remaining cylinder or cuboid (depending on the shape of the pit that had moulded the cess within it) then sharpened at one end, perhaps using an enormous pencil sharpener rotated by shire horses on some kind of mill harness, or by Parson himself, until it formed the rancid tip Parson described. The only way a cesspit could have a natural tip would be if the body of the cesspit itself were conical, which perhaps they were ‘in the little corner of Essex’ where Parson grew up.
In fact, there is an Essex folk song, collected by the archivist Shirley Collins in the ’50s from the old traveller singer Gonad Bushell, that goes:
I’m a Billericay gypsy, Billericay is my home,
My house it is a caravan, my cesspit is a cone.
And if I want to see the cess become a rancid tip
I tip the cesspit upside down, then dry and sharpen it!
And the curlew is a-calling in the morning.
Parson may have a point about the c-word (cunt), though I don’t really think my Brexit bit is hugely relevant to his discussion, and seems to be rather cranked in as part of some kind of twisted vengeance. Out of academic curiosity, I wondered what the dictionary definition of the c-word (cunt) was, and to my surprise, when I turned to it, there was just a massive picture of Tony Parson’s face. And it had all arrows pointing towards it as well.
Imagine writing the sort of space-filling shit Tony Parson does, day after day. At least my columns are supposed to be stupid.
21 I love it when they do this. It never gets old. Logically, though, by making my way around the country and earning a living as a ‘comedian’ for thirty years, I am a comedian, whether you personally find me funny or not.
22 ‘Welcome to the music hall.’ I found myself saying this to amuse myself at this point on this night. I had performed the ‘It’s the first time it’s got a laugh’ line in a very self-conscious, Max Miller-y kind of way, and I looked behind me and realised I was on the Victorian stage of Southend’s Palace Theatre, where Miller himself had probably spoken of not knowing whether to toss himself off or block her passage, and keeping your bloody plough, and I was just momentarily overwhelmed by being part of this comedy tradition, in however small and professionally sensitive a way. Funny what goes through your head.
23 At the time this act was assembled, there seemed to be no real opposition to the Tories’ hard Brexit, so this line was br
oadly true. Then, after Theresa May’s snap-election near defeat, it didn’t seem to be quite correct, as she held only a slim and contrived parliamentary majority, but I glossed over it and got away with it live. At the time of writing these notes, in February 2019, as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group looks poised to enact a soft coup on the Tory party, and by association the country as a whole, it seems more true than when it was written.
24 This bit crossed over with lots of column material, but as the Observer reader The Ducks pointed out earlier in this book, in March 2018, ‘the EU did have regulations about bendy bananas, as Annex 1 Subsection II point 10 highlights, about there being no abnormal curvature allowed. They did of course later amend this due to all the ridicule they got – but why pretend that a regulation on bendy bananas never existed when it clearly did?’ Point taken, and I never knew the banana issue had any basis in fact and couldn’t be arsed to check, but I suppose the key thing here is that bendy bananas were one of the main thrusts for leaving the banana-regulating EU, for both Boris Johnson and the kind of people in the Question Time audience who speak out without any apparent point. And yet the regulation no longer applied at the time of the EU referendum.
25 I think gigging stand-ups, at any level, have a better working knowledge of the state of the UK as a whole than most politicians, having performed up and down it, and stayed in its Travelodges, and eaten in its service stations, even though they may still draw a variety of different political conclusions from the shared experience, from the soft Tory views of Geoff Norcott to the hard-left Remainer radicalism of Marcus Brigstocke.
26 What follows is, on some level, an exaggerated replay of the relationship-compromising disagreements I have had with friends who voted Leave, twisted to make me, in the telling, seem funnier, cleverer and better informed that I am in everyday life.
27 Again, I am sure this part of this sentence – ‘I believe it was I who wrote’ – has some sort of debt to a line by either Roger Mann or Ian Macpherson, both great stand-ups from the late ’80s and early ’90s who quit and were massive influences on me when I started, but I can’t quite place it. I can just hear their voices saying something like it. Sorry, fellers!
28 There is a trend among other comedians to dislike my audience, who seem to be perceived as some kind of judgemental, informed, snowflake Millwall. In a newspaper article, the Australian funnyman Brendan Burns wrote, ‘Stewart Lee’s audience are a bunch of satchel-carrying c***s so painfully unfunny they’ll laugh at anything he says in the hope there’s a chance of spotting the subtext and he’ll throw them a fish’; the professional podcaster Richard Herring has tweeted that they are ‘absolute pricks’, while his audience, in contrast, are ‘the nicest people’. Theatres round the country tend to like my crowd, as they are among the most well-behaved and polite of the hooligan comedy audiences, and yet consume record-breaking amounts of alcohol in the venue’s bars, mainly, I imagine, because my shows are too long and they need refreshment to endure them. I like the people that come and see me on the whole. They can laugh at themselves. (For what it’s worth, all theatre crews’ favourite performer was Lemmy from Motörhead, whom they regarded without exception as a gentleman, while Jim Davidson is almost universally disliked.)
29 David Mitchell is the actual Observer comedy columnist. I am just the sub.
30 Eagle-eared comedy fans will notice that this is actually a twelve-inch extended remix of a much shorter joke from Comedy Vehicle that was initially about something else, but even I can’t remember what it was.
31 My best friend ‘Ian’ did not, in fact, concede that he would remain in the original shatted bed, and finds the idea that Brexit voters were duped by Boris Johnson’s lies as patronising to working-class people. He voted Leave in order to cause total social anarchy, an admirably extremist position in some ways. And one that has, at least, worked to an extent, I suppose.
32 This online grammatical dispute actually happened, giving me some more material essentially written by the witty British public, but now I can’t find the comment anywhere.
33 ‘Lee caters for the smug, right-on, middle-class Guardian-reading crowd who share his elitist prejudices’ – Garry Bushell, Daily Star, March 2016. Bushell has made the predictable journey from being a teenage socialist in the ’70s, via compiling the foolishly titled Strength Thru Oi album (with an actual gay neo-Nazi on the front cover) to being a UKIP supporter by 2011, when he said he would join the party, but didn’t. Now, I expect he is, like lots of people, politically homeless and looking for someone to blame. I suspect the old punk and Python fan really likes aspects of my act, and he must recognise the creative oppositional relationship it has with the old-school comics he champions. Bushell probably can’t square his obvious and counter-intuitive love of me with his increasingly conservative politics. Gal Gonad did his research, though, and noticed in a 2018 Daily Star review (‘The Unfunny Face of TV Comedy’) that in the broadcast of Content Provider, I was wearing a Les Rallizes Dénudés T-shirt, commenting, ‘The ’60s band were renowned for their tediously repetitive instrumental passages and painful use of guitar feedback. Pretentious? Naturally.’ The irony is, nine months previously I had agreed with the producer Richard Webb that I would wear a fairly neutral, and much more flatteringly fitting, T-shirt of the Cornish record label Easy Action, and had been rotating three increasingly smelly ones all through the tour, which doubtless would have offended the sensitive nose of The Kane Gang’s Pat Kane. But on the day of filming, at the last minute, the conscientious Webb decided that wearing the record-label shirt could fall foul of obtuse BBC regulations concerning the promotion of commercial entities, so I had to wear the unwashed, obscure Japanese psychedelic band T-shirt I had turned up at the theatre in. I probably wouldn’t have worn that T-shirt on stage as, even though I have all the Les Rallizes Dénudés recordings that are available, I think it does look pretentious to wear such a cultish thing on TV. It’s the sort of thing Russell Howard would try to do, and somehow get slightly wrong in a way you couldn’t quite put your finger on, like when Prince Harry was photographed in his teenage bedroom next to an upside-down XFM poster. That said, the on-stage version of me probably would wear a Les Rallizes Dénudés T-shirt, so Webb’s last-minute mind-change really only focused the character as the pseud he is, which may have been what the wily Webb wanted to achieve all along. Certainly, Gary Bushell thought me rocking the Les Rallizes Dénudés look chimed perfectly with his perception of me, right down to the fact that he found a review of the band that described them as ‘tediously repetitive’ and ‘painful’. If you are interested, the best Les Rallizes Dénudés track is the particular version of ‘Enter the Mirror’ that is on the Yodo-Go-A-Go-Go (Flightless Bird) compilation album, and is right in the zone where tedious, repetitive and painful become sublime.
34 My mainly liberal audience love being called racists because they know they aren’t. But I have been in audiences for the kind of acts who flirt with an ironic populism that probably doesn’t wash any more, for whom such a line would get an unintended, and unironic, cheer.
35 Weirdly, about three hours before writing this note, I walked past Jeremy Corbyn on the Seven Sisters Road, as I came back from trampolining at the Barry Sobell Sports Centre with my kids. Corbyn did look like Catweazle (an eleventh-century wizard who was transplanted to glam-rock England in a ’70s ITV children’s show, and who gave his name to a novelty wrestler) and was wearing some plastic-laminated grey jogging trousers. Oddly, I told my wife he was accompanied by an eight-year-old girl, but my son said I was wrong, and that Corbyn was in fact walking along with ‘a little old woman’. How the mind plays tricks on us.
36 This idea of ‘an army of tramps’ is, I think, indebted to an early-’90s Frank Skinner anecdote, in which he recalled a homeless fan’s offer of, should Frank ever need it, an ‘army of tramps’. I doubt even Frank himself can remember this incident now.
37 I have lived in N16 since 1999, having moved ther
e when it was still off the grid and cheap. Ten years later, I was blamed by the Evening Standard for being one of the ‘media incomers’ who had driven up the price of a cup of coffee in the café in the park. For two decades I have understood the world through wandering around multicultural Stoke Newington, formerly squat central, and so many of the routines in my material from 2004 onwards were inspired by it, from interacting with veiled Muslim women at the Weight Watchers to being accused of racism by black people for objecting when the jazz club was turned in a Nando’s chicken outlet. But the Victorian pleasure park that once hummed with Turkish barbecue parties and Rastafarian frisbee tournaments is now mainly the preserve of the white middle classes and a few orthodox Jews. We have hung on here, where we are at home, because getting two series of Comedy Vehicle commissioned back to back meant we were financially able to, but maybe the place escapes me now, and most of the people I knew have been priced out. Perhaps the increasing self-loathing of the Stewart Lee character reflects his being marooned on this odd social archipelago, imposter syndrome eating away again. Maybe it’s time to go and live in a wood and write stand-up about squirrels and wild boar. The world that shaped me has shifted. Perhaps I am the archaic relic Brendan McCarthy, the Mad Max writer, says I am.
38 This tweet is a verbatim quote, except it was ‘Stoke Newington’ and not ‘Islington’. In London, or areas of the country to which pricedout Londoners had decamped, I would say ‘Stoke Newington’, which requires a more nuanced understanding of the capital for it to be funny. Elsewhere, I would say ‘Islington’, which still stands for the idea of the metropolitan liberal elite nationwide.
39 There was usually some way of bouncing off the spiraliser line and getting this semi-improvised bit to work, though it didn’t always pan out as neatly as it does here.
40 Another proper pull-back-and-reveal gag. It was the mayor all along!