March of the Lemmings

by Stewart Lee

  90 I do have a relative who clearly can’t stand what I do but loves Russell Howard. I understand why this is and, at worst, find it mildly amusing, but have decided to pretend to be angry here for comic effect. But in terms of our respective critical acclaim, it is a bit like running a Michelin-starred restaurant and your relative saying they prefer Burger King (which is not to say I am better than Russell Howard; merely that broadsheet newspaper critics think I am. He has obvious skills that I don’t).

  91 A joke among comedians is that Russell Howard’s large ticket sales are down to the parents of his fans having to accompany them, as they are too young to go out on their own.

  92 This was actually said to me, in a branch of Wagamama.

  93 Every night there were enough people unaware of my critical standing to make this work.

  94 This joke, which follows the structure of the ‘all the different types of cheese – Red Leicester’ joke from Comedy Vehicle, is for comedians and comedy fans, for whom the consensus, certainly for the most part of this century, was that Daniel Kitson was unassailably the best stand-up in the world, but that he had chosen to remain invisible to mainstream media. When members of the public, like cab drivers, who don’t believe I am a comedian anyway because they haven’t heard of me, ask me who my favourite stand-up is, and I say, ‘Daniel Kitson,’ they become angry and defensive because they haven’t heard of him, especially if you then tell them he can crash the National Theatre ticketing website the second he announces a run of shows there. People seem to take their comedy very personally, as if you are insulting them by liking something they don’t know about.

  95 The deliberately arrogant suggestion here, of course, is that there aren’t loads, because I can’t think of any.

  96 People always walked out. They probably needed wees as much as anything, as I said the half would be an hour long but always ran it for seventy to seventy-five minutes to create stress. I always pointed out the people leaving, rather than ignoring them, as it created the feeling that the evening was collapsing around me.

  97 Here the audience are invited to become stakeholders in the success of the show, rather than passive observers.

  98 After Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette hit Netflix in 2018, American stand-ups realised that in the rest of the world comedians were taking the time and trouble to structure their long-form shows and make them about something, as if the comedians gave a fuck, which explained why acclaimed Americans that came to the Edinburgh Fringe just got three-star reviews and went home crying and complaining about ‘the tyranny of the British hour’. Once American stand-ups started to try and write proper shows too, nearly thirty years too late, think-pieces began to appear in American magazines and on culture websites about this new kind of stand-up, in which I was at best a footnote and the real ’90s Edinburgh Fringe grandaddies of the form, Ireland’s Sean Hughes and Australia’s Greg Fleet, were never mentioned at all.

  99 Here I am thinking, unfairly, of Jim Gaffigan’s acclaimed routine about an American cake called a Hot Pocket, which I have never seen, and which he performed for weeks at the Leicester Square Theatre, in a country where Hot Pockets are not available. In 2000, in Melbourne, I was on with a famous American comedienne, whose name I genuinely can’t remember, who told me she was dying every night. I went to see the show. Much of it was about the brand names of confectionery that was not for sale outside the US. This kind of American comedy parochialism was parodied brilliantly in the ’90s by Paul Putner’s American stand-up character Earl Stevens, who was often accepted by cocaine-blasted Britpop-era trendies as a genuine out-of-touch American, and booed accordingly.

  100 By complaining to Annette about her suggestion of £5 earlier in the show, I set up bringing it back as an unexpected positive. It worked better, for this call-back, if the person earlier in the show suggested a number that was higher than £3.67.

  101 As usual, online commentators assumed the person was a plant. When I took my dad to see Al Murray the Pub Landlord being brilliant in a massive theatre in the late ’90s, he assumed the three dozen or so audience members Al bantered with were plants, and was impressed by Al’s ability to learn all their names before the show and remember where they were sitting. My dad ran his own packaging consultancy, yet would not accept that the logistics of touring thirty-six people around the country, night after night, merely to make some standard top-of-the-show banter work, would render his assumption impossible. The chat-show host James Corden, it must be said, did all of us who genuinely improvise a disservice by having a plant that he ‘improvised’ with every night when he starred in the 2011 National Theatre production One Man, Two Guvnors, thus destroying public trust in genuine comedy improvisation. Corden would say he was hungry, and an ‘audience member’ would throw a hummus sandwich at him, allowing Corden to say, ‘Guardian reader.’ Ah well, it’s a living!

  102 This is a genuine note I received from Music Magpie the first time I tried to order Raintown from them. Obviously, I changed the next part of the exchange for comic effect, but really it was too perfect.

  103 Multiple call-backs! The bodies of every call-back in the show pile up on stage – Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow).

  104 In the end, it would have been too expensive to clear this track just to hear a tiny snatch of it in the TV broadcast of Content Provider, to crown the multiple call-back pile-up. Instead, my ten-year-old son showed me how to use his GarageBand software, and he ‘produced’ a fake ’70s Turkish psych-funk track for me, ‘Yarasa Adam’, by Toz Hasat. Toz Hasat is Turkish for Dust Harvest, which was the name of my ’80s Dream Syndicate-copying student band, which played only four gigs and had three line-ups. On ‘Yarasa Adam’ I played bendy guitar, we swathed the drums in massive echo, and dropped in obscure Turkish dialogue. You can download the track for free here: http://www.stewartlee.co.uk/what-is-stewart-lee/what-is-stewart-lee-2018/. I make no claims as to its quality, but it did the job.

  105 There was a laugh here as the quicker punters realised the opening of the second half was deliberately mirroring the opening of the first, with Trump replacing Brexit.

  106 I keep reading on Twitter and in below-the-line comments that I am drunk on stage. If you are good at acting mad, people assume you must be. I have been drunk on stage about four times, and one of them was in New Zealand, which doesn’t count. The best fabricated story of my drunkenness is this one, from a YouTube user called Funday’s Child, who seems to be trying to mess with my head: ‘I was Stage Manager for Stewart Lee. It wasn’t performance art, stand-up comedy or satire. It was a fucking train-wreck. That man could not read an audience 3 feet away. And yes, I got to know his act well during the rehearsals and Tech rehearsal. I also got to know the fact that the man is a functioning alcoholic, finishing nearly 12 cans to himself before going onstage, and that he is banned from the entire chain of Theatres I used to work at for being rude, dismissive of staff and responding terribly to bad audience feedback. I don’t hate this man in the slightest, I pity him. Where he tries to wear the “never hitting mainstream” as a cloak (Even naming a tour after it) the cracks appear when you’re one on one with him. He is angry, and I don’t think he know who he’s angry at.’ Needless to say, I don’t really have a ‘stage manager’ and don’t really understand what this job title refers to here. I don’t rehearse my act, ever, and certainly not on-stage in theatres. I could not drink ‘nearly twelve cans’ under any circumstances, and I am too tight to ask for any kind of rider, having seen the break-even points disappear in a fog of apparently complimentary sandwiches and Carling Black Label on Lee and Herring tours during the Avalon years. I do like the idea that I finished ‘nearly’ twelve cans, though, as it suggests someone was checking and tipping them out individually to see what was left in them. How many cans was it? Eleven? Ten? What is ‘nearly twelve’? I am not, quite categorically, banned from any chain of theatres either, though I have chosen not to play some of them. In fact, James Hingley, the tour manager, and I are welcomed back by delighted
staff and crew members all around the land every year, as we are an efficient, low-impact unit who clear up our own mess. I am not offered ‘audience feedback’ by any venue, and it is not standard practice to offer it to comedians, so I am not invited to respond to it by anyone, though it is true that even if that were the case, I wouldn’t see it as my duty to adapt to it anyway. I wonder what or who this all relates to? Perhaps Funday’s Child has got me confused with Adam Hills, from The Last Leg. Or Alex Brooker. Or Toksvig. This all sounds like the sort of stuff one of them would do.

  107 How quaint that in April 2018 I was still worrying that Trump might not outlast the tour. I write this in March 2019, and he’s still there, clogging up the pipe.

  108 As a purist, this ‘er’ here irks me, as in this instance it is an example of the stand-up trick known as Ó Briain’s Truncated Appendage. Here the comedian appends a stray ‘er’ to the end of a sentence to give the audience time to catch up with the joke, while appearing to be merely pausing for thought, not waiting for them to laugh. It is so named as it is a key element of the work of Mock the Week’s Norway-conquering, DVD-hating host Dara Ó Briain, who has had a number of his specials screened on terrestrial TV.

  109 Although Tony Parson would doubtless disagree, it is not the c-word (cunt) in and of itself that is getting the laugh here. The laugh comes from the telegraphed inevitability of the fact that the word is going to be said, as the act is mirroring the same section in the first half.

  110 The c-word (cunt) is out of the bag now and can be bandied about with gay abandon, willy-nilly.

  111 This is standard start-of-the-second-hour shtick from me, and has probably appeared verbatim elsewhere.

  112 The image I am talking about here, as older viewers will remember, is called Test Card F, and was usually accompanied by music from reliable Brit-jazz sessioneers like Alan Hawkshaw. It was shown on screen whenever there were no programmes on the BBC, like in the afternoon or the middle of the night. Yes, kids, in the old days, sometimes, there was no TV! I had it in my head that the image had been designed by the father of the hilarious Irish actress and stand-up Tara Flynn, who appeared in, among other things, Comedy Vehicle, but having checked on the Internet, I see this is absolutely not the case. In fact, she tells me, her father worked for a soft-drinks company in West Cork. I wonder why I thought he designed Test Card F. Am I mad? Is the act of writing these footnotes actually documenting early-onset Alzheimer’s disease? Can I trust any of my memories? My brain seems to be just linking random things together. If only there were some way to monetise this.

  113 All this stuff was done in the voice of the Russell Howard fans from earlier.

  114 I have still not seen Game of Thrones.

  115 As mentioned earlier, I was reading the Faraway Tree series of books to my daughter at the time. My mother had read them to me while I drank my milk in my pyjamas and cuddled my bear. I was six years old, and not twenty-eight, as you imagined.

  116 On reflection, this bit has an obvious relationship with a line in a ’90s Lee and Herring routine, where Richard said, ‘They laughed at the idea of toast, Stew, once upon a time.’ Perhaps I included Doritos here as a subconscious acknowledgement of this, as Richard’s father, famously and enjoyably, used to mispronounce Doritos as ‘Doritoss’, making the Mexican snack sound like some kind of cleaning fluid or Hispanic semen discharge. We went to visit him in about 1987, in Cheddar, and he said, ‘Have you tried these new Doritoss?’ I still call Doritos ‘Doritoss’ to this day, because of him.

  117 Punchline.

  118 Topper.

  119 Double topper.

  120 Here I would scan the audience to single out people who looked like Game of Thrones viewers and pitch this quotation at them, so that they would applaud as a minority and I could then berate them for liking Game of Thrones and recognising the quotes.

  121 A version of the Game of Thrones routine was already in place when I gave some free tickets for the show to a musician friend of tour manager James Hingley. The man thanked me for the tickets and gave me a Game of Thrones mug from HMV, which had this original version of the quote on it. I used the quote and detailed its source in subsequent versions of the joke, as seen here.

  122 Punchline.

  123 Topper.

  124 This got laughs from only a small minority of the audience, as it was calibrated to, who were aware that the chugging of a diesel engine can, apparently, cause involuntary erections in some men.

  125 Coincidentally, this is Tony Parson’s home town, where as a young man he ‘breathed the foul air’ that was thick with the c-word (cunt). Obviously, I only said ‘Billericay’ when I was performing in Essex. In other places I’d say a different town. These are the secret tools of the touring comedian, which an ordinary person like you, reader, could never master.

  126 The suggestion here is that the diesel engine has caused the male passenger to ejaculate semen from his penis. A few people laughed at this, and I didn’t clarify what I meant. In the ensuing confusion I segued quickly into a kind of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown/club-comic voice, making my getaway from the previous bit, and began doing ’70s-type working-men’s-club material. I don’t know why. I don’t remember ever writing this bit down, so it grew out of an improvisation, until it became a fluid bit that I performed every night. I don’t quite know what connections were firing here, but it seemed to work, and it allowed me to do Game of Thrones material as if it were being performed by a ’70s club comic, in a time before Game of Thrones was ever broadcast.

  127 This is an old Bernard Manning bit. You can see footage of him using it at all the different stages of his career. When he does it to young women, when he is really old and unthreatening, it is almost charming.

  128 Our perception of ’70s light entertainers has changed in recent years.

  129 This trick of checking if there is anyone listening to the act in the wings is copied from Max Miller, and it makes the audience feel like they are in on a secret that must not be shared.

  130 Crisp-advertising ex-footballer Gary Lineker has distinguished himself over the last few years as a prominent liberal voice in the Twittersphere, much to the disapproval of the largely right-leaning sports commentariat.

  131 I could more or less get Lineker’s Leicestershire accent right if I thought, each night, of how the actor, comedian and Silver Age DC Comics expert Colin Hoult actually speaks in real life, although he is from Nottinghamshire, so it doesn’t really make sense.

  132 This invisible Gary Lineker bit began as an improvisation in Lineker’s home town of Leicester, where his family have a fruit stall in the market, and then became one of those fun bits of the show that keep you sane over 250 performances, which could expand or contract nightly in different ways and go off on different tangents. There were much longer versions of it than the one here, which is the only documented version.

  133 Indeed. The voice is some kind of generic Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown/Bernard Manning composite, which isn’t really sustainable without further finessing, but I left it deliberately in this unresolved state.

  134 Tyrion Lannister is the ‘imp’ character in Game of Thrones, played by Peter Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism. Dinklage addresses his condition head on in Tom DiCillo’s brilliant 1995 film Living in Oblivion, in which he plays an actor of small stature sick of being cast only in dream sequences. Here, like Boris Johnson, I am aware that I am having my cake and eating it, making an un-PC joke with relish, while supposedly parodying old-school un-PC comedians. Look, I’m holding my hand up to that, OK? Am I now #cancelled?

  135 I have a strange pride in having got the phrase ‘He’s wanked hisself into being a dwarf ’ onto the BBC.

  136 The Russell Howard fan voice from earlier returns here.

  137 I wonder if Frankie Boyle and his joke-writing team do have these kinds of discussions. Is there a decision-making process whereby them accusing the glamour model Katie Price’s blind autistic son Harvey, who was eight at the time of Boy
le’s and his writers’ joke, of wanting to rape his mother is balanced out, as legitimate collateral damage, against the idea that his mother’s lifestyle and choice of romantic partners make her fair game for such harsh mockery? When, in his 2011 book Work! Consume! Die!, Boyle described the blameless campaigning comedian Josie Long, who was probably not even on the radar of the average Frankie Boyle fan, being raped by a monkey crossed with Hitler, did he feel the obvious distress this would cause her was counterbalanced by striking a well-deserved blow at … well, who knows what? Similarly, was the decision to repurpose the ’00s Frankie Boyle sick-comedian character as a liberal satirist made by the real Frankie Boyle and his writers for some reason they have never made clear, or had Boyle and his joke-writing team exhausted the possibilities of the Frankie Boyle/nihilist character and understandably wanted to see it evolve? Was this repointing an attempt to ease his, and his writers’, return to the BBC, which he had previously said was too cowardly to handle him and his writers, after the cancellation of the badly produced 2010 Channel 4 series that failed to facilitate their talents? And what makes me making fun of a dwarf actor any better than Boyle and his writers at their least accountable? Is it simply the fact that I have acknowledged what I am doing in a post-modern way? Is it in fact worse than Boyle and his writers because it is dishonest? Probably. I don’t know.