by Stewart Lee
People do change. They come to realise that jokes might have consequences and might exacerbate hatreds that they can’t square with their consciences. We all have material we are happy to have left behind, and Boyle has tried to move on. The likes of Toby Young, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkson have a professional interest in not doing so, and they continue to deny that a joke is ever anything more than just a joke.
138 The initial thrust of this bit survived from the 2015–16 Room with a Stew tour and was too bulky to fit into its intended place in series four of Comedy Vehicle, becoming the first bankable building block of Content Provider. It didn’t make quite as much sense now, as it suddenly seemed a long time since the days when Labour leader Ed Miliband was seeking the endorsement of the newly politicised Russell Brand, who was running around advising people not to vote as there was no point.
139 This bit grew and grew, until I could dance around in a frenzy of pretended phone-screen tapping for minutes on end, surfing the waves of baffled hysteria. A clip of this section, shorn of the spoken-word material either side that explains it, has appeared on the Internet, courtesy of some alt-right nostalgist, as an example of how bad ‘modern’ comedy is, and how much better Dad’s Army, Bernard Manning and Max Miller were. Those viewing it without context could be forgiven for feeling bewildered, but the idea that this furiously incoherent dance represents ‘modern’ comedy is demonstrably wrong. It is ancient comedy, and it is possible to imagine the earliest of shaman clowns, perhaps before language had even taken shape, performing a similar absurd dance around the fires of their Palaeolithic caves, three million years ago. I have written before how the music of Julian Cope’s proto-metal/Detroit pre-punk revivalists Brain Donor has affected my comedy, suggesting that if you persist with something apparently simplistic to the point of stupidity for long enough it can eventually become transcendental. I’m not saying I achieved that here, or that I am the equal of genuinely transporting art and music, but it was a lot more fun doing this every night than saying sentences with words in them that, because of their position in relation to each other and the meanings they have, could make people laugh. As for the falling trousers … I gain and lose weight erratically on tour, due to a toxic mix of post-show drinking, motorway food, sedentary van journeys and suppressed stress. I wore the same 1980s skinny black jeans all through the run, and at a Bristol date about halfway through I must have been significantly slimmer than at the start, as my trousers suddenly started slipping down my hips during the mad phone dance. I could have pulled them back up, but I found myself wondering what would happen if I let them fall, and just ignored it, already calculating in my mind that it would be great to be performing high-status slag-offs of young people, while looking like a ridiculous old man who couldn’t keep his trousers up. In fact, doing the routine with my trousers around my ankles should have actually made it funnier for proper clown-theory reasons. And it did. With a little practice I realised I could swivel my hips in such a way as to make my trousers fall down every night, like some kind of out-of-shape Chippendale, which was even funnier for the front few rows because both of my two legs are covered with scars from insect bite infections, including the bite of a rare and invasive species of spider, and blotches from patches of decayed flesh left over from a bout of cellulitis. They are the kind of legs that encourage GPs, who don’t know that I am a successful comedian, to ask ‘if there is someone at home looking after me’ and to remind me that at fifty I now qualify for free local council sessions of ‘chair-based activity’. One night someone helpfully heckled that my trousers had fallen down, and I answered that I was aware of this, and that it was a deliberate attempt to lower my status to enable me to mock people from the position of a lowly outsider, a theory I had learned from studying, and living with, the Native American shaman clowns in Arizona and New Mexico. About one in ten times people would tell me my trousers had fallen down, and I was able to answer with a similarly pretentious discourse, and I wish it had happened for the live recording, but it didn’t. There! If I had plants, like James Corden, I could have fixed that.
140 I am genuinely sick of these phones, especially in theatres and cinemas. They take everyone out of the moment and ruin the climaxes of long, and painstakingly structured, routines. On this tour I warned everyone at the start (edited out of this transcript) that if they used phones, I would come down, get their phones and smash them to bits. In about one in ten shows I would see someone on their phone, so I would run down and snatch it, easily taking them by surprise as they were looking at their screen, and take it back to the stage. The audience would expect me to smash the phone as promised, but instead I would turn round, pull down my pants and wedge the phone into the actual point where the lower end of my buttocks crack meets the start of my perineum, and then pull my pants back up and carry straight on from where I had left off with no comment. The phone would remain wedged in my rectum until the end of that half, sometimes causing me visible discomfort as I moved around the stage. Then, after putting the phone in a jiffy bag, it would be returned to the punter via front of house, ideally with pieces of suspect physical matter visible on it. GET OFF YOUR PHONES!
141 Throughout this section I am affecting ignorance of the modern world, based on half-seen videos, adverts and memes, which I often genuinely fail to understand in real life anyway.
142 The idea that drinking yoghurt was amusing in and of itself dates back to a mid-’90s Lee and Herring routine, which I have forgotten. Richard has gone on to do pioneering work with yoghurt-based humour, but in this bit I was specifically thinking of an annoying contemporary advertising campaign for a new Australian breakfast drink, Up & Go, which aimed to increase sales among men by visually suggesting there was a link between sucking up some breakfast drink and receiving oral sex from a hot surfer chick.
143 Usually, one person would laugh at the mention of FKA Twigs, who is a female dance-music artist from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and is on the fringes of the average person’s consciousness. She was chosen for this joke because only a tiny minority of the audience would recognise her name, so the joke would semi-fail.
144 I don’t, because I have got Twigs’s gender wrong. On a good night, people would call out to tell me that FKA Twigs was a woman, and then I would accuse them of gender fascism and say they were worse than Hitler. But it didn’t always happen, and it didn’t happen here. That is the beauty of live performance: great moments are lost for ever, as they should be.
145 Bizarrely, audio tape is now the latest cool retro format.
146 If anyone had seen this video (for the 2015 single ‘Pendulum’), and it only needed to be one person, I would go on a lengthy digression about exactly how FKA Twigs had got tangled up in all the string. I would remember that it happened near a row of shops just by Gloucester Quays shopping centre, where there is a Burger King, a Toys ‘R’ Us and a Laser Quest centre. If anyone in the room knew the geography of Gloucester, which I know well, the bit could gain an extra five minutes. I remember that the routine ended with someone jumping out on FKA Twigs, who was listening to rap tapes on a Sony Walkman and so not paying attention, and luring Twigs into a disused shop, where he/she was tangled up in string. I remember it concluded thus: ‘And FKA Twigs says, “There isn’t loads of string in there, is there?” And the bloke said, “No.” But there was.’ But sadly, the lengthy FKA Twigs/Gloucester shopping centre extemporisation was never written down and was not recorded, so like many other classics from my oeuvre, such as the Latvian Radio Station routine, the Icelandic volcano slide show and the Boy Who Cried Wolf bit, which was very similar to a section of Ricky Gervais’s subsequent debut stand-up show.
147 And tonight I did drop this bit.
148 When I do find myself writing a normal set-up/punchline one–two joke, I feel I then have to apologise for it, as it is so unexpected.
149 An elderly volunteer usher, at a small theatre in an out-of-season Yorkshire seaside town that I play out of pity, talked to me
after the show. She said she had never seen comedy like it and enjoyed the bondage part, where, she explained to me, I was making fun of how people always said the past was better than the present, but using the maddest modern thing I could think of as an example of the good old days. I will never tire of touring. Television feels like throwing shit at a wall and hoping some of it will stick. But working live, even at this late stage in my career, I feel like you are making new fans one by one in the most unlikely places and sometimes giving people new experiences they would never have imagined they would enjoy.
150 It was very enjoyable to shout this odd sentence every night. At some point during the routine I was able to contrive, apparently unintentionally, pulling the standing strut of the microphone out of its base, which was another accident which became a bit, and then use the remaining stalk to gesture at people or smash random bits of the stage to pieces in fabricated rage. We had our own, increasingly damaged, mic stand for the tour, which you can see is visibly on its last leg in the BBC film of the show. I never understand stand-ups choosing to use clip-on head mics, or even radio mics without cables, for shows. The mic stand identifies you as a stand-up comedian, and with that powerful visual signifier of identity literally in your hand, however far you deviate from the rules of what a stand-up is supposed to be, you are still anchored to that identity. Plus, the stand and the cable are multipurpose props that you are allowed to use in an utterly uncontrived way – they are supposed to be there anyway – and which ground you. The mic stand can be a sword, a stump to lean on, a baton, a wizard’s staff and even, as I remember in a very old Julian Barratt routine, the tiller of a barge steered by a strange pipe-sucking captain (what a great stand-up Barratt was in the pre-Boosh days, but secretly he always wanted to be in Keith Tippett’s Centipede, and so was never content with comedy). Meanwhile, the mic cable (always use cable mics, not radio mics with no cable, which make you look like someone doing a mattress marketing event in a regional shopping centre) can be a whip, the crest of a wave, a hangman’s noose. Don’t mess with this. This is a powerful archetype now, and it has everything we need. The mic and the cable are the tools of the trade, like the bladder on a stick the morris men’s clown must wave, allowing himself licence.
151 By thinking on my feet I could usually improvise lines in the ‘Behind the Wizard’s Curtain’ song that would tie it in to the earlier part of the show, when I asked a punter to estimate the second-hand value of my DVD, whatever that estimate had been.
152 The Dave channel always invested in the cost of BBC comedy productions, in exchange for repeating them on Dave, but unexpectedly declined that option for the second series of Comedy Vehicle, leading to a deficit in the projected budget, which ultimately streamlined the show in a beneficial way.
153 I have never seen Taskmaster, which this refers to, but I am told it is very good, and I am pleased that things have worked out for its creator, Alex Horne.
154 Obviously, all these local references would be rejigged in different regions. But I don’t like doing too much that feels bespoke to a particular town and its adorable quirks, as I think it looks like pandering to the audience – or entertaining them, as some people would call it. That said, Mark Steel’s BBC radio show In Town is brilliant, and it does only that. I suppose the difference is the character of the comedian Stewart Lee wouldn’t really know or care where he was, or whether there was an annoying one-way system or a crisp factory. That said, I do enjoy surreptitiously using the phrase ‘all round the Wrekin’ whenever I am in Shrewsbury.
155 It took me five years, five years of crate-digging, to find a copy of Country Joe and the Fish’s 1967 classic Electric Music for the Mind and Body, after John Peel played ‘Death Sound’ to my childhood ears in 1981. I remember he wanted to show psychedelic revivalists what real psychedelia was. Today, you could download it in an instant. In November 2000, I ended up having breakfast in a Seattle hotel with two of the Fish and my acquaintance, Nick Saloman, of The Bevis Frond. I travelled light for a three-day trip to plug into the psychedelic mainline at the Terrastock Festival, back when I was young and free and had a disposable, if small, income. I seemed suspicious to Seattle airport’s security staff because I had no luggage. They asked me why I was coming to Seattle, and when I said it was to see a version of Country Joe and the Fish, they detained for me two hours, searching me and questioning me. In a related record-collector’s tale, it took me thirty-four years of googling misremembered titles to acquire a record I heard once on Peel in 1984, which had haunted me ever since. I finally found the twelve-inch version of ‘Hep Cat Gloss’ by Dundee’s Beefheartian obscurists Boo Hooray at an online dealer (which is cheating), and it was like being reunited with a long-lost friend. But today’s young music fans have had the real-world challenge of finding physical things taken away from them. We were big-game hunters, coming home with vinyl trophies. What are they? Squares with Spotify accounts. Nobodies. Nothing.
156 I do remember getting online, when an Internet was set up for the first time for me and Richard Herring in our writers’ office at Avalon’s HQ in Leicester Place, in around 1997, and wondering what would happen if I put Green on Red’s 1981 EP Two Bibles and Markley, A Group’s 1970 album Markley, A Group – two records that had been on my wants list for a while – into the AltaVista search engine. And when I realised that all that stood between me and them was raising the rather large sums the dealers wanted for them, my heart sank a little. It was all over, the great record-collecting adventure, and now those record-collector heroes of the post-war era who invented the concept of Delta blues as a thing by going round shacks in the Deep South with handfuls of cash, would be at home, pallid and unhealthy, clicking online buttons in dimly lit rooms.
157 The trick in performance here was to have talked about general nostalgia so much that when I suddenly doubled back into talking specifically about S&M, it was a shocking and funny surprise.
158 I do think this, so it was easy to perform with conviction, but I am also aware it is ludicrous.
159 I have set this routine in the rural Worcestershire landscapes that I remember my adoptive mother’s parents describing to me as a child. All their tales would take place there. I have used this trick before because, along with lapsing into their Black Country accents, it helps to give these kinds of routines the patina of remembered truth.
160 I was fascinated by Inkberrow as a young teenager, as it was the home village of the mysterious rural goth band And Also the Trees, whom I was a fan of at around the age of fourteen. AATT were ‘folk horror’ decades before it was a thing. Their enveloping literary soundscapes, tragically compromised by the often wayward pitch of their singer, remain big in Europe, if not in Inkberrow. I finally drove through Inkberrow a decade or so ago. You can see the shape of what it was, with Barratt Homes newbuilds now blurring its boundaries.
161 My adoptive father’s sister lived here, and she would have us to biweekly Sunday lunch. On the way home I would listen to the Top 50 rundown on Radio 1 as we drove through the dark countryside.
162 Pronounced as ‘play-zes’.
163 How utterly tedious it was, as a youngster, to listen to adults discussing routes around the country in their boring voices for ages and ages. This is a form of revenge.
164 As a child, it seemed I overheard endless discussions about routeways around the Midlands, and how they had changed, which would end with the observation that ‘back then it was a leafy lane’. How silly, it seemed to me. And yet now there are busy residential roads on the once-rural fringes of Solihull, like Hay Lane, a tree-canopy tunnel through fields flecked with newt-spawn and gorse, which I remember from the ’70s, back when it was a ‘leafy lane’ where we would wait for flocks of geese and herds of cows to cross on the way to school. It is time for me to die.
165 On a good night a lone person would laugh at this, and I would realise there was someone in with local knowledge, whom I could then engage with at even greater, and more tedious, length about
the geographical specifics of Worcestershire roads and motorways.
166 I don’t think the end of this bit was ever well written or focused enough, but I used that sort of American stand-up comedy trick of just increasing in speed and velocity throughout the routine to nudge it over the line and trigger nightly applause on the button, like some kind of West End music-theatre slut. On some level, the puritan in me still thinks such performance tricks are a filthy con and the only honest way to perform stand-up is in a flat monotone, stripped of all cheap applause-provoking prompts. But I spent twenty-five years doing that, so I suppose I have earned the right to sell out and entertain people. I am a barrelorgan monkey prostitute.
167 Ka-pow! I told you I was gonna do dat, and I still dun it, and you still fell for it, sucka!
168 The audacity of returning to this idea, which the audience had presumed abandoned, especially after the lengthy misdirection of the previous minute or so, is what gets the big laugh here.
169 I never really understood what dripping was, but after my parents split up, I lived in my grandparents’ house, where dripping was ubiquitous. Older adults would often have, as a treat, ‘a bit of dripping’ – or if they were feeling extravagant, ‘a bit of bread and dripping’ – in the evening after supper. Dripping was/is congealed animal fat, left over from the cooking of beef, pork and lamb. Its commercial equivalent is lard. But in the world of congealed animal fat, lard is a blended whisky, while dripping is moonshine, potcheen, distilled in a hillbilly fat still. Bread and dripping, a dish popular in the Midlands, where I grew up, and the north of England, is congealed fat spread on bread. Wikipedia tells us that if the brown sediment has settled to the bottom of the dripping, the same dish is known in Yorkshire as a ‘mucky fat sandwich’. Towards the end of the last century, healthier options, such as vegetable, olive and sunflower oil, displaced dripping, but they were still lapping it up in ’70s Birmingham. To be fair, these were people who entered the Second World War knock-kneed and malnourished, emerging from it into protracted rationing, in a world where a big lump of congealed animal fat was a potentially life-saving treat. In my grandparents’ house, the dripping was kept, as I suspect it always had been, on a little plate on a marble slab in the pantry beneath the stairs. They had a fridge but remained suspicious of it, and my gran still used iron weights to measure out cake ingredients and a museum-piece mangle to hand-crank the water out of wet, washed clothes. Above all, in this bit, ‘dripping’ is a lovely word to say over and over again in a Black Country accent.