How I Escaped My Certain Fate
Page 5
Playing the Parker solo was also a good way of identifying troublemakers, of spotting punters that had probably come to the wrong gig. I’d stand at the back of the room watching the audience file in. Anyone who got up and remonstrated with the sound guy, insisting that the music was turned off, as some would, was probably not going to go for the show. In New Zealand, some English fans of Peter Kay and the sport of rugby accidentally arrived at my show as a result of a wrongly assumed national kinship. It was their furious reaction to the Evan Parker solo that immediately alerted me to problems ahead, which eventually and inevitably ruined the show (see Appendix II).
Since 2004, I’ve always thought very carefully about pre-show music. It’s all part of set and setting. A show begins the moment the audience walk into a venue. When Jerry Springer: The Opera was at the National Theatre, the grandiose vibe of the building and the dignity of its discreet and helpful staff were already heading the audience into a beautiful crossfire of high cultural surroundings and low cultural content. But when the show transferred to the West End and punters trooped in past loads of people shouting at them and trying to flog them Maltesers and souvenir hats, this was lost, and the initial impact of the show suffered as a result.
In essence, I don’t want the pre-show music to seem like I am eager to please. I want to start wrong-footing the audience before they’ve even sat down.
STEW APPEARS. MUSIC CHANGES TO ‘MR. LEE’ BY THE 5.6.7.8’S.*
* I chose this Japanese garage-punk song because it is fast and exciting and the ladies’ foreign accents are funny. Is this lacist? I am
velly solly.
STEW INVITES FOUR PEOPLE ONSTAGE. HE GIVES THEM PARTY POPPERS AND TELLS THEM TO EXPLODE THEM ON HIS SIGNAL. THEY DO SO AND RETURN TO THEIR SEATS, LEAVING STEW ALONE AT THE MIC, A FEW STRANDS OF PARTY STREAMER DRAPED OVER HIS HEAD.*
* The more fun I could have with the punters here, getting them to join in the party atmosphere, the funnier and more disconcerting it would be to hold the silence after the celebrations were over and then shift the mood by beginning to talk about the tragedy of the World Trade Center whilst still draped in party-popper streamers. Reading this now it probably seems in poor taste, and perhaps it was when it was written, but three years after 9/11, when I first began performing this show, the event was still inescapable on a daily basis, percolating even apparently unrelated media. It had changed everything, as the cliché goes, but often in the strangest places. There was a bizarre Marvel comic where Spider-Man and The Avengers deferred to the true heroes, the firemen and the police, as they contributed to the clean-up operation. I’m a huge Marvel Comics fan, but had I lost someone on the day, even I might have felt this was an inappropriate tribute (though it’s always good to know that a fictional character who has been given the ability to climb walls by the bite of a radioactive spider shares your pain). Closer to home, I remember talks about scrapping a projection of Bosch-like figures falling down to hell in Jerry Springer: The Opera because suddenly they echoed the tumbling bodies of 11 September. But reminders of the attack were everywhere, intentional and unintentional, to the point where it was beginning to lose its meaning. Could the mere mention of it still kill a room stone dead if the person mentioning it had streamers in their hair?
So, on September the 11th, 2001 … I was actually on holiday, right. That seems distasteful now. But I wasn’t to know at the time. You know, I didn’t plan it. The holiday, I mean, not the attacks.* And I was actually in the city of Granada in southern Spain, right. It’s an interesting place. Granada was kind of the last point of Muslim occupation in medieval Europe. It’s still a very mixed city – lots of mosques, lots of churches, lots of Arab Spaniards and white European Spaniards, all getting on fine.†
* It’s an ongoing source of annoyance to me that initially self-contained jokes and comments are suddenly, and often wilfully, made to seem contentious or offensive by media commentators who reposition them in the orbit of events or shifts in attitudes, subsequent to their telling, which no one could reasonably have foreseen. Again, in Jerry Springer: The Opera, we were required by the producers and stars to rewrite and re-rehearse an existing scene involving a severed head after a hostage was decapitated in Iraq, the suggestion being that audiences watching this vast, massively choreographed, two-and-a-half-hour spectacle might assume the severed head scene had been rapidly included that week specifically in the interests of appearing topical and tasteless. Soon after the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately I saw an episode of Most Haunted, Living TV’s ethically dubious ghost provocation show in which the restless souls of the dead are taunted into activity by entirely unqualified amateur parapsychologists and occasional F-list celebrities. In this particular edition, the tormented wraiths suffered the attentions of Gately’s false Irish group and their lucky shit-at-the-wall svengali Louis Walsh, who were taken into some haunted cellars in Edinburgh to search for the spirits of furious Scottish troglodytes. Rather than thinking that it was intended either as a calculated insult or some kind of misplaced tribute to the now deceased teen idol, who had fled the scene three times in terror during the show, I simply assumed that the timing of the broadcast was nothing more than an oversight on the part of the schedulers, and went about my business.
† The quietly seminal Irish comedian Ian Macpherson, a formative influence on my standup, used to have a joke: ‘Everyone can remember where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot. I was leaning out of the second-floor window of a book depository in Dallas, Texas,’ or something like that. Similarly, we can all remember where we were when we found out that planes had flown into the World Trade Center. I was on holiday in Granada, Spain. And pretty much everything in this routine is true.
And I was walking around there on nine-one-one – the 9th of November, reclaim the calendar, we invented those dates* – I was walking around there on the 9th of November, nine-one-one, and I went into, er, a little Spanish bar. And on television there was all this film of buildings on fire, and things falling down, and people running and screaming. And I said to the barman, ‘Where’s that?’ – in Spanish, ‘¿Dónde está?’ And he said, ‘Nuevo Yorica.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, it’s in Colombia or somewhere, it doesn’t matter.’ And then I watched for a bit longer, Glasgow, and I realised that it was New York, where English-speaking people live, and therefore a terrible newsworthy tragedy.
* Watching American responses to the attack on the news in the bar, and later in the hotel room, it was clear that semantic difficulties – the unintentionally jingoistic use of the word ‘crusade’, for example – were instantly amplifying existing tensions. Even the numerical naming of the event itself showed how we are divided by a common language.
And I don’t know if you remember, do you remember the planes, flying into the, yeah, the World Trade …? ’Cause we got that on the news in London, I don’t know if you had it here. And … I don’t want to make any assumptions, you know … Um …*
* This transcript, remember, comes from a show in Glasgow. Scottish audiences, or Scotch audiences as I prefer to call them, like to manufacture unnecessary grievances by wilfully imagining that visiting English comics know nothing about their culture, and that we have assumed everything in Scotland is the same as in England. This is a misconception I am happy to play on by doing everything I can to make it appear true. I was always scared of Scottish audiences, especially the legendarily feral ones of Glasgow, until I decided to go out to cultivate an air of deliberate cultural insensitivity, which eventually induced their grudging respect.
Likewise, deep in the days of the Troubles, any English standup in Northern Ireland was always, understandably, walking on eggshells, many of them deliberately placed in their path by the regular host of Belfast’s Empire comedy club, the TV personality Patrick Kielty. Fearless as ever, the legendary Simon Munnery went onstage in Derry in his anarcho-punk Alan Parker Urban Warrior persona and began his set by apologising for English complicity in the potato famine and emptying a comp
ensatory sack of spuds onto the stage. The Irish republicans loved it! Audiences can actually enjoy being insulted. If they are abused with enough originality, confidence and verve, the time and trouble an act has taken to disrespect their core values actually appears flattering.
So I was watching that in this, this Spanish bar. And then George Bush came on the television news, and he said, ‘We are gonna get them folks what done this.’ And that annoyed me for two reasons. One, because it was grammatically inaccurate. And secondly, ’cause you could already see the terrible kind of cultural fallout of what this was going to mean. There was suddenly a horrible tension between the Arab Spaniards and the white European Spaniards in this previously happy bar. And after a while, I, I couldn’t stand the tension any more, so I went into the Gents to do a wee, and, er … A couple of people over there sniggered at the word ‘wee’. That’s fine, I know this is a tense subject to open with and I’m, I’m happy that the word ‘wee’ has helped defuse the atmosphere a bit. So … So I was standing there in this Spanish bar on the 9th of November doing a wee … out of my cock … and … and it was yellow … and smelt of wee.*
* I suppose what I was doing here was trying to exploit the tension of discussing something puerile in the midst of something terribly serious, and I would go into greater or lesser detail about the act of weeing depending on the feel of the room. Also, wee is funny, especially if the wee is being weed out of a cock. Into a toilet. On 9/11.
And while I was doing it, this thing happened that happens when you get a bit older, where, when you kind of release the pressure on the front sphincter, the, the, the back sphincter kind of loosens off of its own accord, you know. While I was there, this Arab guy came, and he, and he, and he stood next to me but I didn’t make eye contact with him, ’cause I was embarrassed, er, about the wee. And world news events.* But, you know, while I was there, ’cause I was a bit older the, the, the front sphincter slackened off, the back sphincter went of its own accord. And suddenly, a little fart came out, right.† But it was only a really tiny fart, like the kind of fart a vole might do. Or Anna Friel. It was a fart that smelt mainly of hair and was comprised principally of ideas. But it was a fart nonetheless.‡ And the Arab guy, he, he heard the fart. And he looked across at me. And I looked back at him. And he laughed. And then I laughed. And I realised everything was going to be OK.§
* This is absolutely true. I did feel like I couldn’t make eye contact with the man because of both weeing and the World Trade Center falling down. Similarly, I remember as a thirteen-year-old boy being taken by my mum to see Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi at a cinema in Birmingham, back in the days when they still had intervals in films. After Edward Fox had presided over a massacre of innocent Indian demonstrators at Amritsar, we went and queued in the foyer for an ice cream, the only white people amongst dozens of Brummie Indians, to whom I remember feeling very strongly that I should apologise in some way, firstly for the Amritsar massacre, and secondly for Ben Kingsley blacking up and doing a Dick Emery voice.
† I did not do a fart at this point during the tragic events of 9/11. But I did have a kind of momentary Tourette syndrome panic that I might do, even though I couldn’t feel any gas pressure in my bowel, and I was terrified at how this might seem utterly inappropriate to the man standing next to me, given the seriousness of the events unfolding on the television in the bar. Once, when I was a teenager, I bumped into a friend in the street who was distraught, having just seen an acquaintance run down and killed, and I remember having an out-of-body experience where I realised that the worst thing I could possibly do would be to laugh, as I became paralysed by the fear that I would do so. Similarly, a few days after a terrible child murder in a grim northern city in the midnineties, I found myself floating above myself, looking down on myself while onstage doing standup in the said city, and watching as I made idiotic and insensitive comments about the incident, and then, as my personalities merged once more, I was greatly relieved to find that I had not said anything of the sort. But my mouth was dry, my tongue large and lifeless, and I was bathed in a cold sweat.
Richard Herring is to be both praised and condemned for having exactly these kinds of mad impulses to say the worst possible thing in any situation, and for somehow lacking the self-censorship facility that prevents most of us from acting on them. His midnineties flatmate, the Pot Noodle advert actor and disgrace to Wales Peter Baynham, returned home one afternoon, Rich having been fore-warned that Pete’s dad had passed away earlier that day. Rich’s first words were ‘Pete, can I just say how delighted I am to hear of the death of your father,’ a bold gamble, but one that was accepted in the spirit it was meant. Since then, Richard has progressed beyond the shock-hack’s default setting of ‘saying the unsayable’ to ‘saying the unthinkable’ and to articulating ideas so sexually and morally twisted that it wouldn’t even occur to the average punter to imagine them, let alone say them.
There was a school of comedy in the nineties where the audience would warm to a comedian who seemed to be expressing opinions and feelings they themselves had had but never expressed. There’s an incredible and admirable skill in doing this, and Michael McIntyre perhaps represents its apogee, his rapid-fire observations about everyday life being so accurate and instantly recognisable that he is absolved even of the obligation to develop them into actual jokes. But I’ve always liked the kind of comedy that makes you go, ‘My God, I would never have thought that!’
‡ In long-running shows that I have to perform many times, where there are long sections that need to stay more or less the same to convey dramatically necessary parts of the narrative, I look forward immensely to tiny details that I can change every night to keep myself amused. Each night the mammal and the celebrity in this section would change, as would the exact composition of the fart they had supposedly issued in the subsequent sentence, though it was always necessary for there to be some kind of believable relationship between the mammal, the celebrity and the texture of the fart. For me, the ‘vole/Anna Friel/hair and ideas’ combo, the version recorded for posterity here, wasn’t at all as strong as, say, something like ‘shrew/Paul Morley/Vimto and affectation’, whereas ‘stoat/Victoria Beckham/custard and regret’ is somehow not quite right at all. Or maybe it is? Cynics think free-associating surreal stuff is easy, but it’s much harder than simply putting the word ‘fish’ into normal sentences at random points, as advertising creatives and whoever wrote the piss-weak parody of The Mighty Boosh in Mitchell and Webb’s cash-in book might want to note.
§ On sticky nights, when the audience were uncomfortable and uneasy and silent, this was usually the point at which things finally swung my way, and the laugh would come like a great wave of relief as people in the room realised I was working towards some kind of point, rather than being gratuitously offensive. Not in Aspen, though.
And then I went back into the bar. By now the situation was even worse, even more tense. The room had kind of split along racial, religious lines. There was a horrible tension in the room.* And then suddenly Co-lin – Colin – Powell went on the television – we invented those names, his name’s not … he’s not Co-lin the Barbarian, his name’s Colin, he should be running a photocopier repair workshop – Colin Powell went on television on the 9th of November, Spanish bar, and he said, ‘We are gonna launch a crusade against them folks what done this.’† And being in a largely Muslim town, full of murals of crusaders cutting the heads off Muslims, you realise what an inappropriate word ‘crusade’ was to use on the 9th of November. It went down really badly. And as a, a world statesman, Colin Powell should be aware of how words change their meaning, culturally. Saying ‘crusade’ on the 9th of November, it’s a bit like if I were to get a job as a maths teacher, teaching maths in a German town somewhere near Belsen. And I was to say to the kids, ‘I’m going to set you a maths problem. I want you to work through it, and on the last page, fill in your final solution.’‡ You know, it would be received badly. And as a world leader, Colin Po
well should be aware of these kinds of cultural shifts in language. But he said ‘crusade’ and it went down really badly with everyone in the room, so there was an even worse atmosphere than before.
* Sometimes, if the atmosphere at the gig was bad enough by this point, I was able to play a game in the performance of this section whereby I would gesture around the emotional topography of the uncomfortable room I was in to stand in for the emotional topography of the uncomfortable room I was describing.
† Co-lin Powell did not say this on 9/11. He never really said it, but he did use the word ‘crusade’ a couple of days later. I lied for comic effect. But who is the real criminal? Is it the humble standup comedian, slightly changing what someone said a bit for comic effect? Or is it the American politician, laughing and touching himself inappropriately while he rains death and destruction on the heads of millions of innocents? (Answer: it is the American politician. He is the real criminal.)
‡ When I performed this show in Solihull, where I grew up, a bloke I was at school with, who was now an Alpha Course born-again Christian, tried to engage me in a conversation about the rights and wrongs of the supposedly blasphemous Jerry Springer: The Opera that I had worked on. He suggested that this line, for example, was anti-Semitic and that Jews would be offended by it, though he wasn’t personally. It’s so obviously not the point of the line at all, to me, but I mention this only as an example of the fact that you can’t always worry too much about what people think, as some people are just beyond help.