by Stewart Lee
* An early attempt by the BBC to get the opera on BBC2, which we were able to resist, saw the then controller Jane Root advising me to learn about how to present it using the example of On the Hour, a show for which I had been one of the four main writers.
It was odd to be in Germany and to know that 65,000 people wanted your work banned. The Germans found it funny, and mocked us for being enemies of society and makers of ‘Entartete Kunst’, the Nazis’ demonised ‘decadent art’. When we had first heard about them, I had looked at Christian Voice’s website and assumed the whole thing would soon blow over. They were obviously small-time shock merchants, who even suggested that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on New Orleans for having a gay parade. Matters soon escalated, though. On the night of the broadcast, we sat, in defiance of Christian Voice’s homophobic agenda, in a gay bar in Hanover, drinking gay drinks nervously until we were sure the show had gone out without anyone being killed.*
* A gay bar in Germany is the same as a normal bar here. Whereas a normal bar in Germany is like a dentist’s waiting room with beer.
Christian Voice’s head honcho, Stephen Green, had quickly mastered the art of the inflammatory soundbite, and the press lapped his comments up without really doing any background checks on him or his organisation. Acres of angry newsprint were generated, much of it about things that weren’t even in the show – the supposed nappywearing Jesus, the 6,000 swear words that never were – and frightened white people who imagined immigrants were getting an easy ride whenever their faiths were mentioned joined the queue of incoherently angry people eager to see the show closed. In December, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti had been closed by furious Sikhs at the Birmingham Rep, and on a not unrelated note even the national treasure Billy Connolly had recently been censured for a routine about the British hostage in Iraq Ken Bigley. But Stephen Green managed to mobilise the non-specifically miffed on a previously unseen scale. Then he started to close in for the kill. Green’s creative interpretation of the legal implications of the proposed and pending new laws on the incitement of racial and religious hatred meant that a whole slew of venues that were lined up to take the show on tour pulled out after he wrote to them and said they’d be prosecuted. Our final chance to make some money on the opera faded away.
Over the next few months, as the fuss rumbled on endlessly and Christian Voice began to make plans to prosecute us for blasphemy, in-between smashing my head into walls in rage I began to wonder whether there might be a standup show in it. Becoming part of the news itself ought to offer the comedian-victim interesting creative possibilities. Would it be possible to comment, satirically and objectively, on a story, or a scandal, in which you yourself were a character?*
* Out of professional curiosity, I would like to have seen the TV personality Russell Brand’s 2009 standup show, Scandalous, in which he talked about his role in the Sachsgate scandal. A BBC producer had mistakenly broadcast a recording of the hairy corncrake telling the elderly character actor Andrew Sachs that he had enjoyed sexual intercourse with his granddaughter, who is one of these Goths that they have nowadays that are sexy. (In a grainy film of the phone call Jonathan Ross can be seen touching himself mysteriously in the background, in an act of magical transference, ingesting psychically the energies of his young buck.) As I say, I would have liked to have seen Brand’s standup show, but pretty quickly it became possible to sum up the whole story thus: two overexcited middle-aged men make stupid comments and are then persecuted by a slavering rightwing media to fulfil its own anti-BBC agenda, mobilising ‘decent people’ much in the manner of Christian Voice. And the thought of watching Russell Brand drag this out for an hour, whilst girls threw their bras at him, and then having to read him being described as the ‘closest thing we have to Lenny Bruce’ by Bruce Dessau of the London Evening Standard free-sheet made me, to be honest, bitter and resentful. I would also like to remind you all that despite the fuss about Sachsgate, the most-complained-about broadcast ever remains Jerry Springer: The Opera. I am not proud of this. But if this is a competition, and I have chosen to see it as one for now, I am still on the winning team.
In mid-February, I took a week off the tour to go to America and perform StandUp Comedian at the invitation of the Aspen Comedy Festival, which is basically a trade fair for the American TV comedy industry, hosted by HBO. As noted, my show didn’t really work, though Janeane Garofalo and all the cool teeth-grinding radicals liked it, which pleased me no end. The American comics in Aspen were mainly terrible, as usual, and luckily I managed to wriggle out of hosting a showcase full of acts whose worthless material, it turned out, would have made it very difficult for me to introduce them with any degree of enthusiasm and sincerity. But I did get to meet loads of my favourite underground American comic-book creators, who were doing a panel there, and I was smuggled into a rich man’s party, high in a mountaintop mansion, by the persistent and perverted writer Jonathan Ames, whose work I admired enormously. And the festival offered one of the last opportunities to see the brilliant Flight of the Conchords baffle an unprepared American crowd before they broke big, as they silently died in a tent in the afternoon.
But the single best thing about the Aspen festival was a film screening I attended, out of sheer boredom, of a documentary about standup called The Aristocrats, by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette. It features clips of over a hundred principally American comics telling variations on a joke known as ‘the Aristocrats’, which concerns an obscene vaudeville act. Gradually, the film becomes a hilarious and often moving treatise on shock, surprise, taste, humour, the art of storytelling and the creative imagination. I became an evangelist for The Aristocrats, writing lengthy pieces on it for the Sunday Times, cannibalised below, and The Wire (see Appendix III).
Apparently, the Aristocrats gag, though never repeated onstage and unknown in Britain, had been a dressingroom staple of American comics for decades. It begins with a man entering a showbiz agent’s office to pitch him a nightclub act comprising a man, his wife and their two children, whose performance is then described in as much pungent, pornographic and scatological detail as possible, limited only by the imagination and scruples of the teller. The horrified agent then asks what the act is called. The man replies, ‘The Aristocrats.’ The humour arises from the contrast between the repellent nature of the act and the polite, gentle title it has been given. The lure of the Aristocrats gag for the film-makers appeared to be the infinitely extendable central section, which pushes boundaries of both endurance and taste, and has, on occasion, been stretched out for as long as an hour and a half.
I interviewed Paul Provenza, himself a standup, about his film later that year for the Sunday Times.
The editing process reflected a conscious decision to make the movie about ideas. In fact, we ended up doing some comics a disservice because we didn’t necessarily use their funniest bit, but the bit that best helped to illustrate the ideas of the movie clearly. The movie starts repetitively, but if you listen to each version of the joke, hearing the same gag again and again shows how people take off with it and create different things. In the first six minutes George Carlin does a version that’s totally grossed-out and scatological, then we move on to Drew Carey teaching us how to do the joke, then into a riff constructed entirely of little soundbites until, I think, your moral judgment is suspended. You’ve been bludgeoned. Boom! And then you can concentrate on the absurdity of the thing, the structure of the gag, and the different layers of offence. It’s about the singer not the song. Repeating the same joke actually allows us to get over the issue of content and concentrate instead on the thorny issue of aesthetics.
For me, hearing Provenza say this last sentence was like a cartoon lightbulb appearing over my head. This was what I had been trying to do in comedy for nearly twenty years, but I’d never heard the idea expressed with any degree of clarity.
Sometime around the mid-point of the film, after an especially hilarious sequence in which a clown-faced mime acted
out the gag silently on Venice Beach, there was a twenty-minute section where, for me, the joke wore thin. I began to feel as if I was being dragged through a trench of filth. The violence against women in the various versions of the story became so relentless that when Bob Saget described one of the male performers smashing his penis repeatedly into a drawer, I was almost relieved because at least it offered some respite. That said, other sections of the comedian-packed cinema were still splitting their sides.*
* There can be something utterly hysterical about imaginatively framed obscenity. One of my all-time-favourite routines remains one which Sean Lock performed, I think only once, in about April 1990. Sean, today a popular TV personality and consequently able to play the crowds he always deserved, pictured himself sitting on a toilet, defecating, and looking down to realise that the first stool to emerge from his anus has splashed down into the toilet bowl in the shape of a penis. A second stool emerges. To Sean’s delight it is in the shape of a vagina. The penis-shaped stool and the vaginashaped stool begin bumping into each other in the water of the toilet, at which point, aroused by the activity of the genital-shaped stools, Sean falls to his knees at the bowl and begins to pleasure himself. Sean must have made this story last ten minutes, and I was weeping with laughter, admittedly alone. Whenever I see him I always ask him about this bit and tell him it was the best thing he’s ever done, apart from his BBC2 sitcom, and that he should do it again one day, which seems to irritate him no end.
Seen in public, The Aristocrats becomes a living object lesson in the fact that a one-size-fits-all approach to making decisions about what is acceptable just won’t fit. It doesn’t even work in one room full of people who all do the same job. It could be used as a tool to refute Christian Voice’s claims that Jerry Springer: The Opera was, in and of itself, offensive.
In its closing section, The Aristocrats transcended its base subject material to become genuinely profound and emotional, and I think I took this unlikely transition as a challenge, eventually borne out in the closing stages of the ’90s Comedian set. Viewers were softened up for the final sequence of The Aristocrats with a specially made South Park short, in which the animated toddlers describe a version of the vaudeville act where the perverted family run around impersonating the victims of the 9/11 disaster whilst covered in various bodily fluids. Next we go to a charity event filmed in New York three weeks after 9/11 itself. ‘The shock of hearing the South Park bit makes us close to the state of the room when Gilbert Gottfried takes the stage at a Friars’ Roast,’ Provenza said. ‘Inadvertently, we had somehow created our own third act of The Aristocrats. We had already shot Gilbert doing the Aristocrats joke in private three or four weeks before 9/11, so the joke was in his mind.’
Onstage, Gottfried’s gag about taking an internal flight with a connection at the Empire State Building died. Someone shouts, ‘Too soon.’ ‘You can see him stall,’ remembers Provenza,
and his fingers twitch, and then he decides to start the Aristocrats gag. He didn’t plan to do it. There were no paradigms. But if you look at his face you can see him doing the math in the moment. He chose it for a reason. The room was full of comedy pros busting his ass for ‘crossing the line’. And all around town the comedy clubs were closed and club owners were asking when it would be time for people to start laughing again. Gilbert was proving a point. The Aristocrats gag became a kind of safety rope. It was all about crossing the line. And he knew an audience of comedians would intuit the subtext. He was asking us when it’s OK to laugh. The transgressive nature of the piece was the cathartic relief that everyone wanted after the confusion of 9/11.
Cutting between Gottfried’s grinning face and the sight of people literally falling off their chairs laughing and gasping, in pain, for breath, The Aristocrats made a convincing case for absurdity as a logical response to tragedy. I wept, not tears of laughter, but tears of joy. I wept tears of joy watching a tiny man describe a family of four sexually and physically abusing each other, and any animals in the vicinity, in the name of entertainment. And after an hour and ten minutes of The Aristocrats’ surgically precise analysis of how we are made to laugh, and why we laugh, I think I almost understood why.
In my mind, Provenza and Jillette’s extended essay on the mutable nature of offence synced up immediately with all the spurious debates unravelling at home about the offensiveness of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which until now had been universally praised, even in the religious press. The nature of offence was not objective. It was essentially subjective. We are offended. You are offended. I am offended. But is anything offensive in and of itself? In short, if a tree says ‘fuck, cunt, abortion, piss’ in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, is the tree offensive? And could there be any circumstances under which those words could even convey the opposite of offence, whatever that is? What delighted me about The Aristocrats was watching material which, on paper, should have been indefensibly obscene transformed by context and performance skills into something funny, something sometimes even moving or cathartic. There needed to be something of the flavour of this approach in whatever I chose to do onstage about the Jerry Springer: The Opera debacle.
Added to this, my bleeding arse, my orange piss, my contorted stomach, watching my blood bubble around the needle in the drip, feeling the cool saline fluid in my veins, suddenly losing and gaining and losing weight, feeling like a tube of screaming meat whose only purpose was to process the muck I ate and crap it out the other end, eating only potatoes, feeling the burn on my left side if I strayed to coffee or whisky or soft drinks, the mildly hallucinogenic vibe of my recovery period, the Scottish junkie I urinated on, the endless pressure on my weakened bladder through all those long car journeys on tour, and the wolfman’s weeping sores, had made me acutely aware of the physical world, the pungent world, the world of flesh. I was poised to make something of it.
When the tour with Josie wound up, my good Edinburgh reviews wafted me away to four months of work in festivals and touring in Australia and New Zealand. In Melbourne no one really came to see me for a month, and I struggled to keep the set alive. But I did get to know the marvellous Mike Wilmot, whose show I went to see repeatedly because it moved me, and it shouldn’t have done, being an evening of dirty jokes capped with a very long routine about licking someone’s anus. Just when you think you can’t stand hearing another middle-aged male comic moaning about his marriage and how he can’t please his wife any more, along comes this Falstaffian Canadian, who can invest an hour on these tired old subjects with unexpected levels of humanity, surprise and inventiveness entirely absent from the work of more selfconsciously original comics. Mike’s act was knee-deep in filth, and every night he pretended to need an extra beer because the gig was going so well at exactly the same point, but all the time he was really talking, from the heart, with utter sincerity, about what it meant to be in love. On the bills of the pathetic Nasty Show, at the Montreal Comedy Festival, Mike, a great artist, is annually misfiled alongside the usual predictable American racists, homophobes and misogynists, and yet this good-natured honey-bear of a man seems not to mind at all, and just gets on quietly with the business of rendering their noisy whining irrelevant.*
* Wilmot’s been touring the same hour for about a decade now, on and off, but it seems to me to be one of the all-time great routines. It’s not even on DVD anywhere, but anyone who thinks they love comedy as an art form needs to see it.
In Auckland I played a full 150-seater venue every night for a month, The Classic, arguably a tie with The Stand in Edinburgh for the world’s most perfect standup room. Late at night the same space was used for a club gig, where, one evening, I was suddenly seized by the spirit of Phil Nicol, who was out front hosting the show to a room full of enthusiastically oiled punters. Phil is a total performer who thinks nothing of beginning his shows naked and screaming and then trying to move forward from there. He does not understand the notion of peaking too early. That night he was improvising wildly with the public, hi
s shirt pulled up over his head so that he looked like a kind of stunted Weeble, swinging his arms, singing hillbilly folk songs, and gesturing repeatedly at his bottom. I forget why. Far away from home, cut adrift, if you like, I suddenly felt that every thing I did seemed tame and trite and safe, and that it was my duty to just walk out and try to do something I had never done before, without a safety net. I had nothing to lose. No one knew me here anyway.*
* That same week I had jumped off the highest building in the southern hemisphere on a rope, a decision which has since caused me to develop vertigo at the slightest hint of a drop. I was behaving with uncharacteristic daring and have regretted it ever since. That’ll teach me.
I tried to jam an old routine I wrote in my early twenties about coming home drunk and being sick at my mum’s house onto some kind of scatological encounter with Jesus, without any real planning. I don’t really know why I decided to do this. I suspect I was subliminally under the influence of The Aristocrats, but I don’t really remember what I did, or how I did it, or how it was received. It was late and I was probably drunk. But when it came to assembling the new standup show, I remembered that I had tried it, and suddenly it seemed that with some careful thought, it would be the perfect way of exploring the idea of religious offence.
After the Auckland festival was over I went on the road in New Zealand for a week in a package show, flying over vast forests and mountain ranges in tiny tin aircraft, and sweating in Maori hotsprings. I learned at the feet of the Australian Zen master of everyman observational comedy, Carl Barron, scored an out-of-print Penguin of Algernon Blackwood’s The Centaur in an Oxfam bookshop on a deserted beach, and had a transcendental moment watching a psychedelic trio called Jakob in a student dive somewhere on the South Island. Then I travelled for a further two months in the same kind of set-up in Australia, backed by some kind of bung from the Australian equivalent of the Arts Council, which is just one woman in a floral-print headscarf, crying alone in an empty room. By the time I reached the Great Western Desert I felt like I was completely off the grid. We watched a Little Feat covers band in a Chinese gambling den somewhere in the middle of nowhere, genuflected to a statue of the Red Dog of Dampier, and played towns inhabited only by miners and strippers, where no live entertainment ever went and the only places you could get a drink were topless joints. Near Kalgoorlie we saw the biggest man-made hole in the world. ‘This place is a hole,’ said the cat impersonator Sam Simmons, with hilarious inevitability. Again, I felt far away and disconnected.