by Stewart Lee
I realised that the structural framing device for this show, a single hour-long shaggy-dog story about anal investigation, religious persecution and a blasphemous physical encounter with Jesus, would be that the whole thing had been conceived as the joke that Joe Pasquale could not steal.
Now I had two months or so to write it and learn to try and perform it.
Pretty early on in the process I realised that it was crucial, despite the show climaxing in a long and explicit encounter with Jesus, not to use any swear words. It was too easy for critics of Jerry Springer: The Opera to use its language as a reason to attack its ideas. I would not be giving anyone that satisfaction. Also, I wanted to focus the audience on the thoughts and the images in the show in their most pure sense, not to try and smooth the path to laughs by using crude words for the things I was describing. In the closing section of the show I maintain that ‘I vomited into the anus of Christ’, and it was very important that I did so using those exact words, rather than any slang expressions. I wanted to focus the audience on the act and its meaning, rather than distracting them with rude words.
There was also sound creative logic in adopting this approach, for, as Cicero said, ‘an indecency decently put is the thing we laugh at hardest’. Thus, I was disappointed when an unfavourable review of the show in the Brighton Argus in October 2005 said that I ‘spent most of my time talking about puking into the arse of Jesus Christ’, as I had deliberately gone out of my way not to do this and, moreover, had succeeded. ‘Lee is supposed to be a groundbreaking comedian and writer, but I found little entertainment value in his material,’ continued the writer.
It was not funny. It was a sad and deliberate attempt to see how far he could go. This was the ultimate in sick humour, and if anyone thought it funny, they must be sick as well. Some members of the audience found it too much and walked out, including Brighton actress Carol Cleveland of Monty Python fame. She quipped: ‘I am running out to find a doctor. This guy is sick and needs help.’
It wasn’t a struggle to keep the work clean. On the whole I don’t swear onstage anyway. That said, I am happy to use ‘cunt’, for example, as a swear word, as long as there is no risk of confusing the use of the word with a reference to a vagina, i.e. ‘Richard Littlejohn is a cunt.’ Sometimes I might say cock, as in ‘wee out of a cock’, if I were momentarily and obviously switching the register of my performance, and adopting the persona of a normal comedian, to try and get a normal joke to work, but on the whole, despite being the co-author of an opera supposedly containing 6,000 swear words (which it didn’t, and the 170 that it did contain were all put there by the composer Richard Thomas anyway, who has turned his obsession with genitals and faeces into an art form), I prefer to use the scientific names for these things and avoid profanity. It also means people who want to complain about you have to work a bit harder to figure out why it is they are annoyed. I am sick of reading on Daily Mail message boards that I am ‘one of these foul-mouthed modern comedians’ when I am absolutely not. Honestly, who are these cunts?
My other worry with swearing onstage, in the most general terms, is that it is, creatively, something of a spent wad. Jerry Sadowitz, Viz comic, the composer Richard Thomas, Peter Cook, The Thick of It’s profanity consultant Ian Martin and the folk singer Beans on Toast, for example, are poets of swearing, and use the foulest of language with creativity and conviction. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, playing critics discussing obscenity, satirised the belief in acclaimed artists’ right to swear, a right denied to scummy comedians and other lowlife: ‘An arsehole in Ralph Richardson’s mouth comes out as pure gold …’ they extemporise on Derek and Clive’s Ad Nauseam album, ‘and a prick in the hands of Pinter is a punctuation point, an epithet, a marvellous moment, the end of an extremely witty line … but a prick or a cunt in the hands of Cook and Moore is just a gratuitous prick or cunt.’*
* Ironically, the posthumous canonisation of Peter Cook has made him an artist fit to file alongside Pinter in the arts establishment, rather than the representative of the low culture of comedy he would perhaps have preferred to have been, so the satire here is skewed somewhat. And to be honest, even a ‘cunt’ in the hands of a cunt like Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown can still sometimes be a pretty funny cunt. But the chef-driven swearification of modern life does mean that these marvellous words have been robbed of some of their power now, and can sound lazy and desperate.
I have no opposition to swearing in principle, though in recent years it has become fashionable amongst respectable comedians of a certain vintage to dislike it. In 2008, it appeared that Frank Skinner, the foul-mouthed Brummie comedian, a Rabelaisian alchemist of filth, had come out against swearing, inadvertently making him the subject of approving headlines in the worst kind of newspapers. Skinner is clearly gripped here by the same anxieties about his legacy that trouble Tony Blair, his chat shows being the equivalent here of Blair’s decision to go into Iraq. But the TV millionaire’s position on swearing was actually considered and nuanced. One would expect nothing less from a man whose belated and evangelical enthusiasm for the art form he once abandoned at the first opportunity has earned him, amongst younger comics, the nickname of ‘The Old Wise Monkey’. As Skinner told the Independent newspaper in December 2008, ‘I am a great champion of swearing, but I don’t want Gordon Ramsay to spoil it for comedians. That would be terrible. Used properly, swearing really can be a beautiful thing.’ Sadly, finely nuanced positions don’t have a habit of translating over to the mass media very successfully, so Skinner’s equivocal and thoughtful statement arrived in the collective consciousness transformed into a blanket opposition to swearing generally. ‘Even Frank Skinner says there’s too much swearing now,’ summarised saloon-bar bores all around the country.
Skinner’s ‘Profanity Repudiation’, a handwritten document The Old Wise Monkey famously nailed to the door of the BBC in full view of the ashamed heads of comedy and light entertainment, has since provided further ammunition for the forces of evil to gag freedom of expression all over the world, silencing artists who speak out against oppression and crushing creative thinkers beneath the iron jackboots of censorship. As the gate clangs behind another prisoner of conscience in some repressive totalitarian regime, Frank Skinner’s irresponsible comments on swearing mean he could not be more culpable if he himself were the jailer, laughing and delivering the final kick as his victim is beaten senseless behind closed doors and left to rot in the dark.
I’m joking of course.
But having realised that I needed to eliminate all the bad words from the shocking story I was planning to inflict on the paying public, I was soon made to realise that I also needed to bleed out any bad feeling. The bruising encounter with Jesus, it transpired, needed to happen, as in the transcript in the next section, ‘at His insistence’.
The first time Bridget, my future wife, a practising Catholic and fellow comedian, saw me do this routine was after we had only known each other for a short while, at a club downstairs in a pub in Putney in July 2005. It was the second or third time I’d tried it. She didn’t like it, and neither did a load of other people, who walked out. But we were supposed to be going out for some food, and she is nothing if not greedy, so she stayed. Afterwards, over a plate of hot offal, Bridget collected her thoughts enough to explain, rationally, what she didn’t like about the material, saved me from making a terrible professional mistake, and handed me the keys to the most well-reviewed show I have ever written.
In my early passes at the piece, the encounter with Jesus was like an assault. And sometimes I even dragged His mother into it. I vomited on him, presumably against His will, as His complicity in the incident was never addressed. In real life I was furious with the religious right for messing up my life, professionally, emotionally, physically and financially, and I wanted to take it out on their spiritual figurehead. The early attempts at this bit were just me in a bad mood, trying to wreak a hollow revenge and losing sight of any artistic discipline in a splurge of sc
atological abuse.
But Bridget pointed out that the real Jesus would help me in my distressed state, because that was the kind of guy He was, and that He and I had to meet each other halfway. If I was attacking Jesus, the story wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. Thus, the Jesus in my story invites me to make use of Him, as if taking upon Himself the sins of those who have driven me to this state of drunkenness, and in so doing He proves Himself a better Jesus, a better God, than the vengeful tyrant posited by the religious right who had taken issue with our deeply humane opera.
Was it possible to write something which, when reduced to its content alone, would be impossibly offensive, featuring as it did a urine-and vomit-fuelled encounter between a drunk comedian and a holy figure in a cramped toilet, and yet to write and perform it in such a way that it became tender, moving and meaningful over and above the supposed taboo nature of its content alone? Where notional ideas of offence were concerned, could one conceive a piece that proved that intent and tone and context could make something more uplifting and ennobling than it was offensive and gratuitous, despite the apparently irredeemable nature of the events it portrayed? In short, if you felt our careful, theologically rigorous and kind-hearted opera was blasphemous, well, try this on for size, you twats, and – you know what? – I will still win on points. I will make meaningful religious art out of toilet filth, just to beat you. I will give you the Word made flesh.
Having got comfortable onstage again doing StandUp Comedian the previous year, and having made the odd bold stage move during my trek around the deserts of Australia, I also started to think more about how I could bend the physical parameters of the performance of standup, and yet still have the new show remain, recognisably, a standup show. The influence of many different performers and styles of performances had been nagging at me in my period off, and now I was ready to put them into practice.
*
In the autumn of 2003, I was taken on holiday by my then partner to the Corbières region of south-east France. We went for sun, sea and sand. But we got more. A whole lot more.
Having read nothing beyond a website about beaches, we didn’t know that the Corbières, and the Cathar region further south-west, were rich in history, myth and folk culture. The French spend a lot of money preserving their rural traditions and national arts identity, and cinemas and radio stations are heavily loaded against English-language content. Both times I’ve visited the Corbières I’ve stumbled across some astonishing site-specific musical or theatrical performances of clearly commercially non-viable shows, propped up financially by regional government in the belief that they are culturally necessary. In 2004, I saw a show by a big burly man, who looked like Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh, playing a bagpipe made out of the untreated carcass of a pig from the pulpit of a church in an isolated mountainside village, while his female partner clowned around in the aisles, Noel Fielding style, in a red hat, which was by turns hilarious and moving. In 2003, despite my initial reservations, we followed a troupe of state-subsidised drama-student types pretending to be the mentally and physically handicapped outcasts of medieval French society, as they loped through the labyrinthine alleyways and squares of a tiny mountaintop citadel, causing licensed mischief in the twilight. The event was called Bouffinades en Circulades and was staged every night for two weeks in September in different little rural villages, and appeared to recreate a medieval tradition where the village’s social rejects were allowed, for one night only, to run free and mock the core values of their superiors. The French clowning master and revered theatrical theorist Jacques Lecoq, whose shadow hangs heavily over loads of polo-necked types who studied physical theatre in the eighties anywhere in Europe, repopularised the forgotten term ‘bouffon’ to describe the physical embodiment of ‘mockery’ in clowning and theatre in the early sixties.
In the village we followed the bouffons from house to house, from square to square, from business to business, and outside each one they would stage a semi-improvised sketch, an especially beautiful one being something to do with animals in the stable of a farm building, where they were all lit by flickering candles. Outside the butcher’s the bouffons mocked the butcher, outside the baker’s they mocked the baker, and outside the town hall they mocked the mayor, all in a variety of costumes, declaiming comic verse in French which we were unfortunately too ignorant to understand. But outside the church, even the licentious bouffons were cautious. A circle was drawn in the dirt before the church and the performers huddled inside it, dressed as bishops and priests, waving crucifixes, and an audible frisson rippled through the audience.
I was thrilled, not in some adolescent way, about to enjoy a gratuitous mockery of religion, but because something essential about what standup was had suddenly, by association, become clear. The bouffons were in a charmed circle, perhaps under the protection of serpents, in a sacred and clearly delineated space where they were free to work their magic without interference. The director of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza, once told me he saw the stage of a standup club as a giant pair of inverted commas, framing the performer, saying ‘what is being said here is only being said, not actually done, so judge it accordingly’. Could there be any clearer image for the special privileges of the comedian than this moment, where the clowns marked out their own unassailable territory in the very shadow of the church, the great forbidder that binds with briars our joys and desires?
I’m eternally grateful for the combination of chance, coincidence, French regional-arts funding and my then girlfriend’s instinctive theatrical good taste that allowed me to witness that moment. It made me certain of something, convinced me that I was on the right track, and I’m not sure what I’d be doing now had I not encountered it. Like seeing Ted Chippington open for The Fall in 1984, this was, twenty years later, an absolutely key moment for me as a comedian. I could do anything I wanted. I was in a charmed circle.
But as well as the supposed intellectual theory behind the bouffons’ show, the spatial relations of the performance also excited me. Like the Native American Pueblo clowns of the Hopi, the Zuni and the Tewa, of whom I had read much but never been fortunate enough to see, even these drama-student bouffons broke through the safety barriers between audience and performer, using the whole village as their stage. You never knew where they were coming from next. Because they were actors, not the anointed clown mystics of the Hopi or the genuine outcasts the medieval French bouffons would have been, it never felt truly dangerous, but the performance did have a relationship, I realised, with moments when I’d seen performers closer to home blur the edge of the space. And the periods when I left the stage and wandered around the room in ’90s Comedian were perhaps most indebted to the influence of a strange incompatible trio of a roly-poly funnyman, an acid-fried archaeologist and a Russian physicaltheatre group.
Johnny Vegas, for me, is a massively misunderstood talent. I love him (see Appendix IV). In August 2003, Vegas had been given a budget to make a live DVD, but instead got me to direct an attempt to improvise a story about the Edinburgh Fringe, with live standup comedy inserts, called Who’s Ready for Ice Cream?. The cast, by their own admission, all had mental problems. And the only one who didn’t wasn’t an actor. He was an ice-cream man that Johnny had met in a park, though having been cast as an ice-cream man, he delivered a consistent performance. The crew seemed to hate me, imagining that I thought I was above them because I had recently worked at the National Theatre, and my time on Who’s Ready for Ice Cream? is honestly the only occasion in my career when I have failed to win the confidence of the team working under me. And, because most of the people involved were from St Helen’s, the entire catering budget was spent on chips and gravy and fags, so that everyone had scurvy by the end of the week’s guerrilla-style shoot. That said, the live footage is great, and I used it as the template for all the live footage of myself subsequently shot for DVDs and BBC2 as I became more popular.
When Johnny would leave the stage and wander around the tiny r
ooms we filmed the live shows in, begging for affection and attention, close-up and personal, it created a crazed panic and tension. The literal boundaries of the stage itself had been abandoned, so were there any rules left? I met the American theatre director Peter Sellars at a theatre conference in Limerick in 2006. He said he had enjoyed Jerry Springer: The Opera because of the way ‘it introduced air into an airless room’, and he felt that this was a key to making theatre. Standup is already a fairly well-ventilated form. Was it possible to open the windows a little wider?
The following year, I saw the rock-star survivor and sometime archaeologist Julian Cope play a psychedelic hard-rock set with his band Brain Donor at the Hammersmith Lyric. Cope, clad in full face paint, camouflage fatigues, flying helmet and platform boots, left the stage for around twenty minutes to patrol the auditorium, stalls, circle and balcony, singing on a radio mic during one extended two-chord drone, often entirely invisible to the majority of the audience and largely unlit. But just knowing that he was in the room, not on the stage where the performer should be, made the whole performance terribly and terrifyingly exciting. At any moment, the madman – and Cope often seems genuinely mad – might creep up behind you. I wondered if there was some way of mainlining this manic thrill into standup, and now that I get to play theatres with circles and balconies I am always on the look-out for the opportunity to make a Julian Copestyle foray into the audience. In the little rooms and on the low stages I was playing with ’90s Comedian, making this conceptual leap into the dark usually meant just stepping 30cm downwards.
And in the summer of 2002, I went to see a show called Inferno by the Russian physicaltheatre group Derevo. It was in a circus tent in a meadow in the north of Edinburgh, and in amongst a series of beautiful set pieces there was a sequence where some deranged hobo figures, not unlike the bouffons of the Corbières or the Pueblo clowns I’d read about, worked their way around the crowd, singing to them in Russian, sharing bread and wine with different individuals and communicating with wordless grunts. I became obsessed with the free nature of this section, within an otherwise tautly choreographed piece, and of the breathing space it seemed to provide. I went five times in all to try and see Inferno from every angle, to try and fix it and nail it in my mind and decode it. But I couldn’t. It was different every night, as different as the responses of the people Derevo approached to join their crazy party could make it. I realised this was what it meant to attend a genuinely live event, and the off-mic improvisations that have been in all my subsequent shows were an attempt to bleed a little of this, and Johnny’s unpredictable artistry, and Julian Cope’s panic-inducing presence, into the airless rooms I perform in.*