by Stewart Lee
* This breaking down the room into groups didn’t always happen at this point, and it didn’t always play out exactly like this – this is a transcript of what happened on one occasion – but I’d always need to do this at some point in the first half hour of this show to soften up the ground for the heavy aerial bombardment of toilet-related blasphemy in the second half. By the time I gave up standup in 2000, one of the few things I still enjoyed onstage was trying to lose a room and then win it back for my own amusement. Now, instead of it being an act of self-indulgent self-sabotage and wire-walking, I was able to use these skills for some purpose, as I attempted to forge the audience into a group that will go with the heavy stuff ahead, proving to them that they need not find supposedly offensive subject material offensive. Form and content, finally, had a relationship. And, with an eye on the cohesion of the evening as a whole, I encourage the stronger and quicker sections of the room to help the weaker, slower members of the audience, and encourage those weaker, slower punters, in turn, to feel no shame in accepting this aid.
OK, Team F, I’m going to put you at your ease, right? It’s OK to not like all of this. It has sometimes happened before. Will that relax you, madam? Good. Um. It’s OK to not like some of this, right? People have not … I’ve done this show about ninety times. I did it for three weeks in a little theatre in London and I had some walk-outs. And one of the walk-outs was the pop star Robbie Williams, who left about halfway through. Yeah. And on the way out, the woman from the Soho Theatre said to him, ‘Oh, are you not enjoying it?’ And he said he was, but that he had just remembered that he had to go to a wedding in the morning. Do you think that’s true? Do you think that’s true? If it was true, I hope he’d already bought them a present, and he didn’t just get something from a garage on the way … And then he said that he thought that I was all right, but that my voice – and this is true – Robbie Williams said my voice would be better suited to meditational relaxation tapes. That’s what he said. And the weird thing was that when I saw him in there, I thought, ‘Oh, I hope he doesn’t come backstage afterwards, I won’t know what to say.’ What positive thing could you say, you know? But, like … ‘I liked it when you dressed as that skeleton,’ you could say it was good. But I didn’t know when he’d gone, right?*
* This story is entirely true. R. Williams, formerly of the group Take That, was in the company of his showbiz friend, the tiny satirist Matthew Lucas, of Little Britain, who was laughing alone, both of them on the right-hand fringe of my vision in a balcony over the stage, Williams’s boredom visible to the crowd. Sometimes I elaborated the story, explaining that I was going to tell Williams that I had gone with a crowd of people to watch him onstage at Glastonbury in 1997, hoping it would be awful so that we could all laugh at it, but actually his performance had been entirely adequate.
A few years later, the gossip column of the Independent ran a story saying Robbie Williams had walked out of my show because he was offended by the religious content. I wrote back and pointed out that he walked out before the religious content, and that he left simply because he was bored and thought I had a boring voice, a clarification that the newspaper was happy to publish.
I expect it is hard to concentrate on a long monologue by a speaking man if you are from the world of pop, with all the flashing lights and fast music. And cocaine.
But it is … But there are people in Team F – there’s A people are … Team F are going, ‘Yes, Stew, that’s very funny isn’t it? But in Cardiff Robbie Williams plays in the stadium, not in this small room, like you. So maybe you should look at him and learn something about what entertainment means. And what it means is not talking in a monotonous voice, dressing as a luminous skeleton. That is what people want.’
So all I’m saying is, if you’re … It’s OK to not like this, but if you don’t like it, that means that you are the same as Robbie Williams.
Lynndie England was a female American soldier and she was photographed pointing and laughing at the naked genitals of hooded, bound Iraqis. And in her trial the judge actually intervened, rather unusually, and he said that he wasn’t convinced that Lynndie England knew what she was doing. Now, I don’t believe that, ’cause in my experience, when a woman points and laughs at a man’s genitals, she’s normally fully aware of the effect that will have. In my experience. Especially if he’s hooded and bound. In my experience.
The laugh spreading into the, the Team F region for that, because it’s a kind of bit of satire about the news, but it’s got cocks in it as well. So that helps to bring the whole room onside.* Come on, come on in, Team F, come on. It’s a bit like, kind of, at the moment, I feel like we can get there, and I know it’s a bit early in the evening but … At the moment, it feels like over here, there’s loads of nineteen-fifties American teenagers splashing around in a lake in little shorts. And there’s some other nineteen-fifties American teenagers, and they’re going, ‘Oh, that looks fun. I wish we could go in that lake. But we can’t. ’Cause we’ve got orthopaedic shoes.’ But you can! Throw them off! Take them off, throw them away, you will float in this lake. You will float.†
* Here I am having my cake and eating it. I set up the audience to laugh at a pathetic cock joke, and then berate them for doing so. It is I that have trivialised the Americans’ sexual abuse of Iraqi detainees by using it as a platform for a cock joke, and yet I choose to shift blame onto the audience for enjoying the very food I have forcefed them, like some French pâté manufacturer berating geese for being gluttons. Sometimes, going back over these transcripts, I hate myself for my hypocrisy. Shame on you, shame on you, Stewart Lee.
† This wouldn’t always happen at this point, or in this form, but a riff on cheery American teenagers would usually be applicable to the crowd response at some point, and however long it went on there was always the funny phrase ‘orthopaedic shoes’ to get a laugh at the end. The phrase feels like it belongs in that Baby Cow production company school of post-Alan Partridge comedy that aspires to combine an illness and a brand name in one sentence as the ultimate in northern realist humour: i.e. ‘He fell down in the aisle of Morrison’s when he had a sudden attack of pancreatic cancer. Well, there was tins of alphabet spaghetti everywhere. One smashed and it spelt out a racist word on the lino. I didn’t know where to look. My sister-in-law is Turkish, as you know. It’s not the same, you’re right, but she’s very dark-skinned and their little boy is half-caste …’ etc., etc.
The phrase ‘orthopaedic shoes’ is not in my natural vocabulary and so I feel it must have been brought to my attention either by some Mancunian Steve Coogan character that I and Rich Herring perhaps wrote for in On the Hour, or by a graduate of the same eighties Manchester drama-school gang as Steve Coogan, or else by Rob Brydon in thrall to this particular idiom in the early noughties, or else by the acclaimed playwright and ‘new Shakespeare’ Patrick Marber when attempting to write in this style for profit in the midnineties. I can also picture the delightful Caroline Aherne, aka Mrs Merton, sitting before me in her tiny Manchester flat, when we toured student shitholes together in 1993, saying ‘orthopaedic shoe, orthopaedic shoe’, or something very like it, in-between playing me New Order’s ‘Love Vigilantes’ and making me watch Pretty Woman on video, and the words burying themselves deep into my brain. I know this isn’t a phrase I would have arrived at naturally. It’s not from my realm. But where did I rip it from? Someone must know.
And there was another story from that war, it was, er, it was discredited but it was true. Which was, apparently in Guantanamo Bay, um, the Americans threw a copy of a Koran into a toilet. Now, I’m not a religious person, but I don’t like the idea of a Koran being thrown into a toilet. Especially when bookshops and libraries are full of millions of pristine copies of Dan Brown’s new novel. Which you have to stop reading, right, because … You have to stop reading, because Dan Brown is not … It’s not literature, right? And you should know this in the land of bards, right? Um … Dan Brown writes sentences like, ‘The famou
s man looked at the red cup.’ OK? It’s not … And intellectuals like me have tried to explain to you why Dan Brown is a bad … and it’s not working. So I’m going to have a big poster campaign, a big, anti-Dan Brown poster campaign. It’s going to be a massive picture of a toilet, right? And there’ll be all pieces of shit floating in the toilet. And in the middle of the pieces of shit, there’ll be a copy of The Da Vinci Code, with a speech balloon coming out of one of the pieces of shit, saying, ‘Ah, there goes the neighbourhood.’*
* Today, the literary critics of quality broadsheets define themselves in opposition to Dan Brown, while populists, or people like Dylan Jones of GQ trying to have surprising opinions, say we should stop being so snobby and appreciate his ability to spin a good yarn. Whatever, this Dan Brown riff was four years ahead of the mass acceptance of the fact that he is abysmal, and was later recycled for my 2009 TV series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.
I first read Dan Brown in the flat of my future wife, Bridget Christie, in July 2005. She was swotting for an act she had in mind, where she would be Dan Brown being a standup comedian, telling old pub jokes in breathless, dramatic prose, to the bewilderment of audiences. It was hilarious and I wish I’d thought of it. But I only do me. And the smug-wanker version of me.
And I don’t know if you know, but the Catholic Church are very worried about you all reading The Da Vinci Code. And in fact, in January last year, the Vatican actually issued an official statement reminding Dan Brown readers that the books are largely fictional and full of historically un verifiable information.*
* This joke is calibrated to fail. Nine times out of ten it wouldn’t get much of a laugh, and if it did it would only be from a minority of hardcore, atheist, intellectual pseuds, predisposed to equating the stories of the Bible with the idea of ‘fictional and historically unverifiable information’. But it did the job of further dividing the audience just as they were usually starting to become a workable unit, and thereby cranking up the tension, amplifying the sense of unfolding drama in the room, the narrative of my own failure to master the entire audience that plays along underneath the actual through-line of the material. It also allows me, in the next sentence, to appear totally in control by not being fazed by the failure of this joke, and to assure them that they have nothing to worry about and that they will all be onside again soon.
[Long pause.]
Six minutes’ time, I tell you, you’ll be fine, right? But you’re right not to laugh at that, it’s not a proper joke, right, it’s just based on a shared set of assumptions, it doesn’t work.
Um … Now I was talking about the Vatican there. I don’t want anyone to think, anyone to think I’m, I’m anti-Catholic. I’m not. I actually love Catholicism. It’s my favourite form of clandestine global evil.
What I really like about Catholicism, my favourite thing about it, is the way that it combines a search for profound spiritual meaning in the universe with a love of kind of inane seaside tat. And you don’t often see those two things working as a team, do you?*
* Again, I am in thrall to Harry Hill here. ‘Working as a team’ is very much a Harry Hill phrase, although in his world it would be applied to foodstuffs and animals, rather than abstract concepts.
I’ll give you an example of what I mean, right? I was in the Vatican at the start of last year. And outside the big church there, in the square, there were these little carts selling souvenirs, little souvenir stands. And outside the Vatican at the start of last year, you could buy – and this is true – you could buy lollipops about that big, with the face of Pope John Paul II on them, you could buy Pope John Paul II’s face loll– … I bought about ten and brought them home, right?* And I was just wondering if, in the light of his death early last year, whether sales of those lollipops went up or whether they went down, you know. Whether good Catholics thought, ‘Ah, the Pope’s just died, it would now seem inappropriate to lick a sugar effigy of his face.’ Or whether they’d go, ‘Ah, the Pope’s just died, but what better way to pay tribute to his memory than by licking a sugar effigy of his face.’ To eat that, swallow it, digest it, shit out a kind of enchanted papal shit. I don’t know if whatever spiritual properties those lollipops have would survive the digestive process. I’m neither theologically nor medically qualified to do anything other than speculate on that, right? We can’t know.†
* This is all totally true. After the furore surrounding Jerry Springer: The Opera, and my subsequent involvement in the politics of blasphemy, I have learned to moderate my atheism, and always try to give the impression of being as reasonable a person as possible, and to respect people’s religious beliefs unless they impinge upon generally accepted human-rights norms. But some religious things are just hilarious, such as Catholic gift-shop culture. Greater love hath no man than to fashion his God into an ashtray or a cigarette lighter.
† The last pope died in April 2005, while I had a run at the Melbourne Comedy festival, and this piece came together over a couple of nights during the run, basically written onstage.
But I did ask my girlfriend, she’s Catholic. I said to her, ‘If you drink holy water and then you do a wee, is the wee then magic?’ And she said, ‘No, that would be ridiculous.’ And it would, wouldn’t it? It’d be stupid.
Now, I don’t know if you remember, when the Pope died, the Catholic Church put out this story about his last words. They said that the Pope’s last words on his deathbed were addressed to God. Apparently, in his closing moments, the Pope said to God, ‘I searched for you, you found me, I thank you.’ That’s the story they put out. Let’s call it what it is, an obvious, made-up lie. ’Cause even the cardinals in the Vatican admitted that the Pope was in a coma for the last two weeks of his life. And that does seem to me like a very eloquent and profound statement to make in a coma.*
* I was able to play this with a steely calm just by thinking about what an incredibly offensive story this is for the Vatican to distribute when it is obviously not true, and by how, on the rare occasions I have been awaiting the death of someone I love after some protracted suffering, the messy chains of events never resolved themselves with a similar moment of clearly fabricated closure. The most memorable and heartbreaking last words I ever heard were, ‘God, oh God, let me die.’
The Australian comedian and inventor of all Australian comedy Greg Fleet has a superb routine about how his father wished to emulate Oscar Wilde, whose last words were ‘Either that wallpaper goes or I do,’ to the point where he arranged to be sent home in the final stages of a terminal illness to a specially prepared room which he had already gone to the trouble of having decorated, at great expense, with an appropriately unpleasant wallpaper. In the event of feeling the hand of death upon him, he sits up, clears his throat to deliver his witty final epithet, and says, ‘Either this wall … ah fuck this really hurts … agggh … ah fuck … ah … Akkh … Ugh.’ And dies. It’s all in the telling, of course.
And I’m suspicious of that story for personal reasons as well, right? Because I actually nursed two friends, right, um, an elderly relative and someone I’d known from school. And they were both people that I loved. And I nursed them both, and I visited them both through very long illnesses, not dissimilar to the late Pope’s. And I can assure you that in their closing moments, neither of them were in a fit state to say anything as eloquent or profound as that. Although admittedly I was holding pillows over their faces at the time.*
* The trick here was to play this with bald-faced conviction, summoning up memories of visiting dying loved ones, to the point where it looked like I nursed an honest and terrible grievance about the way the Vatican had lied in the light of the appalling deaths I had witnessed, and then flip it. It was a good way of testing the water for the second half, which basically extends this method of po-faced sincerity as far as it will go.
But, you know, it was an act of love, right? It was an act of love. The first one was, the second one in retrospect I feel ambivalent about. But you’re in the moment, aren�
��t you? You have to act in the moment. It’s the kind of split-second decision London anti-terrorist officers have to make every day.*
* The final few shows of ’90s Comedian took place soon after the police had shot Jean Charles de Menezes dead, in Stockwell of all places, mistaking him for a suicide bomber. This is another proper joke, albeit a black one. Within a few years these ‘jokes’, as we comedians call them, will have been entirely purged from my work in favour, exclusively, of grinding repetition, embarrassing silences, and passive-aggressive monotony.
I don’t know if you remember, but the Pope’s … The scheduling of the Pope’s funeral actually caused some problems for the royal family because it ended up being arranged for the same weekend as the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Camilla Parker Bowles. So they actually ended up moving that wedding to avoid a clash of interests. Now, I don’t think they should have done that, right, they should have left that wedding where it was. ’Cause for me, that’s what split-screen television technology was invented for.* Although it is hard, isn’t it, to imagine which one of those two events would have been the most distressing to watch, you know? The public veneration of a wrinkled old corpse …†