by Stewart Lee
† This happened.
‡ It would be nice if you didn’t assume anyone flying the flag might be a BNP voter, but they usually are. Especially west of Birmingham. A chain of bed-and-breakfasts run by frightened racist Brummies stretches as far south-west as Land’s End, where they in turn are hated by pureblood pirates as unwanted incomers to the republic of Cornwall, taking our jobs, buying our cottages, gobbling up our cream.
But as it turned out, running away to Worcestershire was a mistake. What I didn’t know was that the New Labour MP for Worcester was one of the New Labour MPs that was calling for our opera to be banned and for us to be prosecuted, so it was in all the local papers. My mum’s friends would keep coming round with clippings of me and the composer, with a thing saying ‘BAD MEN DUE TO GO TO HELL’ or something … And my mum would go, ‘Oh, you look a bit fat in that one. Never mind, I’ll put it in the scrapbook. With all the other clippings of people calling you a cunt. Going right back to your school reports. And your adoption certificate.’ [turns back on audience] ‘Reason for abandonment of infant.’ ‘Infant is a cunt, clearly.’ ‘I expect this early childhood rejection will lead to him spending most of his adult life travelling the country in search of the approval of ever-dwindling groups of strangers.’ [turning back] Yeah, laugh it up. Um …*
* Obviously, as an adoptee, I reserve the right to do this material about myself being adopted, but I don’t know if I’d do it today, as a parent myself. I suppose the joke enabled a valuable moment here, creating a jarring shock laugh in the middle of this meandering set-up, and it was fun to play with the set of assumptions made around adoptees, such as them being attention-seekers looking for approval, that dovetail with similarly glib assumptions made about standups. And perhaps the brutal line ‘Infant is a cunt’ was also an important hinge in the whole show’s shift of tone. ‘Infant’ is also one of the great comedy words, an especial favourite of the shadowy satirist Chris Morris.
But those women in that shop … The women in the shop that I mentioned, right, they really like me in the village shop. And from what I can work out, it’s ’cause I’ve got a long black coat that I sometimes wear. And that’s kind of enough, you know. They go, ‘Ooh, he came in, Mrs Lee, in his coat.’ Whatever next. It’s like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. It’s like Gary Numan had come round. Batman.*
* I once owned a huge, long, swishy leather coat and I wore it in Edinburgh in August 1999. I was of no fixed abode at the time and I could sleep in or on the coat, wherever I ended up, and keep pants and deodorant in the massive pockets. Because I wore this coat, the Guardian Photoshopped my head onto a picture of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, dressed in full leather cyberpunk mode, and appended an unfunny caption.
And so they really like me. So they used to cut these things out of the newspaper slagging me off, laminate them, stick them on the wall in the shop and get me to sign them, right. Like I’m an outlaw, you know. So if you ever go past there, you’ll know what that is.*
* It’s all true. In the corner shop, on the road near the village where my mum now lives, I was asked to sign a clipping of a newspaper article in which the local MP slagged off Jerry Springer: The Opera, which was then put on the wall by some bus timetables above the takeaway-pork-roll counter.
But again, joking apart, the blasphemy things did your head in, the legal threats, the collapse of the work and every thing, it did kind of stress me out. So I did what anyone would do under the circumstances, which was to drink heavily every day. Um. But it’s difficult to drink in the countryside, right. It’s not like here in Cardiff where the streets are thronged with revellers all the time.* Nothing going on, you know. I used to have to walk about two miles to the nearest pub. And I’d get in there and there’d just be the same three old blokes every night. And they’d go, ‘Ooh the blasphemer’s arrived, cross yourselves lads,’ you know.† And they’d make me drink stuff without telling me what it was. They’d go, ‘Have some of this.’ And I go, ‘All right, I’ll have a pint of that.’ ‘A pint?’ ‘Yeah.’ I’d have about four pints of this stuff. I thought it was real ale, it turns out it’s this thing called barley wine, right. And you’re only, you’re only supposed to have an egg cup of it, basically. But no one told me that, ’cause I wasn’t from there. I was from a town, right.‡
* Whatever town I was in I would use its name here. People either seemed to think it was funny because the streets often were thronged with revellers, as in Nottingham or Newcastle, or because they weren’t, as in Malton, Yorkshire.
† The whole affair did make me feel paranoid. People would come up to me – in motorway service stations, in pub toilets, in the street – and ask me if I was one of the writers of Jerry Springer: The Opera, and I never knew if they were going to congratulate me or attack me. I was even threatened with physical violence by a busker in an Edinburgh subway as a result of the opera. He raised his guitar like a weapon on behalf of aggrieved Christians everywhere, before backing down when I lost my temper with him and briefly became berserker fearless, shouting, ‘Come on then, come on then, for fuck’s sake, you fucking idiot.’
‡ This story makes its way into our tale from a weekend’s writing retreat with Richard Herring in 1992, to the home of our radio producer, Sarah Smith, in the spooky Suffolk village of Hoxne, where none of the bar staff in the pub saw fit to tell me that you shouldn’t drink barley wine in pints. I have never been so sick. I slept on the floor in an attic, the walls of which were covered in ancient LSD and magic mushrooms and Hawkwind-themed graffiti, and woke in a carpet of vomit. Just once, before I die, I’d like to do this sort of thing again.
So I went out at about half – I was trashed – about half eleven at night. I could hardly stand. I was mad anyway, and paranoid ’cause of all this blasphemy stuff. Stressed out. And I was scared about how I was going to get home, in the dark. But I set off along the road. And after about two minutes, exactly what I was worried about happened. A big lorry came round, I thought it was going to hit me. I had to jump into this kind of agricultural drainage ditch. I, I came out all covered in water and mud and animal excrement and stuff. Carried on walking along the road. And then about four minutes later, about three hundred yards ahead of me on the right, I saw this kind of white figure, like a, like a ghost, right.*
* Looking at this now, I think it’s another example of the Irish comedian Dave Allen, a TV staple during my childhood, making his way into my subconscious. The long shaggy-dog story, often with a supernatural element, during which they would dim the lights in the studio, was a staple of his standup, and here’s me, ripping this approach off. Find some old Dave Allen on YouTube. It seems impossible that comedy so sophisticated and subtle and damned well enlightened was ever considered for broadcast. There was no tradition in standup that explains the emergence of Dave Allen. Was there a whole school of deadpan rationalists bubbling away in Ireland that we knew nothing about? Where did he come from? Sadly, Dave Allen: The Biography by Carolyn Soutar tells us nothing.
Now. I’m not superstitious, I was drunk, and I was under a lot of stress, and paranoid. So I thought, ‘I’m imagining this.’ I ignored it, right. And I tried to walk past it. When I got about ten, fifteen feet away from this thing, I recognised it as being Jesus, right? But even so, I still thought it was my imagination, OK? Because we all know that Jesus should be black or Arabic or Jewish or whatever. I had given Him the face of Robert Powell – the nineteen-seventies television Jesus. So I thought it was my subconscious. Or Jesus was real and He had chosen to appear to me in a form that I would recognise. ’Cause He would know that I also used to watch The Detectives. Mm? He could have come as Jasper Carrott, which is the same initials, right, but Robert Powell is a more holy kind of figure, isn’t he?*
* Here I’d use the whole space of the stage, marking out the territory in which this encounter happened, and I’d try to play all the musing on Robert Powell and Jasper Carrott as if they were the ramblings of a deranged and distracted brain, rather than as i
f they were attempts to be funny.
So … But even so, I thought, ‘This is my subconscious, I’m going nuts.’ I tried to walk on past it, but as I got level with Jesus, He took my hand and He started to lead me along the lane. Even then, I thought, ‘This is still my subconscious.’ What do I want? (a) I want to get home safely, and (b) I have this anxiety about reconnecting with faith. And He’s taking my hand, in my imagination that’s what that is, right? It’s not real.*
* Again, despite not believing in God, I think part of getting this bit to work was about imagining, convincingly, the amount of comfort that physical contact with an apparently forgiving Jesus would give you, if you were seriously worried about being cast out from faith. To have a holy figure take corporeal form and hold your hand on a dark lane would be something we could all respond to. How wonderful it would be to have this kind of vision. Is it any wonder than sometimes people will such experiences into being?
But then He started talking to me, Jesus. He said to me, ‘Stew’ – that kind of swung it – He said to me, ‘Stew, I know that my representatives on Earth have come out against you and your co-workers and loved ones and accused you of blasphemy,’ He said. ‘But I forgive you,’ He said. ‘And I want you, if you can, to find it in your heart to forgive me.’* And I said to Him, ‘What do you mean, Jesus?’ And He said, ‘Well, Stew,’ He said, ‘there was another man, wasn’t there, two thousand years ago, who annoyed the religious establishment of his time. In fact, a lot of people didn’t like some of the true things that he had to say. And … in fact, they crucified him for it, Stew, and … maybe, just maybe, you are the rightful inheritor of his crown.’†
* Here I suppose I am playing the religious right, our tormentors, at their own game. Holy figures, like Jesus, are vessels for carrying whatever message is poured into them. People with particular political ends attribute their own beliefs to these avatars and impose their own values on them. Here, instead of allowing the religious right to monopolise him, I am co-opting Jesus to my own ends, and my ends involve establishing that I am the new Jesus.
† Here is an unselfconscious echo of every hero myth ever written, from King Arthur to Star Wars, where the role of the champion is passed on to the unwilling youth. Again, it also reincorporates the ‘I am not saying I am Jesus’ riff, last seen after the mosque-fartatrocity bit in last year’s StandUp Comedian set, but with its origins in Lee and Herring double-act material. The key here was to play it with absolute sincerity. In last year’s set, it was a knowing joke, from behind which I winked out at the audience. This time around I was asking them to consider the suggestion that in my mentally deranged state, I think I may have been handed the mantle of ‘the new Jesus’ by Jesus himself, in order to combat injustice. ‘Take this cup away from me!’
Now can I just make clear at this point, right, I am not saying that I’m Jesus, OK? I’m not saying that I am Jesus. That’s for you to think about at the … I’m not saying I’m Jesus, right, I’m not. But if I was Him – I’m not – but if I was Him, this – not – but if I was Him – I’m not – but if I was Him – I’m not Him, I’m not Him, right, I know you think I am but I’m not. You’re going, ‘Yeah, but if you were, you would say you weren’t, wouldn’t you? To trick us.’ I’m not. I’m not Him, right? I’m not Jesus, I’m not Him, come on. That would be ridiculous. That’s the … I’m the last person that He would come as. It definitely wouldn’t be me. Oh, maybe He would … I’m not, right. I’m not Jesus, right.*
* Again, like the Ang Lee routine in last year’s show, this was another moment where I had to kind of forget what I was trying to say, and approach it in a new way every night. Groping towards the right words to express the idea, in real time, I’d meet the audience halfway.
But if I was Him, this is the kind of place I would come and speak, isn’t it? Yeah. Not in the vain, arrogant Millennium Centre. I would come here, to this humble place, and I would speak to people like you – to drunks and whores – I would come here. I would come here. I would come here. In Canton. To this simple, humble place with adequate but ultimately limited wheelchair access.* ’Cause I would know from the first time around they will come, clamouring, ‘Heal me, Jesus, heal me.’ There’s only so much one man can do. You can’t have a quota system. So it’s better to just speak in a place where they can’t get in. With the best will in the world, with the best will in the world, with the best will in the world. We mean nothing by it.
* Wherever I was I would play off the ‘humble’ venue I was in against the grand one round the corner. ‘Humble’, it must be said, is another very Richard Herring word, as is ‘vain’, as we established earlier. Richard writes comedy in the vocabulary of a sexually frustrated Methodist preacher, and his influence upon me is once again apparent. On this recording I use the Cardiff Millennium Centre, which is the most conceited and inhospitable venue in Britain, and the Chapter Arts centre, which is lovely, as the vain and humble venues, respectively. Pretty much anywhere will do to make the limited-wheelchair-access joke, as the audience’s assumption is always that wheelchair access is limited, even when there’s wheelchairs all around them.
Again, I had to play the wheelchair joke straight, so that it was about the suffering of the harassed healer, namely me or Jesus, and not making fun of the wheelchair users. If you played it straight, as if the presence of wheelchair users were a terrible inconvenience to a mystical healer, you could do it to a row of wheelchairs and not worry. If you played it for laughs, you couldn’t. It was about my pain. It had to be inclusive, not exclusive. On a good day, this is the difference between Ricky Gervais and Jim Davidson, a difference Davidson fails to grasp and one which, to be fair, becomes increasingly irrelevant to Gervais’s audience too as it grows larger and less finessed.
So He was leading me along the road, Jesus. And within about a minute the same thing had happened again. Another big lorry came round, I was scared. But He seemed to do something to either slow it down, or we became immaterial. It passed through us, we weren’t hurt. But that panicked me, and the alcohol kicked in, I started stumbling around. What He did, Jesus, was He grabbed my right arm and He hooked it over His shoulder, like that, and He started carrying me along, like you would a drunk mate, you know. Now initially I thought this was a bit of an imposition but then I realised He did have some previous experience of carrying a heavy burden in that way. And to be honest, under more difficult circumstances.* And He seemed to like the warmth, the human contact. And in that way, we finally got to my mum’s front door.†
* So here’s a thing. This image of Jesus bearing the drunken narrator seems, admittedly, disrespectful towards Christ’s sufferings whilst carrying his own cross to Calvary, but, on the other hand, you’re going to have to know your New Testament fairly well to get it. Hopefully, it flatters the biblical knowledge of some of the very people who might be offended by it, putting them in something of a quandary. Also, it seems important that Jesus is supporting me, helping me.
† Here I am beginning the process of humanising Jesus, and making him physical, ready for our pungent encounter in the toilet. ‘He liked the warmth, the human contact.’ One imagines he would, after centuries as a bloodless metaphor. Let’s make him real and see what that would actually mean. Though it was not a decision I was aware of making during the writing process, I wonder how much of the effect of this decision to place a physically real Jesus in a world of drunkenness and vomiting was a subconscious attempt to ape the idea of ‘the Word made flesh’. Part of the charm of the gospels is to do with the story of a divine figure who chooses to engage with the physical world. And here he is doing it again.
I wrote a story at school, when I was fifteen, about finding a dead African baby in the park on Christmas Day, in which I described its body in terms of Christmas paraphernalia – crackers, streamers, turkey bones. No one knew whether to punish me for poor taste or give me a prize for having a social conscience. Twenty years later, I am doing the same thing as a standup, trying
to give form to an abstract idea.
I suppose this is what all standup, what all comedy, what all satire does. You take an idea and say, ‘What if this was actually real, what would it be like?’ If Jesus was really the loving and wise Jesus of the New Testament, rather than the angry and judgemental Jesus of the Christian right, then just as he fraternised with prostitutes and tax gatherers so he would help me, the drunken blasphemer comedian, home.
And I started trying to get the key in and fumbling around. And then I thought, ‘This is a bit weird. Jesus is here. What’s the correct etiquette? Am I supposed to ask Him in for a coffee? You know, and hope He doesn’t read anything into that.’ OK, I’m not saying that Jesus is gay. That’s part of what caused the problems last year. But one in ten people are and you can’t – especially in a port town – you can’t make assumptions.* And while I was thinking about this, He disappeared. And I felt bad because I was, I was grateful that He’d helped me home. But I was relieved that I didn’t have to deal with what to do. And I, and I felt like I’d betrayed Him, but He’d gone and I was relieved.†
* To a degree this is deliberately provocative. One of the planks in the Christian right’s case against Jerry Springer: The Opera was that we had portrayed Jesus as gay. We hadn’t. We had written a lengthy dream sequence in which the titular talk-show host is forced to confront his demons and his guilt in the form of an imaginary chat show set in hell, where the symbolic figures from Judaeo-Christian mythology all appear with problems of the sort one might see on an American talk show. An audience of demons taunts Jesus for supposedly being gay, and he counters, ‘Actually, I am a bit gay,’ over a dancing, dainty rhythm that ensured it always got a laugh.