by Stewart Lee
Despite our BBC credentials, Native American commentators were reluctant to explain the theory behind any of this practice in detail, the folk memory of the white settlers’ suppression of Pueblo clown ceremonials perhaps still strong, but gentle pressure revealed the suggestion of a social, maybe even moral, purpose at work. By reversing the norms and breaking the taboos, the clowns show us what we have to lose, and what we might also stand to gain, if we step outside the restrictions of social convention and polite everyday discourse. This core idea holds whether it is played out up close in the plaza of a New Mexican pueblo or miles away by the tiny dots of television stars on the stage of a vast arena.
That autumn I was getting married. Things were a bit difficult financially as I was supposed to be writing for the BBC series that now wouldn’t happen and I hadn’t set up any live work. So I did some of those TV panel games for the money. You get about £600 for Have I Got News for You after commission. I’d been offered these kinds of shows before but I didn’t really thrive on them, as you have to be snappy and tight, rather than slack and monotonous, and I realised they weren’t really for me. The weekend after HIGNFY, which gets millions of viewers, I was in Aberdeen, on the way to our foolishly chosen mid-winter honey moon destination, Shetland. Drunk men recognised me from the telly and shouted ‘Quiz show cunt’ and such like at me in the taxi rank. It’s a lot of aggro for £600.
In January, I pulled together an experimental theatre piece, What Would Judas Do?, for a month’s run at the Bush Theatre on Shepherd’s Bush Green in London, again having ‘scratched’ it at Battersea. It was produced in a double bill with Product, by Mark Ravenhill, the terrible child of British theatre, who is really a nice Doctor Who fan. I got paid Equity minimum, £375 a week. To have developed the same piece in Edinburgh in the nineties would have cost me thousands of unrecoupable pounds. Radio 4 drama dithered around trying to decide whether to broadcast the show, but time was passing, so I taped it and Go Faster Stripe put it out as a triple CD for sale on the internet. By the time it had sold two hundred copies it had paid more than Radio 4 would have done, and I had not had to compromise it in any way.
Edinburgh was looming. I had a new promoter, a flamboyant and disarmingly straightforward Soho face who had brought various American legends of standup to Britain in the nineties and claimed once to have dined with the surrealist occultist Ithell Colquhoun. But most importantly, he didn’t have a TV production company on the side, meaning the live books had to balance in my favour as there was no Jim Crow system in place for me to work off any losses picking cotton on the boss’s plantation. And Underbelly wanted me to play their big tent, The Udderbelly. The show I’d thought of last year, The Decommissioning Process, had withered on the vine, and I was now committed to an idea called March of the Mallards. A preview was booked in under this title in the Glasgow Comedy Festival in March 2007, which Tommy Sheppard of The Stand very kindly allowed me to cancel when it became clear to me, days before the proposed debut of the piece, that it wasn’t really going to work. I was hoping to hinge a show about scientific truth and religious lies on all the tonal and factual fudges of the hit documentary film March of the Penguins, but couldn’t make it fit, and instead was left with reams and reams of facts and a deluge of liberally biased opinion which I was to try and make funny by delivering in a sarcastic voice. I had no wish to tread on the toes of the comedian Robin Ince, who has made an art form of exactly this chaotic approach, and so decided that discretion was the better part of valour.*
* The ten minutes of useful penguin material that I did have appeared in early versions of 41st Best, as I explained what the show would have been about, and then made its final bow in a much improved form in my 2009 BBC2 TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. I also tried to make use of my March of the Mallards material later that same year at Nicko and Joe’s Bad Film Club, at the Brighton Picture House. Bad Film Club is a night when a comedian chooses a film they hate, explains why they hate it, and then screens it, with hopefully amusing interruptions. I had already enjoyed doing the nasty anti-CND propaganda film Who Dares Wins for Bad Film Club at the Barbican, in which Lewis Collins’s bulletheaded SAS hero goes undercover to have sex with a feminist, endures a political benefit gig performed by moonlighting members of Fairport Convention trying to sound like a New Wave band, and then shoots his duped and sullied peace-whore to death in an embassy siege, before returning to his clammy wife and terrifying Midwich cuckoo children. I tried to get the wine critic Oz Clarke to attend the screening, to discuss his brief cameo as an in effectual and racist customs official, but the grape-smeared epicure would not return my emails.
In Brighton I chose to ridicule and discredit the American moral-majority puff piece March of the Penguins. But the British cinema edit of March of the Penguins that was screened on the night differed from the American edit on the DVD release that I had prepared my notes from, in that the most extreme examples of scientifically unsustainable anthropomorphism and born-again Christian subtext had been quietly excised, leaving many of the audience wondering why I was so down on this charming, if rather sentimental, look at cuddly penguin life. What had I got against penguins exactly? Why would someone waste their time travelling to Brighton to attack the heroic and flightless seabirds for their apparently innocuous behaviour?
Print dates were closing in for the 2007 Edinburgh brochure and I still didn’t have an idea, or a name, for the new standup show. Then, a few days after the March of the Mallards cancellation, I found myself featured in a spurious Channel 4 clip-show rundown of the supposed hundred best standup comedians of all time, placed at an astonishing number 41.* Now, I know these shows are bullshit, and they jiggle the order so that sweary comedians get to go after the watershed, and the production company have got commissioners breathing down their necks saying, ‘You simply must fix the figures to include [insert name of current flavour of the month here]’, and that Daniel Kitson was only included because if they didn’t they would have no credibility with clued-up comedy fans whatsoever, and that it’s patently absurd that I was placed higher than Chic Murray or Bob Newhart or Andy Kaufman or Dave Allen or George Carlin or Tommy Cooper or Sean Lock or Johnny Vegas or Dave Gorman, and that Simon Munnery and Kevin McAleer and Greg Fleet and Boothby Graffoe and various other of my totemic figures were not even placed, and that if it had been done two years earlier the little wave of good press that had got me placed at all wouldn’t have happened yet… but I thought, ‘Hey, I can use this.’†
* What dreadful things these programmes are. I often read on internet message boards that I am ‘best known as a regular on clip shows’. I have only done one, the 100 Greatest StandUps, because they told me I was going to be on it, and I thought I’d best try and say something modest. The only other times I have been a talking head on TV is on documentaries about Spider-Man, comic books, Ted Chippington and The Fall, all of which I love. I have never taken money to try and fabricate a memory about some aspect of mass culture in which I had, at the time, no interest. People who think I am a regular on clip shows are confusing me with the comedian Robin Ince, who is like a higher-voiced and slimmer version of me, and who, like Stuart Maconie, is prepared to pretend to remember anything if the fee is high enough. Peter Kay used to be particularly superb on these ultra-short-term nostalgia clip shows, often being able to remember in detail aspects of everyday life, such as the Space Hopper craze, which predate his actual birth.
† In early stages of the subsequent standup show, I would improvise a fifteen-minute bit about how any poll of comedy voted for by the public was invalid because they always chose Del Boy falling through the bar in Only Fools and Horses as the funniest TV moment ever. For a few months it worked really well, but after a while I forgot why it was funny, and I was never really able to get it back. There were no jokes, no lines as such, and it was all in the performance, which required me to put myself in whatever perilous positions were available – hanging upside down ranting on raised stages o
ver precariously deep orchestra pits, or smashing my head repeatedly on the floor of stages surrounded by raised rostrum seating. In the end, I dropped it from the already overlong show. I got a good pass at the piece in the pilot of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle in November 2007, but by the time I came to film it for the TV series, in January 2009, it was floundering again. People seemed to like it in the TV show as eventually broadcast, but I can see it’s a mechanical and learned performance.
A show called Stewart Lee – 41st Best StandUp Ever would seem to have its cake and eat it, mocking the poll but at the same time using it as a marketing tool. And I could hang all the things that had been interesting me in the previous year – the TV decommission, the Pestival performance, the fact that I couldn’t get a mainstream commercial release for a DVD – on the disparity between my supposed high critical standing and the actual reality of my often precarious professional position.
The more I thought about it, the more little incidents from my life seemed to fit this structure. But I was looking for a through-line, a theme that would do the job the way the Joe Pasquale bit topped and tailed the ’90s Comedian show. And then I remembered a difficult Christmas Eve of a few years previously.
I was at my mother’s, and she had arranged for us to visit her friends round the corner. The evening started badly as I could see my mother was embarrassed that my feet smelt, and assuming it was the stink of my old trainers, she told me that at her friends’ house it was customary to remove your shoes on entry. I did this, and then realised that no one else had, and that the friends were looking at me like I was odd. In the car on the way there my mother had clearly improvised this supposed ‘shoes off ’ custom to prevent me taking the smell of what she thought was my shoes into the house. However, the smell was not just my shoes, it was also my feet, which are gnarly and covered in a yellow fungus, so despite her quick thinking, the stink followed us into the house.
Later during the smell-ruined night, I was required to explain what I did for a living to the bewildered company, all of whom, it appeared to me, thought I was a deranged liar pretending to be a successful comedian, otherwise they’d have heard of me, surely. Various well-meaning old age pensioners kept suggesting I should do the cruises. My mother had seen Tom O’Connor, the seventies TV gameshow host and former club comic, on a cruise, and had been especially impressed by a joke he had done about a sardine, which she tried to repeat, but fumbled, by getting the set-up before the punchline. Being a comedian is actually harder than it looks and is best left to the professionals. Anyway, the implication of all this discussion about cruise-ship comics was, to me, in my admittedly paranoid state, that if I was any good, I would be doing the cruises too.*
* For those of you too young to remember Tom O’Connor, of the berry-brown face and frosty hair, here’s a piece by Nick Duerden, in the Independent, from 27 August 2006:
Though he started his career on Opportunity Knocks as, ostensibly, a comic, Liverpool-born Tom O’Connor was hardly a seminal standup. Instead, in the kind of jumper a sitcom grandmother buys for a sitcom grandson at Christmas, he possessed a comfortable television persona that, by the mid-1980s, had seen him anointed as the king of the cheesy gameshow.
‘All told, I did 11 of them, and every one a winner,’ he says in his room at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel where, tonight, he will preside over a corporate awards ceremony. ‘Name That Tune, Cross Wits, I’ve Got a Secret, The Zodiak Game. Many more. Why so many?’ He winks. ‘Producers knew that I could make a middling gameshow great. How? I had the knack.’
In 1988, though, this former teacher and devout, married Catholic was reported to have fallen in love with an 18-year-old prostitute. The allegations were splashed all over the papers, and the gameshow host issued writs against three of them, before ultimately dropping each one.
‘You certainly find out who your friends are when something like that happens,’ he said at the time. Within a year, he’d lost all but one of his shows, Cross Wits.
When I bring this up, the 67-year-old winces and abruptly segues into a joke about a one-armed Irish swimmer, which he says always gets them laughing.
Life away from TV was initially difficult for O’Connor, largely because he had grown rather fond ‘of the fame, the money, the fancy cars. I was an arrogant so-and-so, I thought I was invincible.’ He was relegated to the cruise-ship circuit, presiding over the same gameshows but now adapted for OAP seafarers. These days, he is the king of the corporate event. Tonight, it’s the motoring industry; last week, a pizza and pasta company. For someone who once dominated our TV screens, surely it’s a bit of a comedown?
‘At £4,500 a night, four, five times a week?’ he says. ‘Hardly. I’m doing very nicely indeed, thanks. There’s respect out there for me, and whatever anybody tells you, there is life after TV. I’m living proof.’
Later, he performs 20 minutes of standup before a room full of drunken motoring types, some of whom talk all over his nostalgia-driven monologue. The one about the one-armed Irish swimmer still goes down a storm, though.
What Duerden doesn’t say is that O’Connor’s seventies standup was much better than the usual workingmen’s-club fare of the time, with an uncharacteristically sensitive streak, a neat line in social observation and a real flair for authentic-sounding dialogue. I hate it, obviously, because I am a pretentious elitist, but what Duerden describes as a ‘nostalgia-driven monologue’ had, in its day, exactly the same flavour and tone as current work by northern observational comics like Peter Kay or Jason Manford, both of whom enjoy critical acclaim in broadsheet newspapers. Now that there is a school of criticism for comedy, and an audience for it beyond the working men’s clubs and shit ITV shows of the seventies, it’s reasonable to assume that if Tom O’Connor were starting out today he could easily be a stadium-filling, TV panel-show regular selling thousands of DVDs at HMV and Tesco. And if he was embroiled in a scandal he could always just do a one-man show about it and try and get David Baddiel to co-write a film about sex addiction with him.
In the end, I sort of lost my temper and was forced to act like an intellectual and cultural snob in order to justify my position. ‘Look, all those old-school cruise guys, they might be making loads of money, but they talk to us lot in astonished terms about our ability to actually write material about stuff, when they just do old gags. They’re not going to get reviewed in the Observer or asked to play arts festivals. It’s a completely different thing.’ ‘Well, I think I’d rather have the money,’ said one of the old folk, clearly remembering queuing for that first banana after World War II, and then another added, in a tone which I, perhaps mistakenly, assumed to be provocative, ‘Oh, so you’re some kind of artist are you?’
This was the key to the show. Reviewing ’90s Comedian in The Times, Dominic Maxwell wrote, ‘Lee could do more to bring out the personal sense of hurt that came with his hounding as a blasphemer. Without it, the bad-taste Jesus anecdote is too long to sustain the ideas – of freedom of expression, of the mutability of religious icons – that it supports.’ The personal is absent from my work. The me you see onstage is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most annoying, my most petty and my most patronising. But the things I was hoping to drive at in 41st Best StandUp Ever needed a personal grounding if they were to mean anything to anyone. That’s what Daniel Kitson does so well, and why he remains the best standup I’ve ever seen. He’s funny, but alongside that Kitson can show you heaven in a wild flower, and eternity in a slice of parkin, which is some kind of foul Yorkshire cake the blind, bald, woman-hating racist eats at Christmas with his sweaty family. The 41st Best StandUp show needed anchoring. At the moment, it was just a discussion about my supposed place in the rarefied world of standup comedy. But with a personal story attached to it, the 41st Best show could become something anyone could relate to, a story about how we still feel we need the approval of those we love, whatever we do for a living, irrespective of whatever accolades we might have bestowed upon us, irr
espective of whatever we might supposedly have achieved.
Besides which, the shock-horror tactics of ’90s Comedian already felt dead in the water. There was suddenly a macho element to the presentation and consumption of transgressive material. ‘Are you man enough to handle my act?’ Jim Jeffries, who in the flesh is a charming and unassuming former opera singer, was pictured on his poster as an avenging angel involved in rising flames, and was being promoted as ‘the most offensive comedian you will ever see’. And there had been Americans in Edinburgh whose professional publicists were employed to tell us they had AIDS, or hepatitis, and that they were on drugs, and had been prostitutes, and advocated the compulsory abortion of all living things. And that they hated you, and the world, and everything you stand for. Some even appeared, alongside Australian and British guests, under the banner heading of The Unbookables – though, ironically, they had been booked – and people flocked to see them to have their sensibilities trampled in front of their astonished faces. These unbookables were, it seemed, eminently bookable. I liked lots of them, and would have booked them if I ran a club, but when I was invited onto an Edinburgh panel by The Aristocrats’ director Paul Provenza to discuss taste and comedy, I hadn’t felt any especial kinship with any of the unbookable outlaws he was talking about, despite having spent half an hour onstage talking about vomiting into the anus of Christ. Instead, I thought about Boothby Graffoe and his guitar and his funny song about a mouse, and how he still made you feel glad to be alive without his act being the least bit shit. And I wondered if there was some way of taking all the tactics of my previous work and using them to say something that was unambiguously positive.
And in the April before the 2007 Edinburgh run, we had a little boy. And when he laughed at us, that was worth more than all the Perspex Chortle awards in the world.