by Stewart Lee
Personal Diary Piece,
May 2005
III: Derek Bailey/Ruins/Aristocrats
At the Royal Festival Hall in 1997, Derek Bailey played a double header with the Japanese duo Ruins. I seem to recall a moment where the septuagenarian genius, lost in concentration, actually bumped into the back wall of the stage, his guitar making a resonating clang. Looking down, he appeared to consider what had happened, and then playfully bashed the instrument into the wall a second time. I laughed, and despite the wealth of different responses Bailey’s music had already offered me, I never thought it would provoke laughter. But something great music shares with great comedy is the capacity to surprise, to take us out of ourselves and engender a joyous, and not necessarily mean-spirited or cynical, laughter. I’ve subsequently learned Bailey once played in the pit band for Morecambe and Wise, when they toured theatres before their 60’s and 70’s TV success. Banging your guitar into a wall by accident, and then doing it again on purpose in a spirit of clownish curiosity, seems to me like a classic Eric Morecambe move.
There’s a great documentary about standup comedy currently winning awards all over the international film festival circuit. The Aristocrats, directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, shows sixty or so standups telling a shaggy dog story enjoyed privately by American comics, but never inflicted on the public. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that standup is, along with jazz and comic books, one of America’s great 20th century art forms. This seems a blinkered and isolationist observation. But The Aristocrats started to swing me. Halfway through, soon after one of the comics has gone off on a tangent involving the father repeatedly slamming his penis in a drawer for the audience’s edification, somebody makes a case for standup’s relationship with jazz. The distinct variations different performers can extrapolate from the Aristocrats tells us that standup is about ‘the singer not the song’. Just as John Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’ is different to the Julie Andrews version, so George Carlin’s Aristocrats, told with a world-weariness that suggests he has been compelled against his will to relate this horrible event, differs vastly from Billy Connolly’s, which is delivered with typically infectious relish.
Carlin, a Fifties Catskills hack, turned Sixties radical, turned elder statesman of American standup, wisely draws the distinction between ‘shock’, a term that comes with pejorative overtones, and ‘surprise’, which has no obvious moral dimension. Though the endless variations in different versions of the Aristocrats mainly involve stacking up increasing levels of scatological or sexual symbols, what’s really making us laugh is the pleasure of surprise, of things being simply unexpected and wrong, of reversing the usual order of things. Surprise is the reason a one-year-old child laughs if you put a shoe on your head. Shoes are for feet, not heads. Even a baby has a sense of inappropriate behaviour. Respectable looking families shouldn’t smash their genitals into drawers onstage in the name of entertainment. And guitars shouldn’t be banged into walls by elderly musicians, and then banged again. But how exciting is it to not know what’s going to happen next? Sometimes Derek Bailey’s music makes me feel like a kid on a roller-coaster. And Carlin, like some Native American shaman-clown, makes the need to subvert expectation, to continually surprise, sound like an artist’s Holy Obligation.
It seems to me there are two broadly different approaches to standup, and by association to all art, each with their own strengths. At commercial British comedy chains like Jongleurs or The Comedy Store, performers tell you about your life, and things that always happen to you, and you may feel comforted by this. Go beyond the usual venues and you may see acts advance ideas that would not normally have occurred to you. In his book, Improvisation, Derek Bailey assumes a position in opposition to the very act of musical composition itself. But there’s a kind of social need both for songs we can all sing, and for jokes about buses always being late, and men being different to women, and dogs being different to cats. Only the most extreme Wire subscriber would deny the potential of all-embracing, utilitarian art. It’s just that all-embracing, utilitarian art tends to be a bit shit. When millions wept for their own mortality after the death of Princess Diana, all they were offered was an Elton John song with the words changed a bit.
Great art, whether it’s laboriously crafted or spontaneously generated, tends towards the surprise factor that Carlin describes, and Bailey embodies. Derek Bailey is bold enough to refuse to gloss his work with emotional signifiers, just as George Carlin doesn’t tell jokes as if they’re supposed to be funny. Both make us do the work, and we get the reward of appearing to surprise ourselves. But the breakthrough moment, for me, of seeing Bailey bash his guitar into the back wall of the RFH, was realising that I could be made to laugh, against my will, in an atmosphere of high seriousness, in the temple of culture, by the simple childlike joy of surprise. Derek Bailey, it seemed, was giving me permission to laugh.
‘Epiphanies’, Wire magazine
comedy issue, June 2005
IV: Johnny Vegas – Instrument of God
Michael Pennington was born in St Helens, Lancashire, in 1971. He gave birth to Johnny Vegas sometime in the early 90’s, after a difficult pregnancy involving pottery, the priesthood and at least one severe beating. Pennington is one of our most misunderstood and maligned talents, and Johnny is one of the greatest comedy characters ever created. Johnny’s live performances, whether they succeed or fail, always do so spectacularly. Despite this, Johnny is best known to the public for his association with a woollen monkey in a series of TV commercials promoting a now bankrupt cable TV supplier. Almost hourly, people in the street shout at him, ‘Where’s your monkey?’ Only once have I seen him crack and reply, ‘It fucking died!’
I never knew Michael Pennington as Michael Pennington, only as Johnny Vegas, and he’ll be the first to admit that the line between the two burly northern men is blurred. ‘When I tell people about terrible things that have happened to me, they just seem sad,’ he explains. ‘But if I pretend they’ve happened to Johnny they become hilarious. But sometimes it’s complicated. On Shooting Stars I had to sit there and join in. But Johnny Vegas would have just lost interest, wandered off, come back with a dead rabbit and said, “Look what I’ve found.”’ For the purposes of this piece, the Pennington–Vegas phenomenon will be referred to throughout as Johnny.
On location in the Peak District village of Castleton, where he is filming Dead Man Weds, a sit-com written by and staring Phoenix Nights’ Dave Spikey, it is Johnny, not Michael Pennington, whom every passer-by feels en titled to engage in conversation. Moving through any public space with Johnny is a problematic exercise. Everyone wants to shake hands, buy him a drink, or get scraps signed. I have never spent time with a celebrity so genuinely loved, and yet also so unselfconsciously accessible. Nobody leaves Johnny’s orbit without an anecdote or an authenticated fragment. Finally we wrangle him away, and Vegas drinks rum and coke in a Castleton pub, turning butts of smoking paraphernalia over in his hands, which are surprisingly small and gentle, like those of a spider monkey, or a young Victorian servant girl.
Johnny’s ongoing presence in newspaper gossip columns, quiz shows and commercials means that although he himself is instantly recognisable, the talent that informs his incendiary live shows remains largely un recognised. ‘It’s not my world but that doesn’t stop me passing through,’ he protests. ‘I think anyone who is remotely normal would find it interesting to observe those kind of parties without considering yourself one of the people that ought to be there. The thing is though, you go along and you imagine you’re just people-watching, but before you realise it, people are watching you.’ But to see Johnny live at the Edinburgh fringe in the late 90’s was an unforgettable experience. In some dark, dank room, this gargantuan figure would rage at the audience, often half naked, soaked with spilt pints, demanding their pity, or their respect, forcing them, often out of sheer terror, to enjoy themselves by joining in massed singalongs, whilst he displayed his genuine prowes
s on the potter’s wheel, creating, as best he could, beautiful clay objects, moulded from muck and beer, within the midst of this maelstrom. Where did this character come from?
‘When I was young I did get badly beaten up once and hospitalised. I went through a year of being really timid and I think doing Johnny allowed me to be as confrontational on stage as I’d like to be in real life. I might have been scared in reality, but I’d stand my ground on stage. And a lot of him is like local lads in St Helens where I grew up. You go in their club and they’re dead happy to see you but you only want to have two pints with them, not six. You don’t want to get drawn into it, otherwise it’s, “Come on, sit with me, be my friend, and then watch me reach the point of exploding.”’ When Johnny embarks upon free-associating tirades, that often last literally hours, he conjures the same feeling of excitement, fear and hilarity experienced during the desperate revels of just such despairing drinkers. ‘That’s another drunk-style thing about Johnny,’ he explains, ‘nothing ever gets to a finished point. Drunks think there’s always got to be somewhere else open. Otherwise it’s the horror of going home and living with themselves. Johnny wouldn’t care how much he bored other people. He’d satisfy his own need to be distracted first.’
Was using the potter’s wheel onstage in the early days of the act an attempt to find something delicate in amongst all the violence, despair and anger? ‘No,’ says Johnny, ‘the pottery was a kind of accident. When I was starting out doing standup I accepted a residency somewhere in Manchester and in my blissful ignorance I hadn’t realised people spent years putting their first hour show together. I didn’t have enough material so I just thought of anything I could do to fill the time. I remembered I’d done an arts foundation course and I’d really loved ceramics because I’d had a brilliant teacher. So I brought the Potter’s Wheel on stage. The first time I did it I realised it had a mesmerising, magnetic effect on people. They were amazed I could do it. And the fact that I could actually make pots like I said I could, made them wonder how much else of the act was true. “God! He weren’t lying? Maybe he was a Butlin’s redcoat in the 60’s like he says?” The problem with people that come and see me now is they’re not a live comedy crowd. They’re people who want to see someone off the telly. I do what I do and they say, “That’s not what I paid to see. I was expecting standup. Not a frightening monster.” I don’t think you can defeat it. You just have to not water down what you do, and not start gearing it towards that kind of audience.’
The Johnny Vegas character has been thoughtfully and carefully drawn to embody blackly hilarious notions of desperation, loneliness and bewilderment. But it’s so convincingly portrayed that, when it encounters an increasingly superficial media, Johnny’s behaviour is portrayed as synonymous with Michael Pennington’s. ‘What you say on stage becomes a perception of your real life,’ Vegas explains, ‘they won’t draw that line.’ Last year some lads shouted out at Johnny on stage, ‘Why did your wife leave you?’ Confronted with such a personal question any standup who chose to answer it seriously, or else get angry, would have thrown the gig. Johnny replied, ‘She didn’t share my belief in sea monsters. I’d be swimming around in the sea looking for them, and she’d get bored,’ brilliantly defusing the whole situation. The next day in the Daily Mirror, this comment was reported as evidence of Michael Pennington’s deteriorating mental state, as had been a previous gig where he had invited men in the audience to lick his nipples, an old Johnny Vegas trick for breaking the ice that fans will have seen him use on stage many times. In the Incredible Hulk film, Eric Bana rampages through the Mojave desert destroying thousands of US army tanks, but he has so far escaped personal censure for this in the pages of the Daily Mirror. That said, I once criticised some friends for saying they had seen Johnny do a shit onstage. I said this was ridiculous and that whilst he may have pretended to do a shit onstage, he wouldn’t actually do a shit on stage. He was a character comedian, an actor playing a role, not a psychopath. I subsequently related this story to Johnny as an example of people’s failure to view Johnny Vegas as a character, but he made a kind of doubtful face, and I decided not to pursue the issue.
The irony is, such stories, whether true or not, add to the myth of Johnny Vegas. Johnny has never been honoured with his own TV vehicle. ‘TV producers and commissioners come and see the show and love it but when you give them any more in that vein they don’t seem to latch onto it and think you’ve gone too far,’ he concedes. Ben Thompson’s study of British TV comedy in the 90’s, Sunshine on Putty, singles out Channel 4’s failure to commission Johnny’s 1998 pilot as a major downward turning point in British comedy. But, denied of its own TV format, the Johnny Vegas character seems instead to be creating its own narrative in the real world, funnier and more comically tragic than anything a team of writers could contrive.
Earlier this year, Vegas appeared in Sex Lives Of The Potato Men, a film subsequently described as ‘the worst British film ever made’, though presumably not by people who had seen Love Actually, Shooting Fish or that one with Lee Majors and Bradley Walsh riding around in golf carts. But though being in ‘the worst British film ever made’ might have been a blow for Michael Pennington, there’s something perfect about it for Johnny Vegas. When I went to see Sex Lives Of The Potato Men in Leicester Square, the Warner West End ticket machine was broken, and the cashier had given me a handwritten note allowing me access to the film. The very act of going to see Vegas’ film became inherently absurd and this is a typical by-product, somehow, of any of Johnny’s interactions with popular culture. I couldn’t resist ringing him from the largely empty cinema. ‘It’s the critics,’ he said, ‘they’ve taken to sabotaging the ticket machines now.’ But whilst the film’s other stars saw off the flack with various degrees of plausible denial, Vegas, honourably alone, embraced it. ‘Even when one critic described me as “the ugliest man in British cinema” I still stood by what I’ve done,’ he says. ‘Everyone that read that script wanted to be in it. I don’t moan about it. There are actors in it who’ve tried to distance themselves from it but it’s like standup. When they go badly they blame the crowd, and when they go well it’s because they themselves were amazing.’
Vegas may yet become a superstar by doing what he’s actually good at. If not then there remains the consolation that his career will look like some kind of strange art project. Standing alongside soap opera celebs in TV listings magazines Johnny, like the skeleton at the feast, renders them all ridiculous, whilst he remains idiotically removed, so low in status that he cannot be harmed, a genius fool. ‘You can’t touch Johnny because he’s never going to see the sense in taking the blame for anything anyway. That’s another idea drawn from alcoholism too. Everything’s always someone else’s fault. If that butterfly had flapped its wing in Tokyo I’d have got the part in Lord Of The Rings. It’s not my fault.’
The Johnny Vegas character seems entangled in notions of guilt and blame. It’s no surprise that the young Johnny considered training for the Catholic priesthood. ‘I thought of going into it until the age of ten,’ he remembers, ‘then at 11 I went to seminary, a private school funded and run by the church. The church work out what you can afford and your parents pay it out of shame. The idea was you’ll be a priest, get a taste for the monastic lifestyle of the priesthood – it’s indoctrination really. I don’t want faith through fear. I think it’s about the individual’s acceptance. I thought it was quite good that at the age of 11 I wanted to read George Orwell in bed but they wouldn’t even let me have a reading light because of rules and regulations and I found myself rallying against it. I was the great white hope of the parish and when I said I wasn’t up for it every one was very disappointed. I was made to feel very special when I wanted to be a priest and everyone was disappointed when I became ordinary again. But I craved the ordinary. I suppose Johnny Vegas is like that. He doesn’t give people what they want. He’s a revolutionary, like Martin Luther, but he doesn’t have anything worked out that he can nail
to the church door. Johnny Vegas believes he has something to share but he is constantly humiliated. God is trying to teach Johnny Vegas a lesson, but even the violence doesn’t work on him. You could knock his head in and then he’d just put on baby’s clothes. God is doing it to him. God is saying to Johnny Vegas “you are one of the men who deserve to be beaten”. But he’d just tell God he was out of order.’
Does Johnny think God would like the Johnny Vegas act? ‘God would see that by accident one man has got as much as he can out of misery,’ is all he will say. And what if Johnny Vegas were to do a shit on stage, would God
approve of that, would he see it as an expression of his love? ‘Whatever happens,’ Johnny Vegas concludes, ‘I am God’s instrument. Maybe I should have used me own name for some things, and kept Johnny as a character. But I didn’t. And it’s too late now.’
Esquire magazine,
December 2004
V: An Improvised Discussion about Russell
Brand on Big Brother’s Little Brother
This is an interrogation/interview that Johnny Vegas and I improvised from areas of conversation that I had suggested to him previously, included as an extra on the 41st Best StandUp Ever DVD, in order not to misrepresent Russell Brand, whom I had misquoted, knowingly, during the show itself. I maintained that I had no obligation to represent Brand’s behaviour accurately as what I was doing was a ‘meta-discussion’.
The actress Jackie Clune, who penned the poorly received Denise van Outen vehicle Blondes, had just written a newspaper piece about her opinion of a routine Vegas had recently performed in a live show I promoted, which the Guardian had described as being the literal equivalent of a sexual assault, implying that his audience volunteer should press charges. When I challenged Clune about the rights and wrongs of speculating at length about something that she hadn’t seen, having not been present at the show, and that wasn’t proven or even corroborated by the supposed victim, she said the truth of the events was immaterial, because her piece was a ‘meta-discussion’ about the issues it raised, rather than a piece of reportage.