My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  That said, I was quite lucky with my last DVD. The only thing that was withdrawn for legal reasons was a section about shamkidnap munter Shannon Matthews. The thing that’s surprised me most about that whole thing is that with her family background Shannon Matthews wasn’t a cyclops. I don’t believe Karen Matthews knew where Shannon was. I’d be amazed if she knows where any of her kids are.

  The launch of the DVD meant that when I sat down to start writing the following year, I had to say goodbye to a lot of jokes. But with President Obama getting elected it seemed a great time to be writing some new topical stuff. Obama had just been given high approval ratings but then again he did follow Bush. You could put a brain tumour in the Oval Office and it’d get better ratings. And construct better sentences.

  Obama’s not infallible though—he apologised after his plane swooped low over Ground Zero for a calendar photo. Which is like Gordon Brown posing on the District Line with peroxide and a fuse.

  Shortly after he was elected, Obama invited Gordon Brown to a working lunch in Washington. I think Gordon was a bit surprised when he ended up serving bread rolls and pouring the wine. Brown said his meeting with Obama was ‘to help sort out the world economic crisis’. The meeting took less than an hour! What exactly did he do? 60 Hail Marys? Gordon did make a speech to Congress though, and it was truly embarrassing. At one point he said, ‘With faith in the future let us together, build tomorrow today.’

  Is this such a great speech? It sounds like it’s been cobbled together on the plane from the clues of The Times crossword. ‘Outgoing partners once left home to catch a Rolling Stone.’ Applause. ‘The Spanish ambassador fools about with Mickey Mouse.’ Standing ovation. He received nineteen standing ovations in total. I’ve always thought a standing ovation is a strange thing. ‘I’m enjoying what you said so much I’m going to clap, not louder, but higher than before.’ The problem is what do you do after the first few standing ovations if the speaker makes a point that you like even more? Do you jump and clap? Or get on the table? Typically, a standing ovation comes at the end of a speech. Essentially the Congressmen tried to get him to finish nineteen times. I mean, why would anyone want to listen to a man whose own country is in meltdown? It’s like Fred Goodwin starting a Christmas Club. While in America, Brown also announced that Edward Kennedy would receive an honorary knighthood from Britain. This is a man who fled a car accident in 1969 that led to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. He doesn’t deserve a knighthood. A liar, a coward and a criminal. Sounds more like a Lord to me.

  After my tour ended I decided to move back to Scotland. It’s been a real relief. I hated the intensity of life in London—walking around a Scottish city is like walking around London after an apocalyptic viral event. I knew that I really needed to get out when Boris Johnson got elected. Voting for Boris Johnson can’t have been that different from voting for a Labrador wearing a Wonder Woman costume. He’s sort of like a wee boy who’s woken up in his dad’s body. The Labour Party must really be in trouble if they can lose control of London to a fat albino with Down’s syndrome. Earlier this year Madame Tussauds unveiled a waxwork of Boris Johnson. It’s so lifelike the only way to tell them apart is that the waxwork is slightly better at running London. I mean, what a waste of money. Boris does so little work he’d have been happy to go down to Madame Tussauds for a couple of hours a day and just stand.

  Boris’s election made it clear that it’s time we went for an entirely different system of government altogether. How about instead of voting, we all write two—to three-hundred-word essays about how we’d generally like things to go. Then we appoint a random celebrity—Jeremy Clarkson or that guy from The Kumars—and they have to work their way through what we’ve written and make as much of it happen as possible. Often the things we’d write would be contradictory, so much of the government’s work would involve things like ripping up all the roads and then building them all again. Then, at the end of their term of office, we would burn our leaders alive, just like the old Celtic tribes did (to be honest my source here is Slaine in the comic 2000 AD).

  Yes, it’s a voting system that would very probably return our nation to the Dark Ages. On the other hand, we’d get to kill Clarkson! Is everybody in?

  Since moving back I’ve realised there’s lots of bizarreness in Glasgow, particularly if you’ve spent your whole life looking for it. Queen’s Park has a disturbing Victorian Insect Museum. That’s something I’d avoid if you were on drugs. Or recommend. Really, it depends on the drugs. Probably avoid. The park also has a big flagpole where there’s a beautiful view out across the city. Anytime I go there somebody clearly on drugs comes up and raves almost stereotypical mentalness at me. One time it was a guy telling me to make a tinfoil helmet to stop the government reading my mind. I moaned at Jim for several minutes about the way somebody on drugs always comes up and spoils that view before I remembered that I was also on drugs.

  I moved back to Scotland the week that Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor were thrown out of the Scottish football team as they were deemed unfit to represent our country. I dunno—I think a couple of drunks making obscene gestures at a crowd of strangers represent our country pretty accurately. We’ve had to put up with drunk or abusive Scots representing our country in the fields of cinema, cuisine and international diplomacy…and football is where they draw the line?

  Since I got back to Scotland I do find that I’m a bit more recognisable, but probably only in that vague way that makes people think I’m probably somebody who owes them money. I was out camping a couple of months ago and some old guy followed me through the woods and back to my tent, sticking his head in and asking for an autograph for his son. I wrote, ‘I fucked your Dad. As we came, we both thought of you’ and folded it up nice and tight.

  I moved back to Scotland in time to see my daughter finish nursery. They had a cute little graduation ceremony and she sang a song about the continents. I lurked in the background with my boy, both of us drawn by the strange attractor of the buffet. We looked like two guys who didn’t care how many continents there were. Afterwards, one of the nursery assistants came by with a plate of cake. I snatched a big bit with a cry of ‘Cake!’ and bit into it. ‘That cake is for the children,’ she grimaced. I tried to make light of it by saying, ‘All the sweeter!’ but blew crumbs everywhere as I did so. It’s so rare we get to see ourselves as others see us. That was a tragic time for it to finally happen for me. Still, I love icing. I read that once a wild bear starts coming into a town they have to go and capture it and release it hundreds of miles away. Basically once the bear has tasted peanut butter there’s nothing in nature that’s going to top that, so they’ll always come back. I feel like that myself. I know there’s cake out there, so it’s hard to eat salad. Look at the stuff we have access to! Who wouldn’t feel like a bear? If your neighbour’s bin had a tub of choc-choc-chip ice cream in it would you tear it apart like a bear to get at it? Of course you would! I’d fuck a bear! Rrragggghh! Ice cream!

  Sometimes I wish I had more of a regular routine to my life, but a lot of the time I do enjoy the weirdness. I did a weekend recently that involved doing a show at some freakish ball in London, then driving to Switzerland and doing a gig in Geneva. At the ball I wandered round the wonderful grounds of the country club it was being held in and enjoyed the snotty looks from real members. How do you get to the stage where you can look down your nose at somebody wearing a tuxedo?

  There was a huge glass atrium in the room in which I was playing. In a fit of boredom, I pretended that my contract specifically excluded me from playing atriums. ‘No atriums! Did you guys get the old contract or something?’ Just before I was due to go on I stuck my head out the back door for some air and swallowed the most enormous moth. I could hear the guy who was going to introduce me talking me up while I knelt on the steps trying to vomit up a living creature that was thrumming somewhere in my vocal cords. It was horrendous. I puked something that looked like a cross between a bat and a tumour, then
did the gig sounding like I’d just survived a house-fire.

  My friend Craig Campbell met me at the club and drove me to Geneva. To pass the time he played lectures on the philosophy of the mind. An American gentleman, speaking patiently for several hours, finally made me appreciate that my body might not exist. We grabbed a couple of hours sleep in a lay-by. As I got out and stretched beside all the big trucks, I saw for the first time how liberating the life of an itinerant serial killer might be. You could work your way through all kinds of lectures, have an exercise programme you could do in a motorway toilet and just really develop your own style. I might not even kill some days, I reasoned as I breakfasted on a Cornetto.

  Geneva is a strange place. The streets were full of ridiculously beautiful women. Perhaps beautiful women are very good at working in the finance industry; that’s one option. Or a lot of ugly guys use the money they make in the finance industry to lure beautiful women there. I honestly can’t decide. The gig was one of those typical expat things where everybody was sat with their boss. I think expats are chosen for their ability to tolerate bosses.

  Could you imagine British bosses going out with their staff every weekend? The only boss who should do that is somebody leading a team of behavioural scientists exploring the exact moment when banter turns to violence.

  Sometimes I think doing open spots doesn’t really tell me that much. Either it’s a nice crowd and they laugh at everything, or it’s not and they don’t. I had to do every open spot in Scotland to get myself match-fit for this year’s series of Mock the Week. I did a ‘Best of Irish’ comedy night and pretended to be Irish. ‘Like all Irish people, I’m mad for the racism!’ That was my catchphrase, which they hated. A guy came up to me after that and introduced himself as the best impressionist in Scotland.

  ‘Do you watch Family Guy?’ he asked, in what may have been the voice of a Family Guy character.

  ‘No, I don’t, I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘You don’t watch Family Guy?’ he shouted, in what was clearly supposed to be the voice of another Family Guy character. ‘Geez, I can’t believe you don’t watch Family Guy!’ He said that in an English voice that I think may be the voice of the Family Guy dog, or perhaps baby.

  ‘I don’t have a TV, mate.’

  ‘You know who else doesn’t watch TV…? Robert De Niro. Hey, what you lookin at…?’

  I hid in the toilet while I heard him ask for me in the voice of Robert De Niro and then somebody else I couldn’t identify.

  At my shows, I always like to have as many Scottish people as possible. Not for nationalistic reasons, but because a largely English audience means that I won’t be able to spend about a third of the show throwing lazy, clumsy blows at the city of Dundee. Hats off to Dundonians, they can certainly laugh at themselves. Although, looking around their city, maybe they just love any kind of punishment. It’s the sort of place you imagine everyone would have put all their lights on during the Blitz. It’s their fire brigade I feel sorry for. Very difficult to do your job properly when the locals are queuing up to throw themselves into the flames.

  Another thing I’ve been doing since I moved back is writing a pilot for a sketch show with Jim and our friend Tom Stade. Tom is a laid-back cannabis-defined Canadian whose natural joyousness and extrovert nature terrifies the people of Scotland. I’ve stood patiently in a cafÉ as he’s attempted to get an elderly waitress to high-five him. His joshing good nature is often ignored by Scottish people in the hope that he will fuck off. He never notices because of his joshing good nature. We’ve all written stuff together that’s easily as mental as anything Jim and I used to come up with back at peak ecstasy consumption. That’s made me very happy. I suppose I always feared that if I went off and did straight stand-up and panel shows that maybe when I came back the magic wouldn’t be there. The magic is still there! The fact that we are the only people who think it’s magic is irrelevant.

  The other day Jim reminded me of a Dr Presley sketch that went out where Dr Presley controls a defeated-looking grown-up version of the kid from The Wonder Years.

  ‘Enough, Fred Savage! I hold your heart within a Perspex cube!’

  As I remember, it was delivered as a booming psychic voiceover. Clearly the world needs more of that kind of thing. I’m also writing my new touring show, which is called ‘I Would Happily Punch Every One of You in the Face’. Writing it involves a lot of going to comedy clubs and finding out that a lot of things I thought were funny are actually not funny and don’t even make any sense. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to the end of this brutal ‘pre-season’ bit. It will be a relief to get down to talking some serious rubbish on a nightly basis while energy drinks destroy my health and sanity. Oh no, wait a minute, it’ll be worse. Still, the good news is I can’t live for ever.

  At least it’s now a really good time to be a topical comedian with a dystopian worldview. Never has everything seemed to be going to fuck with quite such alacrity. The Bank of England has started printing £75 billion of new money to pump into Britain’s economy. Soon the banks will start lending again and people will have more cash in their pockets—it’s just unfortunate that a Mars bar will cost over £1 million. I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about though. Printing money may not have worked in Zimbabwe or Nazi Germany, but third time lucky eh? The one bright spot in the financial crisis was when the Chancellor announced in his budget that ‘I’m taking the necessary measures for Britain’s recovery’. Unfortunately the gun jammed when he tried to shoot himself in the head.

  With everyone watching what they spend, Lidl is becoming the most successful supermarket in the UK. The Germans have finally won. They swore in 1940 they would have us all eating bratwurst and finally they’ve managed it. It’s all the strange German food that amuses me. Lidl is full of the kind of people who go on holiday but eat chips because they are scared of foreign food…and there they are, being forced by their poverty to buy herring in some freaky, day-glo yellow sauce, and sausages that look so like your childhood imaginings of an alien’s cock.

  Not that you catch a politician in Lidl, of course. It was the Daily Telegraph that printed MPs’ expense claims and its readers were furious. They have to pay for their own chandeliers, tennis courts and moat cleaning. What I’d like to know is if MPs can claim for all those things, then what aren’t they allowed to claim for? Chocolate fountains? Cream horns? Golden baths? Or are all these sexual practices allowed too? Douglas Hogg claimed to have his moat cleaned and Michael Spicer claimed to trim the hedge around his helipad. They couldn’t have made the Conservative Party look any more like aristocratic idiots if they’d claimed cash for ‘a termination for the scullery-maid and a third-class ticket for her crossing to New Amsterdam’.

  Trying to defuse the crisis, Gordon Brown appeared on YouTube—and that’s what everyone said when they saw it. Apparently Gordon Brown wore make-up to cover up his blemishes and wrinkles. Christ, what does he look like without make-up on? ET with skin cancer? If an alien skinned a fat man to wear his flesh as a suit would it really look any different from Brown? He’s now so wrinkled he looks like Sid James’s nutsack. Brown looked like a man getting a prostrate exam from Freddy Krueger. The last time I saw someone looking that fake and uncomfortable on YouTube they were telling us that they were being treated well by their captors. I mean, someone really should tell Brown to stop smiling—it just looks like he’s trying to shit a sea urchin. Where did Brown learn to smile? Watching The Shining? John Prescott said Brown had ‘the worst smile in the world’. Obviously there weren’t any mirrors about when he was shagging that secretary.

  In preparation for the tour I’ve been trying to get fit as my body had begun to resemble a sort of fleshy landslide. In a moment of madness, I booked some colonic hydrotherapy. I have to start off by saying that it did make me feel better, but I honestly don’t know that it was worth the several circles of hell it took me through. For a start, you have to wear paper pants. Never good and in this ca
se ladies’ pink paper pants, due to supply-line difficulties. I had naÏvely imagined that I would be left to do the actual, well, insertion, myself. No, it’s rammed up there by a stranger. As she did it she blurted, ‘I’m sorry about this Frankie!’ So was I. Essentially, a colonic is a bum abortion and it’s very difficult to keep the conversation going with the practitioner. We chatted idly about our hopes for the future, but the fact that she was manoeuvring a hose around in my arse just killed any real chance of rapport.

  After the next tour, that’s very probably it for me. Getting out of live work and getting out of show business are my priorities. Hopefully when I retire I can find some hobbies that interest me, like prescription med addiction, dread and loneliness. I’d like to be able to write something really good, a film or a novel, but secretly know this would just see me meeting the same cunts on a slightly different basis. You meet some decent-enough people in comedy or telly, but you must never imagine that they are your friends. One must strive for a mindfulness that they could watch you die, right in front of them and feel only a numbed indifference. Or, at best, mildly horny.

  When you meet people you admired on TV ten years ago they always seem slightly lobotomised, as if the quality of cocaine they briefly achieved melted their synapses. I think people get addicted to the money, and to having things done for them. As a result, they agree to more and more shit. Can you honestly watch the telly on a Saturday night and say that mankind deserves to survive as a species?

  Of course, I am as big a Cunt as anybody. Probably bigger. Well, listen to me show business, and listen good. I may be a Cunt, but this is one Cunt that you’re not going to fuck!