That’s what it’s like having a mate with an iPhone. You can still physically see them, they’re just not really there.
I can’t find God … Not in the Telegraph or the sat nav. He’s not in my heart and He’s definitely not in my head. He’s not available to download or to buy a pirated copy of and as far as I can tell He’s not tucked into the pages of any special book, just as He’s not loitering in a big imposing building waiting to be found. I really don’t know where to look, so if you’ve seen Him please let him know I was asking after Him, and then tweet me to let me know what His plans are.
7
Who’s who … Who believes what?
WHEN I TOOK MY SEARCH FOR GOD ON A STAND-UP TOUR of the UK, I hoped the make-up of my audience would include a broad spread of beliefs. In order for the show to work well it was essential it didn’t become some smug atheist love-in where we all sat about laughing at how ridiculous everyone else is for believing in silly ideas like God and suchlike. I hoped for life-long worshippers and atheists through to recent converts to or from religious observance, holy men and women, pagans, Satanists, scientists, philosophers, goths, weirdos, extremists, stoned theatre staff and everything in between, all sitting together and laughing at my thoughts. When trying to sell a national tour, pretty much every comic I know will settle for anyone in their audience as long as they turn up and laugh. I was not disappointed by the spiritual demographic of comedy fans across the UK. Most groups were well represented and even the modest C of E ones were bold enough to identify themselves in a potentially hostile environment.
I didn’t get a great many Muslims coming to see me. In all honesty, this was not a surprise. The UK’s more strict Islamic community don’t tend to come to comedy clubs. I can understand why, but it’s a shame none the less. A cliché it might be, but laughter has the power to cross all language and cultural barriers; unless that laughter is generated by Jim Davidson, in which case it most specifically doesn’t. The absence of a large veiled and bearded Muslim presence at my show was both a disappointment and a relief. A disappointment, as I like to be challenged and it would have been interesting. A relief because, despite striving to understand a wide variety of media, I know that, like most white middle-class people in Britain, I’ve accidentally bought into some of the ideas put about by the press and the truth is that some Muslims scare me. It’s my responsibility to find constructive solutions to this fear, one of which is to own up to it. It’s a prejudice in common with my fear of football fans, Christmas shoppers, large family gatherings and the studio audience of X Factor. It’s based on the simple fear of the unknown. I don’t understand why people would dress up in shiny cheap-looking shirts with paint company logos on and go bat-shit crazy over a football team, any more than I understand why a load of bearded men would kneel down in the road outside Finsbury Park mosque to listen to Abu Hamza. I feel very outside of these ‘tribes’ and I experience some fear. Is this Islamophobia? I suppose to some degree it is. Is this prejudice the same as the views held by the English Defence League? I sincerely hope not, but perhaps I’m being squeamish. I just don’t see myself marching alongside men who want to send Moroccans back to Iraqistan and think that a Hindu shopkeeper is going to try to convert them to Shi-ite belly dancing. A few Muslims came to see my shows; some wrote polite letters to me afterwards to set me straight on factual errors I had made. No one blew me up or threatened to sever my head. That is more than I can say for a late show in Battersea a few years ago when I accidentally made a joke about the sacred city of Manchester. There were some very devout Mancunians in the audience who took my blasphemy very personally and threatened to kill me.
On occasion, as I sat alone backstage on the God Collar tour trying to remember how I linked from Noah and the flood to the story of James and the grazed penis, I imagined what I would do if one night I walked out on stage to find a whole theatre full of cross-looking Islamists peering at me from the gloom. I think the eye-slits in the burka have the potential to look particularly frightening in the half-light of a theatre. Hundreds of pairs of eyes floating in the air, staring, judging … ‘So a fella walks into a bar … is this thing on?’
The tour gave me a rare opportunity to talk with large groups of people about religion and to find out who really believes what. How alone am I really? I seem to share the quality of confusion with a great many people who find me funny. This isn’t scientific enough to draw any real conclusion from other than to say that a great many people who find me funny are very very confused. When I previewed the show and was still working out what I thought I wanted to say, one of my promoters indicated that some sort of ‘non-lethal’ fatwa might be good for ticket sales. I said I’d settle for five stars from a national newspaper. Yes, I’ll slag them off, criticize their critical faculties, unpick their writing, but give me a couple of stars and a ‘funny’, ‘clever’ or ‘hilarious’ and I’m all theirs. I accept the fact that I am essentially a needy approval whore. Now please love me.
Stand-up comedy errs heavily on the side of cynicism, scepticism and the rejection of any formal structures that are perceived to be imposed upon us … that and knob gags. Stand-ups are for the most part a bunch of smart-arsed, Godless, mean-spirited, selfish, ego-driven spreaders of joy, light and laughter. Time spent in any green room will soon confirm that we are mostly competitive, back-stabbing, supportive, kind, well read, poorly researched, childish, filthy, vain, needy, loving, cruel and almost always a little bit late. I am convinced that the stand-up demographic contains a wholly disproportionate number of dyslexics. You should see most comedians’ notebooks – they contain secret codes, the scribblings of inky-legged spiders, hotel addresses and some infantile sketches of penises.
Atheism is well represented amongst comedians, though it’s important to recognize that atheist comics find they get more comedy mileage out of discussing their rejectionist position than the believer comic does from discussing theirs. There are some extremely funny and brilliant Christian comedians in the UK, which ought to go without saying but rarely has. Atheism includes so many varied schools of thought it can’t really be compared to one faith or another and most Christian comics find plenty else to be funny about without having to bare their soul before a drunken rabble underground in the middle of the night. The comedy circuit is an environment where professing your love or enthusiasm for an idea without then undermining that with self-deprecation and insults is rare.
‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I believe in a loving and merciful God and I love my wife to whom I am faithful. The present system of taxation seems to work as well as you might expect from a functioning democracy and my journey here was pleasant and swift … Hey, is this thing on? Who threw that? No, you piss off. Oh all right, I will. Damn this “turn the other cheek” nonsense. It might be the right thing to do but you hecklers are killing me.’
I often wish I didn’t think man-made climate change was a genuine phenomenon, as I suspect undermining the efforts and earnest sincerity of ‘people like me’ who want to address it would be a doddle. If the dolts on Top Gear can pull it off by calling anything they don’t agree with ‘gay’ or ‘vegetarian’ to the delight of the meat-faced petrolheads around them, then I’m sure I could. Religion has structure, faith is delicate and sincere and the churches of the big faiths contain ludicrous, old-fashioned ceremonies. These are the lowest-hanging fruit there is. None of which is to say that using comedy to challenge the orthodoxy of the church is not entirely worthwhile. A bishop’s hat makes him look like a fish gasping at the sky; bashing a bishop is a euphemism for masturbation. Women in burkas look like Batman and Hasidic Jews have woolly dreadlocks dangling out of their funny hats. Boom, take that, orthodoxy.
When I subjected audiences up and down the country to my wholly unscientific demographic faith test (which was sufficiently imprecise and unrepresentative that it could easily have been written up as a conclusive and alarming survey in the Daily Express), I found that whilst non-believers
usually made up the largest and certainly the loudest and most willing to be identified part of the crowd, there also were plenty of people with beliefs representing the three Abrahamic faiths and a few ‘others’ too. There were also a large number of people who declined to identify themselves in any of the three group options I offered: 1. Possessing a desire to believe in something beyond this existence, including anything from religion to spiritual curiosity. 2. Agnostic/not sure. 3. Atheist. I concluded that those who didn’t identify with any of those groupings were either too thick to understand the choices or resented the imposition of being asked to identify the personal and private theological structure of their lives in public. It is also possible that they were none of the above because they were deities who’d come to see if anything I had to say was a threat. If they were, they must have decided I wasn’t. There have been no lightning bolts or supernatural maimings so far. I’ll let you know if the next time I go swimming, Neptune decides to poke his trident up me …
I asked the audience to trust me not to bully or expose them if they told me what they believed. I hope they were convinced of my sincerity when I tried to explain my search for God was genuine. I promised there would be no witch-hunt. When I told them that in Henley-on-Thames, there was an audible boo. They seemed to be quite up for the idea of hunting a few witches.
‘Well, we’ve got the river so we might as well dunk a few elderly cat owners.’
When I asked first if there was anyone who would describe themselves as having some sort of faith, religion or perhaps even curiosity about the possibility of something beyond this existence, the hands went up very slowly indeed. Usually one hand would go up and then when that had been seen by another audience member they would feel safe enough to join in and before you knew it there were a good number shoving a believer’s fist proudly in the direction of the Lord. They were waiting until they felt safe enough to join in, fair enough. Many of them seemed embarrassed, some even to the extent that they then pretended they had temporarily misunderstood the question.
‘Oh faith? Faith, yeah sure. I thought you said face. Does anyone have a face? Sorry. Yes I have faith, and a face, so, yes, count me in.’
Of course, they had no obligation to tell me anything at all. They were there to be entertained and not to take part in a narrow and irresponsible census. On any given night there were probably many more sitting in the darkness with some sort of religious system at work in their lives but not comfortable enough to say so at a comedy gig. I did take great delight in reminding them that they only had to deny it twice more before they were in a whole heap of trouble. They couldn’t be sure if I’d ask them twice more, but it’s a tough call, isn’t it? Slight awkwardness at a comedy show versus eternal damnation for thrice denying the Lord.
I tried to make that first question as inclusive as I could. ‘Is anyone religious? Does anyone have some sort of faith or perhaps even a curiosity about something beyond this existence?’ I wanted to invite in as many people as possible and dispel the fear that this might be a series of cheap shots flung at the inconsistencies in the Bible. Hilarious though books like Leviticus are, it’s not why I don’t believe in God so it didn’t make the cut. This wasn’t about mocking any one group. It was and is about trying to understand why anyone believes in anything and why I can’t seem to. As a cry for help, I think making thousands of people laugh all over the country is better than a suicide attempt. The first few rows at Henley-on-Thames might not agree.
When I was previewing the show in a tiny club near Tower Bridge in London, trying it all out and seeing what worked, I asked if there was anyone with any religion, faith or belief system in the crowd. No one responded, not one person. It was very awkward. Up until then it had been going really well and people were laughing a lot and answering my questions. I was very disappointed when this bit drew a blank. Then as I tried to work out what to do with the next ten minutes of material, which really depended on at least one person identifying themselves as a child of God, a woman in the front row suddenly piped up. She pointed at the shocked gentleman beside her and announced, ‘He’s a Jew!’ I’m sure it came out with more force than she’d intended but the impact on the room was massive and, I’m glad to say, hilarious. Everybody laughed, particularly our freshly identified ‘Jew’, as the tension of the silence was broken by a statement that made everyone instantly more tense. She didn’t mean any harm, of course, and he seemed to find being grassed up very funny. It’s just a good job she never lived next door to Anne Frank, I suppose.
Then I moved on to the next group. The undecideds. I asked: ‘Is there anybody here who would describe themselves as an agnostic?’
Well, predictably enough some hands went up and then down again and then back up and then halfway down and it was like the Grand Old Duke of York was in charge of all the agnostics’ arms, which then wavered for a bit before being dropped in exhaustion and replaced with a despondent shrug. They didn’t seem sure of anything very much. Keen to make the religious amongst the audience feel all right about having been asked to go first, I set about teasing the agnostics for a while. Accusing them of sitting on the fence so hard they had corrugated bottoms. Hedging their bets so completely they had time to add topiary. So desperate to have it both ways, they looked like indecisive bisexuals. I imagined a row of agnostics on their knees at the pearly gates, looking contrite and self-piteous. Pleading for a place on the guest list to Heaven.
‘Sorry, God, there wasn’t enough evidence, but can we come in anyway? We’ll be really good and sweep up and everything. Surely a “maybe” is as good as a prayer. I gave a quid to the Sally Army once … please let me in.’
Teasing aside, agnosticism is the system that makes the most sense to me. If you apply any degree of rationale to the question of God’s existence, it is, at least for the time being, an unknowable thing. So you arrive at agnosticism. Open to the idea there might be a God but unconvinced by the available evidence. It seems the most scientific position to take. That said, I think for a great many agnostics the question of science, evidence and open-mindedness is not really the point. I am blown away by the number of agnostics for whom no further research seems to be necessary. It is possibly the biggest question mankind has ever addressed itself to. Is there a God? It affects this existence. It affects all past and all future existences. It defines who we are and what we believe in. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s the big one. And yet if you ask most agnostics, ‘Is there a God?’, they shrug, shuffle a bit, look at their shoes and mumble, ‘Yeah, dunno … huh? No, not sure, you know … not easy is it? God, eh? Tsssk? Erm, I was going to look into it but there’s a new season of The Sopranos out on DVD and er … well, I’ve got an iPhone … so … what was the question? I’ll see if my slutty gerbil knows the answer.’
The nights the show went best were when there was a good number of believers and undecideds, but then I needed to establish if I held any appeal for the non-believers. I could feel them like a Jedi feels a disturbance in the force, waiting to be asked …
‘So is there anybody here who would describe themselves as an atheist?’
Wooomph. The cheer was always the loudest and most confident. My ‘demographic’ are the vocal Godless. I’m sure it’s connected to a piece I once wrote for The Now Show on BBC Radio 4 about my objection to the inherent hate and violence so prevalent in the three Abrahamic faiths. I was put up on YouTube and had an astonishing number of ‘hits’. I’m often asked to speak at secular societies and atheist groups. I always decline because I’m not sure there isn’t a God and it might not take that much to convince me there is. I just need to meet the right salesman. There were always plenty of atheists in my shows and they are, to whatever extent you wish to divide up into groups, ‘my people’, I suppose. So I sought to establish some friendly parameters for the excitable atheist. I thanked them for coming to see the show. I told them how lovely it was to see them and how much I appreciated their support. Then I pointed out that as a g
roup it was time to realize they were not cleverer than everyone else in the room and could they please pipe the fuck down. Some were confused and possibly hurt. Surely the comedian whose six-minute diatribe on the Abrahamic religions on YouTube had so clearly nailed his colours to the mast as an anti-religious, atheist provocateur wasn’t about to turn on them? No, I wasn’t about to turn on anyone, but I don’t wish to be defined by an absence of belief. There were a lot of atheists keen to see my show, and I thank them for coming, but amongst their number there will have been some gits. That fact seemed unavoidable. Being atheist doesn’t make you clever or nice or logical or brave or moral or anything else. It’s a choice and we could just as easily rally round the idea that none of us liked public swimming pools or Ugg boots, trivial though they are compared to the power of religious ideology.
I thanked the Godless again for coming and reassured them I hoped we could grow to be friends, but real friends are honest with each other and so I wanted them to know that I was as sure as I could be that announcing your atheist status was no more a guarantee of intelligence than saying you like custard. Some custard-eaters are clever, some are not; it is not the liking of the custard that defines the custard-eater as clever, though I suspect if you tested the theory you would find custard-eating atheists such as myself are amongst the brightest people in the world. Atheism is no more a badge of being clever than going to Oxford for a day trip and coming back with a special hat that says ‘I went 2 Oxford’ on it.
God Collar Page 12