Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
How I Escaped My Certain Fate (27 page)
And there was another story from that war, it was, er, it was discredited but it was true. Which was, apparently in Guantanamo Bay, um, the Americans threw a copy of a Koran into a toilet. Now, I’m not a religious person, but I don’t like the idea of a Koran being thrown into a toilet. Especially when bookshops and libraries are full of
millions
of pristine copies of Dan Brown’s new novel. Which you have to stop reading, right, because … You have to stop reading, because Dan Brown is not … It’s not literature, right? And you should know this in the land of bards, right? Um … Dan Brown writes sentences like, ‘The famous man looked at the red cup.’ OK? It’s not … And intellectuals like
me have tried to explain to you why Dan Brown is a bad … and it’s not working. So I’m going to have a big poster
campaign
, a big, anti-Dan Brown poster campaign. It’s going to be a massive picture of a toilet, right? And there’ll be all pieces of shit floating in the toilet. And in the middle of the pieces of shit, there’ll be a copy of
The Da Vinci Code,
with a speech balloon coming out of one of the pieces of shit, saying, ‘Ah, there goes the neighbourhood.’
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Today, the literary critics of quality broadsheets define themselves in opposition to Dan Brown, while populists, or people like Dylan Jones of GQ trying to have surprising opinions, say we should stop being so snobby and appreciate his ability to spin a good yarn. Whatever, this Dan Brown riff was four years ahead of the mass acceptance of the fact that he is abysmal, and was later recycled for my 2009 TV series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.
I first read Dan Brown in the flat of my future wife, Bridget Christie, in July 2005. She was swotting for an act she had in mind, where she would be Dan Brown being a stand-up comedian, telling old pub jokes in breathless, dramatic prose, to the bewilderment of audiences. It was hilarious and I wish I’d thought of it. But I only do me. And the smug-wanker version of me.
And I don’t know if you know, but the Catholic Church are very worried about you all reading
The Da Vinci Code.
And in fact, in January last year, the Vatican actually issued an official statement reminding Dan Brown readers that the books are largely fictional and full of historically un verifiable information.
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*
This joke is calibrated to fail. Nine times out of ten it wouldn’t get much of a laugh, and if it did it would only be from a
minority
of hardcore, atheist, intellectual pseuds, predisposed to equating the stories of the Bible with the idea of ‘fictional and historically unverifiable information’. But it did the job of further dividing the audience just as they were usually starting to become a workable unit, and thereby cranking up the tension, amplifying the sense of unfolding drama in the room, the narrative of my own failure to master the entire audience that plays along underneath the actual through-line of the material. It also allows me, in the next sentence, to appear totally in control by not being fazed by the failure of this joke, and to assure them that they have nothing to worry about and that they will all be onside again soon.
[
Long pause.
]
Six minutes’ time, I tell you, you’ll be fine, right? But you’re right not to laugh at that, it’s not a proper joke, right, it’s just based on a shared set of assumptions, it doesn’t work.
Um … Now I was talking about the Vatican there. I don’t want anyone to think, anyone to think I’m, I’m anti-Catholic. I’m not. I actually love Catholicism. It’s my favourite form of clandestine global evil.
What I really like about Catholicism, my favourite thing about it, is the way that it combines a search for profound spiritual meaning in the universe with a love of kind of inane seaside tat. And you don’t often see those two things working as a team, do you?
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*
Again, I am in thrall to Harry Hill here. ‘Working as a team’ is very much a Harry Hill phrase, although in his world it would be applied to foodstuffs and animals, rather than abstract concepts.
I’ll give you an example of what I mean, right? I was in the Vatican at the start of last year. And outside the big church there, in the square, there were these little carts selling souvenirs, little souvenir stands. And outside the Vatican at the start of last year, you could buy – and this is true – you could buy lollipops about that big, with the face of Pope John Paul II on them, you could buy Pope John Paul II’s face loll– … I bought about ten and brought them home, right?
*
And I was just wondering if, in the light of his death early last year, whether sales of those lollipops went up or whether they went down, you know. Whether good Catholics thought, ‘Ah, the Pope’s just died, it would now seem inappropriate to lick a sugar effigy of his face.’ Or whether they’d go, ‘Ah, the Pope’s just died, but what better way to pay tribute to his memory than by licking a sugar effigy of his face.’ To eat that, swallow it, digest it, shit out a kind of enchanted papal shit. I don’t know if
whatever
spiritual properties those lollipops have would survive the digestive process. I’m neither theologically nor
medically
qualified to do anything other than speculate on that, right? We can’t know.
†
*
This is all totally true. After the furore surrounding Jerry Springer: The Opera, and my subsequent involvement in the politics of blasphemy, I have learned to moderate my atheism, and always try to give the impression of being as reasonable a person as
possible
, and to respect people’s religious beliefs unless they impinge upon generally accepted human-rights norms. But some religious things are just hilarious, such as Catholic gift-shop culture. Greater love hath no man than to fashion his God into an ashtray or a
cigarette
lighter.
†
The last pope died in April 2005, while I had a run at the Melbourne Comedy festival, and this piece came together over a couple of nights during the run, basically written onstage.
But I did ask my girlfriend, she’s Catholic. I said to her, ‘If you drink holy water and then you do a wee, is the wee then magic?’ And she said, ‘No, that would be ridiculous.’ And it would, wouldn’t it? It’d be stupid.
Now, I don’t know if you remember, when the Pope died, the Catholic Church put out this story about his last words. They said that the Pope’s last words on his deathbed were addressed to God. Apparently, in his closing moments, the Pope said to God, ‘I searched for you, you found me, I thank you.’ That’s the story they put out. Let’s call it what it is, an obvious, made-up lie. ’Cause even the cardinals in
the Vatican admitted that the Pope was in a coma for the last two weeks of his life. And that does seem to me like a very eloquent and profound statement to make in a coma.
*
*
I was able to play this with a steely calm just by thinking about what an incredibly offensive story this is for the Vatican to
distribute
when it is obviously not true, and by how, on the rare
occasions
I have been awaiting the death of someone I love after some protracted suffering, the messy chains of events never resolved themselves with a similar moment of clearly fabricated closure. The most memorable and heartbreaking last words I ever heard were, ‘God, oh God, let me die.’
The Australian comedian and inventor of all Australian
comedy
Greg Fleet has a superb routine about how his father wished to emulate Oscar Wilde, whose last words were ‘Either that wallpaper goes or I do,’ to the point where he arranged to be sent home in the final stages of a terminal illness to a specially prepared room which he had already gone to the trouble of having decorated, at great expense, with an appropriately unpleasant wallpaper. In the event of feeling the hand of death upon him, he sits up, clears his throat to deliver his witty final epithet, and says, ‘Either this wall … ah fuck this really hurts … agggh … ah fuck … ah … Akkh … Ugh.’ And dies. It’s all in the telling, of course.
And I’m suspicious of that story for personal reasons as well, right? Because I actually nursed two friends, right, um, an elderly relative and someone I’d known from school. And they were both people that I loved. And I nursed them both, and I visited them both through very long illnesses, not dissimilar to the late Pope’s. And I can assure you that in their closing moments, neither of them were in a fit state to say anything as eloquent or profound as that. Although admittedly I was holding pillows over their faces at the time.
*
*
The trick here was to play this with bald-faced conviction,
summoning
up memories of visiting dying loved ones, to the point where it looked like I nursed an honest and terrible grievance about the way the Vatican had lied in the light of the appalling deaths I had witnessed, and then flip it. It was a good way of testing the water for the second half, which basically extends this method of po-faced sincerity as far as it will go.
But, you know, it was an act of love, right? It was an act of love. The first one was, the second one in retrospect I feel ambivalent about. But you’re in the moment, aren’t you? You have to act in the moment. It’s the kind of split-second decision London anti-terrorist officers have to make every day.
*
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The final few shows of ’90s Comedian took place soon after the police had shot Jean Charles de Menezes dead, in Stockwell of all places, mistaking him for a suicide bomber. This is another proper joke, albeit a black one. Within a few years these ‘jokes’, as we
comedians
call them, will have been entirely purged from my work in favour, exclusively, of grinding repetition, embarrassing silences, and passive-aggressive monotony.
I don’t know if you remember, but the Pope’s … The scheduling of the Pope’s funeral actually caused some problems for the royal family because it ended up being arranged for the same weekend as the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Camilla Parker Bowles. So they actually ended up moving that wedding to avoid a clash of interests. Now, I don’t think they should have done that, right, they should have left that wedding where it was. ’Cause for me, that’s what split-screen television technology was invented for.
*
Although it is hard, isn’t it, to imagine which one of those two events would have been the most distressing to watch, you know? The public veneration of a wrinkled old corpse …
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This was just a throwaway comment made in an email from my friend, the notorious bluestocking and radio comedy producer Louise Coates, which I asked her if I could have. Louise wrote me a facetious email while I was in Australia, keeping me up to date on world news events which she felt I might have missed. Louise is a natural and caustic wit whose arrival in a room spells either delight or disaster, but is always certain to bring about an exciting change of some sort. So much of what she says could be strip-mined for laughs that were I ever to face total artistic block I would
secretly
follow her around, writing down her indignant expressions of
outrage
at facets of modern life which I would have placed in her path to provoke her. Then I’d have her killed by a hit man and pass them off as my own.
†
I added this bit to the bluestocking’s bon mot, and it relies on the audience’s innate understanding of the way stand-ups usually structure this kind of gag. The implication, of course, is that the wrinkled old corpse is Camilla Parker Bowles, and not Pope John Paul II. Ideally, I wouldn’t have to finish the joke, as the whole crowd would anticipate the end, and this would be the point at which I would be able to congratulate them at having begun to work as a unit, where there were no stragglers. I needed them pleased with themselves and confident by now, as this is the last possible point to try and get them on my side before we launch into the difficult second half.
Sometimes, if the audience hadn’t anticipated the correct
ending
to the joke, and hadn’t laughed ahead of it, I would deliberately spoil it by saying, ‘The public veneration of a wrinkled old corpse
…
or the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.’ I don’t know why I would do this. I don’t know what I was trying to achieve. In the cold light of day, it seems extremely self-indulgent and futile.
You all right now?
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In April 2000, in an Australian wildlife park, I saw the raspyvoiced American comedian, rancher and renowned horse whisperer Rich Hall bring a fully grown bull kangaroo to its knees by talking calmly to it and gently stroking its furry face. He was on the horizon, some distance from us, and the sun was behind him. Perhaps he had positioned himself there on purpose, aware of how the mythic status of his kangaroo-mastering abilities would be magnified were he to be backlit by the sun. Talk softly and sweetly to a confused and frightened audience, like Rich Hall would to a
kangaroo
, and do not threaten them, and soon they may submit. Or not.