How I Escaped My Certain Fate (36 page)
Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
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.
A transcript of the show recorded on 7 April 2008 at The Stand, Glasgow
PRE-SHOW MUSIC: RIDDIMBUGZ BY DAVID ROTHENBERG
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The pre-show tracks for 41st Best were a recording of the
American
musician David Rothenberg improvising on the saxophone to a tank full of chirping insects called Riddimbugz, followed by lengthy blasts of Evan Parker playing saxophone to field recordings of birds and bugs made in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly by Ashley Wales. Rothenberg’s recording is not commercially available, as far as I know, but I tracked it down via the art radio station Resonance FM, which broadcast the Pestival Insect Festival cabaret evening at which we both appeared, and where Rothenberg and his unwitting insect slaves performed this piece. The Evan Parker tracks appear on Evan Parker with Birds, on the Treader label.
The Rothenberg piece is quite ambient, but the Parker tracks were mysterious and arresting. I played these to punters on the way into the show in Edinburgh in August 2007, when I found myself in an acoustically problematic circus big top, The Udderbelly. Here, crowds of meandering weekenders, who just wanted to see ‘some of that comedy’, wandered into my dreary and pretentious show by mistake, resulting in inappropriately packed Friday and
Saturday
sets and predictably sluggish response times for the weird stuff. The insect-based improvised music was just the beginning of their nightmare.
I take no pleasure in the fact that during the show’s Fringe run, the alluring title of the piece, and its prime location in Bristo Square, drew to it many people who just wanted a fun night out and would probably prefer to have seen something else rather than me, such as paint drying, for example. Daniel Kitson won’t even play weekends in Edinburgh, for fear of short-changing these
legitimately
aggrieved fun-seekers. Next time I did a stand-up show at the Edinburgh Fringe I went to The Stand, a small room stuffed with dedicated aficionados of comedy, and left a far smaller number of people bored and annoyed.
As a younger man, looking at the fed-up faces of a minority of an audience amused me, in my conceited insolence, but now, as a parent of a young child, for whom organising any night out is a logistical nightmare, the thought of grown-ups having gone to the time and trouble of leaving the house and then being subjected to something that wearies and irritates them fills me with nothing but shame. I regret wasting their evening and babysitting costs. I try and make it clear that the shows are not for everyone, and indeed the poster and publicity material for 41st Best included one Chortle website punter’s review – ‘The worst comedian I have ever seen’ – in an effort to deter the casual comedy consumer.
Of course, it was always possible that someone who came in hoping for something that they didn’t get actually preferred what turned out to be on offer. These were the key marginals I was
interested
in winning. In theory there were enough threads to grasp in 41st Best to continue building the new audience, as well as satiating those who had particular expectations of me.
VOICE OFF
: Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome the 41st best stand-up ever, Stewart Lee!
Thank you very much, thank you for coming. Thanks for coming to this show, which is called
Stewart Lee – 41st Best Stand-Up Ever.
It wasn’t originally going to be called that. I started writing it in about May last year. I didn’t know what it was going to be. And then, as luck would have it, about that time I appeared in one of those programmes – you know those terrible Channel 4 programmes, they’re about nineteen hours long and they go out on Friday or Saturday nights, and they’re a countdown of the hundred
best things of a thing, ever. And each one of the things is separated from the next thing by a bought memory from Stuart Maconie. He is an amazing figure, Stuart Maconie. He is able, if the price is right, to recall almost any aspect of the entire spread of all human existence. He’s an incredible figure, Stuart Maconie. He’s rather like an omniscient alien super-being, a giant baby that lives in space, bald,
wearing
only a toga, orbiting the earth, able to view the entire span of all human culture and existence, and yet tragically, by the creed of his alien race, Stuart Maconie is forbidden from ever intervening directly in human affairs.
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This is, as everyone knows, a reference to The Watcher, the
Marvel
Comics character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963 whose physical appearance – that of a giant and wise baby – and his role as an omniscient but non-interventionist observer make him very similar to the TV pundit and DJ of worthwhile pop music Stuart Maconie. And also similar, perhaps, to the idea of the
noninterventionist
God that New York comic-book writers, drawn from the post-war Jewish diaspora, must have felt had abandoned their people, looking on, unable or unwilling to act. Only a
minority
of the crowd would ever spot the reference, so I would then stop and talk to these people about it, and explain to them that they were my target audience, and that the show was not really aimed at the rest of the room. The same Chortle punter who described me as ‘the worst comedian I have ever seen’ said my act was aimed
exclusively
at ‘atheist, comic book reading, Morrissey fan nerds’. This is, of course, entirely accurate, and I am delighted that my
marketdriven
attempts to win the loyalty of this key consumer base came across.
If you didn’t get that reference, this show isn’t really aimed at you. You may enjoy it anyway, the words and shapes, but it isn’t aimed at you. This is not for you. You are welcome to stay. But this is not for you.
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Someone emailed me after the Edinburgh run of 41st Best in the big top quoting an exchange in Bristo Square after the show, where a disgruntled punter had come up to me and said, ‘I didn’t enjoy that very much, to be honest,’ and apparently I’d said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you expect me to do about that now.’ I don’t remember this. Although I regret wasting people’s time, the work is what it is, and I can’t go back in time and change it now. I am like The Watcher myself in that respect.
So I was on this programme, right, the hundred best stand-ups of all time. And I came in at number 41, and I was very, I was very surprised to be placed, I was very pleased to be placed, um, er, you know, I’m not exactly a household name. I’m the only person on that list of the hundred best stand-ups of all time who regularly plays in this venue, for example. And is glad of the work, is glad of the work.
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No matter how big or prestigious the venue I was playing, this line would always get a laugh. Most people think we are all doing much better than we really are. But you can be a megastar in the Edinburgh Fringe and find your mother’s friend still doesn’t believe you when you say you are doing well, otherwise she would have read about you in the paper.
Um. I was surprised to be placed. I’ve had a sort of an odd relationship with the press. In fact, when this show was running in London in December, I got a review describing me as looking like a squashed Albert Finney. Nine years previous to that, the same paper, the London
Evening Standard,
described me as looking like a
crumpled
Morrissey. And it’s good, you can see a kind of trend developing there of comparing me unfavourably to
various
stocky, greying celebrities in increasingly terrible states of physical distress. And a squashed Albert Finney is arguably worse than a crumpled Morrissey. As a
crumpled
Morrissey, there’s the possibility the Morrissey could be straightened out, put to work. But, er, a squashed Albert Finney is of no value. Except perhaps as a coaster made of meat. Um. Or a white pudding, as I believe you Scots would call them.
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It is a shameless hack move to open a set with a line like, ‘Hey! I know what you are thinking – it’s the bastard love child of Mark Knopfler and Iris Murdoch,’ or whatever combination of
recognisable
faces one resembles, and something I suspect vulnerable young people are encouraged to do on these stand-up comedy courses that they have now. But here I disguise this same hack move as a
discussion
of some admittedly genuine reviews. In the past I have been described as looking like Ray Liotta, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edwyn Collins, kd lang, Morrissey, Albert Finney and a heraldic lion or lamb on a medieval tapestry (by Richard Herring); and I have
irritated
members of the public, who will not take no for an answer, by denying that I am Mark Lamarr, Roland Gift, Ben Watt from Everything but the Girl, Terry Christian, Todd Carty, the bloke who committed suicide that Todd Carty replaced in EastEnders, and the lead singer of UB40. Basically, they half-recognise me because of my carefully cultivated F-list celebrity status, and their brains
misfile
me into the nearest possible fit.
My mother pointed out that I looked like Terry Christian in the early eighties, before he was even famous, when he was interviewed as a teenager by Gus MacDonald on an ITV discussion show about young people’s attitudes. ‘That boy looks like you, but less scruffy and miserable,’ she said, and the comparison went on to haunt me. I had a twenty-minute conversation with a polite man in a Thai
restaurant
in Stoke Newington in 1999, during which I gradually
realised
that when he was asking about my cancelled television series and absence from our screens he actually thought I was Terry
Christian
, and it got to the stage where it would have been embarrassing for both of us for me to explain that I wasn’t. Instead, I continued to pretend to be Terry Christian, improvising successfully around my limited knowledge of Christian’s current projects, until the man paid and left. Perhaps I should have carried on being Terry Christian from that point. We have aged in the same way, same receding hair, same sagging jowls, though I am fatter than him. Perhaps I could have faked a Manchester accent, killed Terry Christian, usurped him and lived his life, like Martin Guerre or the bloke in Mad Men.
Last year, I found myself sitting next to the Fine Young
Cannibals
’ Roland Gift, who is of mixed race, outside a crêpe stall in Edinburgh. Like some kind of delusional fantasist, I said, ‘I expect you find this hard to believe, but I have been mistaken for you in the past.’ He said, ‘I think you look more like Ali Campbell from UB40.’
In order to save waste, I recycled a variation on this mistakenidentity theme in my 2009/10 show, If You Prefer a Milder Comedian Please Ask for One, adding Hattie Jacques and a thirties newspaper cartoon of Tarzan’s face to the lookalike list.
So it was weird, I was surprised to be placed, number
41, I thought, ‘It’s not bad’, you know, number 41, it’s quite good. And in fact soon after that list was announced, Bernard Manning, who was in the top forty, he died and I thought that meant I would move up a position. But it wasn’t the case, even with, er, a letter-writing campaign to the family; they were distressed, if anything. ‘Why, why are you doing this? Please stop.’
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I’m sure the tone and delivery of this ‘Why, why are you doing this? Please stop’ is copied from somewhere, but I can’t place it. It sounds like something the comedian and man Richard Herring would have said, or at least would have had said to him on
numerous
occasions, in his everyday life.
So you know, it’s great. I’m not joking, I was pleased, I was pleased and surprised, but you might have a similar experience to me. You might be supposed to be good at something, but it doesn’t necessarily count for anything with your family ’cause they know who you really are. And my mother, for example, is still as ashamed and embarrassed as she ever was of me being a stand-up comedian. It’s not something that she’s interested in, stand-up comedy. My mum’s main area of interest is quilts.
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Making quilts and talking about making quilts. And a new kind of quilt she’s been making lately, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, it’s called a quillow. And that is a quilt which rolls up into a pillow. Although it comes with its own unique set of problems, ’cause if you think about it, for a relaxing night, you need both … you need both a quilt and a pillow. So with the quillow, you either are cold with a comfortable neck, or are warm with backache. And the only solution, of course, is to use two quillows – in many ways, defeats the unique selling property of the quillow – or alternatively, to revert to the traditional quilt–pillow combo.
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My mother is unpredictable and mysterious, like God or the sea. She talks to me for hours about things I am not interested in, such as golf, and then quietly and fascinatingly becomes a master quilt-maker, fashioning award-winning quilts inlaid with beautiful designs, without really ever seeing fit to mention it.
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I am being facetious of course. The quillow is superb.