How I Escaped My Certain Fate (30 page)

*
Here I suppose I am playing the religious right, our tormentors, at their own game. Holy figures, like Jesus, are vessels for carrying whatever message is poured into them. People with particular
political
ends attribute their own beliefs to these avatars and impose their own values on them. Here, instead of allowing the religious right to monopolise him, I am co-opting Jesus to my own ends, and my ends involve establishing that I am the new Jesus.

†
Here is an unselfconscious echo of every hero myth ever written, from King Arthur to Star Wars, where the role of the champion is passed on to the unwilling youth. Again, it also reincorporates the ‘I am not saying I am Jesus’ riff, last seen after the mosque-
fartatrocity
bit in last year’s Stand-Up Comedian set, but with its
origins
in Lee and Herring double-act material. The key here was to play it with absolute sincerity. In last year’s set, it was a knowing joke, from behind which I winked out at the audience. This time around I was asking them to consider the suggestion that in my mentally deranged state, I think I may have been handed the
mantle
of ‘the new Jesus’ by Jesus himself, in order to combat injustice. ‘Take this cup away from me!’ 

*
Again, like the Ang Lee routine in last year’s show, this was another moment where I had to kind of forget what I was trying to say, and approach it in a new way every night. Groping towards the right words to express the idea, in real time, I’d meet the audience halfway. 

*
Wherever I was I would play off the ‘humble’ venue I was in against the grand one round the corner. ‘Humble’, it must be said, is another very Richard Herring word, as is ‘vain’, as we established earlier. Richard writes comedy in the vocabulary of a sexually
frustrated
Methodist preacher, and his influence upon me is once again apparent. On this recording I use the Cardiff Millennium Centre, which is the most conceited and inhospitable venue in Britain, and the Chapter Arts centre, which is lovely, as the vain and humble venues, respectively. Pretty much anywhere will do to make the limited-wheelchair-access joke, as the audience’s assumption is always that wheelchair access is limited, even when there’s
wheelchairs
all around them.

Again, I had to play the wheelchair joke straight, so that it was about the suffering of the harassed healer, namely me or Jesus, and not making fun of the wheelchair users. If you played it straight, as if the presence of wheelchair users were a terrible inconvenience to a mystical healer, you could do it to a row of wheelchairs and not worry. If you played it for laughs, you couldn’t. It was about my pain. It had to be inclusive, not exclusive. On a good day, this is the difference between Ricky Gervais and Jim Davidson, a difference Davidson fails to grasp and one which, to be fair, becomes
increasingly
irrelevant to Gervais’s audience too as it grows larger and less finessed. 

*
So here’s a thing. This image of Jesus bearing the drunken
narrator
seems, admittedly, disrespectful towards Christ’s sufferings whilst carrying his own cross to Calvary, but, on the other hand, you’re going to have to know your New Testament fairly well to get it.
Hopefully
, it flatters the biblical knowledge of some of the very people who might be offended by it, putting them in something of a quandary. Also, it seems important that Jesus is supporting me, helping me.

†
Here I am beginning the process of humanising Jesus, and
making
him physical, ready for our pungent encounter in the toilet. ‘He liked the warmth, the human contact.’ One imagines he would, after centuries as a bloodless metaphor. Let’s make him real and see what that would actually mean. Though it was not a decision I was aware of making during the writing process, I wonder how much of the effect of this decision to place a physically real Jesus in a world of drunkenness and vomiting was a subconscious attempt to ape the idea of ‘the Word made flesh’. Part of the charm of the gospels is to do with the story of a divine figure who chooses to engage with the physical world. And here he is doing it again.

I wrote a story at school, when I was fifteen, about finding a dead African baby in the park on Christmas Day, in which I described its body in terms of Christmas paraphernalia – crackers, streamers, turkey bones. No one knew whether to punish me for poor taste or give me a prize for having a social conscience. Twenty years later, I am doing the same thing as a stand-up, trying to give form to an abstract idea.

I suppose this is what all stand-up, what all comedy, what all satire does. You take an idea and say, ‘What if this was actually real, what would it be like?’ If Jesus was really the loving and wise Jesus of the New Testament, rather than the angry and judgemental Jesus of the Christian right, then just as he fraternised with prostitutes and tax gatherers so he would help me, the drunken blasphemer comedian, home. 

*
To a degree this is deliberately provocative. One of the planks in the Christian right’s case against Jerry Springer: The Opera was that we had portrayed Jesus as gay. We hadn’t. We had written a lengthy dream sequence in which the titular talk-show host is forced to confront his demons and his guilt in the form of an imaginary chat show set in hell, where the symbolic figures from Judaeo-Christian mythology all appear with problems of the sort one might see on an American talk show. An audience of demons taunts Jesus for supposedly being gay, and he counters, ‘Actually, I am a bit gay,’ over a dancing, dainty rhythm that ensured it always got a laugh.

Richard Thomas wrote this line. I remember him singing this
new section through for the first time in his damp and cluttered studio under a Brixton railway arch, where he would urinate into pint glasses and then hide them under piles of rubbish, rather than make the lengthy journey to the dark toilet, some five metres away outside the door. It was an irresistibly funny bit, but we knew we would be challenged over it, so we needed to get our defence straight in our heads. First of all, it didn’t really matter what it meant, as it was happening in a vivid fever dream, as a result of taunts by devils, as Jerry’s life flashed before him in-between the moment he is shot and the moment he dies. Secondly, we decided that we wanted our Jesus to speak for all mankind and embody many varied fragments of all human sexuality.

It wasn’t a line I felt I personally could have submitted to the opera, as it flirts with a kind of schoolboy homophobia, albeit ironically and in the mouths of demons, whom one assumes aren’t operating to a contemporary moral agenda, and are in the dream of a dying talk-show host anyway. But Richard is 100 per cent gay, without a straight bone in his body, so it was up to him to use these words if he wanted to. I seem to remember that he has come out to his family, but if this is not the case, I do apologise for breaking the news so clumsily here.

The character of Stewart Lee on the doorstep here, unsure of whether to ask the vision of Jesus in, in case he assumes he is propositioning him, is an exaggerated form of myself, so worried about what is the politically correct course of action that I may end up making a massive social blunder. This Stewart Lee doesn’t want Jesus to assume that he thinks he is gay, but if Jesus is gay, he also doesn’t want Jesus to think he has a problem with that. The joke is on me here, but I distanced Jesus from the suggestion that he is gay via my own panicked assumptions about his sexuality.

†
It’s important that I feel I’ve betrayed Jesus by being hesitant about asking him in. I need to establish that there’s a kind of bond developing. This moment also deliberately echoes Peter’s denial of Christ after his capture. The suffering servant knows we will betray him, but forgives us and loves us all the same.

*
Despite the obscenities that follow in the next fifteen minutes, many people would talk to me after the show about this
‘cat’sfeet
towel’ idea, about how they had had cat’s-feet towels in their childhood homes, or that they had one now. The cat’s-feet towel becomes more important as this routine drags on, an island of domestic normality in the midst of a horrific nightmare. 

I discovered the comedic power of the cat’s-feet towel entirely by accident, while looking to give the story of my imaginary
encounter
with Jesus in my mum’s toilet the ring of truth by loading it with vividly remembered local detail. We had a cat’s-feet towel in the toilet, so I put it in the story. I didn’t realise how strongly people would identify with it. I had a brief taste, by complete accident, of what it must be like to be Michael McIntyre at Wembley, on a
massive
screen, talking about a drawer full of insulating tape. Ironically, I am reliably informed that Michael McIntyre doesn’t actually have a ‘man drawer’, and invented the concept in order to ridicule
ordinary
people, for whom he has nothing but haughty contempt.