How I Escaped My Certain Fate (7 page)

*
The more fun I could have with the punters here, getting them to join in the party atmosphere, the funnier and more
disconcerting
it would be to hold the silence after the celebrations were over and then shift the mood by beginning to talk about the tragedy of the World Trade Center whilst still draped in party-popper
streamers
. Reading this now it probably seems in poor taste, and perhaps it was when it was written, but three years after 9/11, when I first began performing this show, the event was still inescapable on a daily basis, percolating even apparently unrelated media. It had changed everything, as the cliché goes, but often in the strangest places. There was a bizarre Marvel comic where Spider-Man and The Avengers deferred to the true heroes, the firemen and the police, as they contributed to the clean-up operation. I’m a huge Marvel Comics fan, but had I lost someone on the day, even I might have felt this was an inappropriate tribute (though it’s always good to know that a fictional character who has been given the ability to climb walls by the bite of a radioactive spider shares your pain). Closer to home, I remember talks about scrapping a projection of Bosch-like figures falling down to hell in Jerry Springer: The Opera because suddenly they echoed the tumbling bodies of 11 September. But reminders of the attack were everywhere, intentional and
unintentional
, to the point where it was beginning to lose its meaning. Could the mere mention of it still kill a room stone dead if the
person
mentioning it had streamers in their hair?

*
It’s an ongoing source of annoyance to me that initially
self-contained
jokes and comments are suddenly, and often wilfully, made to seem contentious or offensive by media commentators who reposition them in the orbit of events or shifts in attitudes, subsequent to their telling, which no one could reasonably have foreseen. Again, in Jerry Springer: The Opera, we were required by the producers and stars to rewrite and re-rehearse an existing scene involving a severed head after a hostage was decapitated in Iraq, the suggestion being that audiences watching this vast, massively
choreographed
, two-and-a-half-hour spectacle might assume the
severed
head scene had been rapidly included that week specifically in the interests of appearing topical and tasteless. Soon after the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately I saw an episode of Most Haunted, Living TV’s ethically dubious ghost provocation show in which the restless souls of the dead are taunted into activity by entirely unqualified amateur parapsychologists and occasional F-list
celebrities
. In this particular edition, the tormented wraiths suffered the attentions of Gately’s false Irish group and their lucky shit-at-the-wall svengali Louis Walsh, who were taken into some haunted cellars in Edinburgh to search for the spirits of furious Scottish
troglodytes
. Rather than thinking that it was intended either as a
calculated
insult or some kind of misplaced tribute to the now deceased teen idol, who had fled the scene three times in terror during the show, I simply assumed that the timing of the broadcast was
nothing
more than an oversight on the part of the schedulers, and went about my business.

†
The quietly seminal Irish comedian Ian Macpherson, a
formative
influence on my stand-up, used to have a joke: ‘Everyone can remember where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot. I was leaning out of the second-floor window of a book depository in Dallas, Texas,’ or something like that. Similarly, we can all remember where we were when we found out that planes had flown into the World Trade Center. I was on holiday in
Granada
, Spain. And pretty much everything in this routine is true.

*
Watching American responses to the attack on the news in the bar, and later in the hotel room, it was clear that semantic
difficulties
– the unintentionally jingoistic use of the word ‘crusade’, for example – were instantly amplifying existing tensions. Even the numerical naming of the event itself showed how we are divided by a common language.

*
This transcript, remember, comes from a show in Glasgow.
Scottish
audiences, or Scotch audiences as I prefer to call them, like to manufacture unnecessary grievances by wilfully imagining that visiting English comics know nothing about their culture, and that we have assumed everything in Scotland is the same as in England. This is a misconception I am happy to play on by doing
everything
I can to make it appear true. I was always scared of Scottish audiences, especially the legendarily feral ones of Glasgow, until I decided to go out to cultivate an air of deliberate cultural
insensitivity
, which eventually induced their grudging respect.

Likewise, deep in the days of the Troubles, any English
standup
in Northern Ireland was always, understandably, walking on eggshells, many of them deliberately placed in their path by the regular host of Belfast’s Empire comedy club, the TV
personality
Patrick Kielty. Fearless as ever, the legendary Simon Munnery went onstage in Derry in his anarcho-punk Alan Parker Urban Warrior persona and began his set by apologising for English complicity in the potato famine and emptying a compensatory sack of spuds onto the stage. The Irish republicans loved it!
Audiences
can actually enjoy being insulted. If they are abused with enough originality, confidence and verve, the time and trouble an act has taken to disrespect their core values actually appears flattering.

*
I suppose what I was doing here was trying to exploit the tension of discussing something puerile in the midst of something terribly serious, and I would go into greater or lesser detail about the act of weeing depending on the feel of the room. Also, wee is funny,
especially
if the wee is being weed out of a cock. Into a toilet. On 9/11.

*
This is absolutely true. I did feel like I couldn’t make eye contact with the man because of both weeing and the World Trade Center falling down. Similarly, I remember as a thirteen-year-old boy being taken by my mum to see Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi at a cinema in Birmingham, back in the days when they still had intervals in films. After Edward Fox had presided over a massacre of innocent Indian demonstrators at Amritsar, we went and queued in the foyer for an ice cream, the only white people amongst dozens of Brummie Indians, to whom I remember feeling very strongly that I should apologise in some way, firstly for the Amritsar massacre, and secondly for Ben Kingsley blacking up and doing a Dick Emery voice.

†
I did not do a fart at this point during the tragic events of 9/11. But I did have a kind of momentary Tourette syndrome panic that I might do, even though I couldn’t feel any gas pressure in my bowel, and I was terrified at how this might seem utterly inappropriate to the man standing next to me, given the seriousness of the events unfolding on the television in the bar. Once, when I was a teenager, I bumped into a friend in the street who was distraught, having just seen an acquaintance run down and killed, and I remember having an out-of-body experience where I realised that the worst thing I could possibly do would be to laugh, as I became paralysed by the fear that I would do so. Similarly, a few days after a terrible child murder in a grim northern city in the mid-nineties, I found myself floating above myself, looking down on myself while onstage doing stand-up in the said city, and watching as I made idiotic and
insensitive
comments about the incident, and then, as my personalities merged once more, I was greatly relieved to find that I had not said anything of the sort. But my mouth was dry, my tongue large and lifeless, and I was bathed in a cold sweat.

Richard Herring is to be both praised and condemned for having exactly these kinds of mad impulses to say the worst possible thing in any situation, and for somehow lacking the self-censorship
facility
that prevents most of us from acting on them. His mid-nineties flatmate, the Pot Noodle advert actor and disgrace to Wales Peter Baynham, returned home one afternoon, Rich having been
fore-warned
that Pete’s dad had passed away earlier that day. Rich’s first words were ‘Pete, can I just say how delighted I am to hear of the death of your father,’ a bold gamble, but one that was accepted in the spirit it was meant. Since then, Richard has progressed beyond the shock-hack’s default setting of ‘saying the unsayable’ to ‘saying the unthinkable’ and to articulating ideas so sexually and morally twisted that it wouldn’t even occur to the average punter to imagine them, let alone say them.

There was a school of comedy in the nineties where the audience would warm to a comedian who seemed to be expressing opinions and feelings they themselves had had but never expressed. There’s an incredible and admirable skill in doing this, and Michael
McIntyre
perhaps represents its apogee, his rapid-fire observations about everyday life being so accurate and instantly recognisable that he is absolved even of the obligation to develop them into actual jokes. But I’ve always liked the kind of comedy that makes you go, ‘My God, I would never have thought that!’

‡
In long-running shows that I have to perform many times, where there are long sections that need to stay more or less the same to convey dramatically necessary parts of the narrative, I look forward immensely to tiny details that I can change every night to keep myself amused. Each night the mammal and the celebrity in this section would change, as would the exact composition of the fart they had supposedly issued in the subsequent sentence, though it was always necessary for there to be some kind of believable
relationship
between the mammal, the celebrity and the texture of the fart. For me, the ‘vole/Anna Friel/hair and ideas’ combo, the version recorded for posterity here, wasn’t at all as strong as, say, something like ‘shrew/Paul Morley/Vimto and affectation’, whereas ‘stoat/
Victoria
Beckham/custard and regret’ is somehow not quite right at all. Or maybe it is? Cynics think free-associating surreal stuff is easy, but it’s much harder than simply putting the word ‘fish’ into normal sentences at random points, as advertising creatives and whoever wrote the piss-weak parody of The Mighty Boosh in Mitchell and Webb’s cash-in book might want to note.

§
On sticky nights, when the audience were uncomfortable and uneasy and silent, this was usually the point at which things finally swung my way, and the laugh would come like a great wave of relief as people in the room realised I was working towards some kind of point, rather than being gratuitously offensive. Not in Aspen, though.