Life and Laughing: My Story (2 page)

The teacher enquired again. No response. A third time she asked. You could cut the pungent atmosphere with some safety scissors.

Still nobody came clean about their dirty little secret. Then the teacher announced something that I think is the reason I remember this moment still to this day. She said that if nobody would own up, then everyone must, in turn, pull their pants down to prove it.

Horror. I couldn’t believe this. How humiliating. In fact the thought of it nearly made me shit myself. A Chinese kid gasped and dropped his tambourine. One by one, around the circle, we had to stand up and reveal our bottoms to the music group. The tension may have damaged me for life. I remember this unbearable swelling of fear as my turn approached. I frantically scanned the room for the crapping culprit. I ruled out the teacher, although I had my doubts about the elderly woman on the piano. I pinned my hopes on this kid who had a permanently solidified snotty nose. I think everyone can recall the kid in their class at pre-school with a permanently solidified snotty nose. Well, my class had one. He was about four kids to my right, and I prayed it wasn’t just the nose area he’d let himself down in.

My prime suspect stood up, seemingly in slow motion, and burst into tears. It WAS him! Thank God. I was saved, but the experience has been permanently etched on my mind. Incidentally, if you were in that circle and were one of the kids who had to pull their pants down, please get in touch. I’d love to know how your life turned out.

It is odd how we remember scenes from our childhood at random. Your first few years are, of course, a total blank. I’ve got two sons, who are four years and one year old, and they aren’t going to remember any of their lives so far. I was going to take them to a museum today. Why bother? I might just send them to their rooms until they’re old enough to remember some of this effort I’m putting in.

So everything prior to Poo-gate is a mystery to me. I have to rely on my parents, old photographs and Wikipedia to fill me in. According to
Wikipedia
, I was born in 1976 on 15 February. However, according to my mother, it was 21 February 1976. I don’t know who to believe. One thing they both agree on is that I was born in Merton. I think that’s in South London. I’m flabbergasted by this news as I am a North Londoner through and through. My opinion about South London is exactly the same as the opinion of South Londoners towards North London: ‘How can you live there? It’s weird.’ I get a chill when I drive over Hammersmith Bridge. I feel as though I’m entering a different world. I wonder if I need a passport and check that my mobile phone still has a signal. The roads seem to be too wide, they don’t have parks, they have ‘commons’, and everyone looks a bit like Tim Henman’s dad.

(I’ve just realized that I have to be careful about how much personal information I reveal. I think there’s already enough to answer most of the security questions at my bank and get access to all my accounts.)

I have details about my birth from my mother, who says she was there for most of it. I weighed 8 pounds and 11 ounces. I’m telling you that because the weight of babies seems very important to people. No other measurement is of interest: height, width, circumference – couldn’t give a shit. But the weight is must-have information.

I was a big baby. My mother tells me this, and so does everyone else when they learn of my opening weight. Like it was my fault, I let myself go, I could have done with losing a few ounces, a little less ‘womb service’ and a little more swimming and maybe those newborn nappies wouldn’t have been so tight.

Not only was I a big baby, I was also remarkably oriental in appearance. Nobody really knows why I looked like Mr Miyagi from
The Karate Kid
and, let’s be honest, my appearance has been the source of quite a lot of material for me. A midwife asked my mother if my father was Chinese or Japanese. My grandparents thought my parents took home the wrong baby. Questions were asked about my mother’s fidelity. My father beat up our local dry cleaner, Mr Wu.

My mother wondering whether she’d accidentally picked up a Super Mario Brother from the hospital.

Every year I, like you, celebrate my own birth and the fact that I am still alive on my birthday. This is always a very emotional day for my mother, who annually telephones me throughout the day reliving my birth. She calls without fail at about 3 a.m. telling me that this is when her waters broke, and I get phoned throughout the morning and afternoon with her updating me on how far apart her contractions were. At 5.34 p.m., I get my final phone call announcing my birth, and then she reminds me that I was ‘8 pounds 11 ounces, a very big baby’.

Since I became a comedian, she now adds that the labour ward was also the scene of my very first joke. Apparently, when I was only a few minutes old, the doctor lay me down to give me a quick examination, and I promptly peed all over him. I’m told it got a big laugh from the small audience that included my mother, father, the midwife and the doctor. Knowing me, I probably laughed too.

It was the first laugh I ever got.

2

Why do I look foreign? Let’s examine my heritage. My parents are not English people. My father is from Montreal in Canada, and both my mother’s parents were from Hungary. I am therefore a ‘Canary’. I consider myself British. I have only visited Hungary and Canada once.

My one and only visit to Hungary was with my grandmother and my sister Lucy. I was twenty years old, Lucy was eighteen and my grandma was seventy-nine. My grandmother was an eccentric woman, to say the least. Think Zsa Zsa Gabor or Ivana Trump, and you wouldn’t be too far out. She was funny, glamorous and rich. A true character. I will do my best to convey her accent when I quote her.

‘Helllow, daaarling’, that kind of thing.

This is actually how she wrote English as well as spoke it. Born in Budapest, she claims to have ‘rrun avay vith the circuss’ as a child before marrying scientist Laszlo Katz. When the Nazis showed up in 1939, they fled their home country and settled in Roehampton, South London (I would have taken my chances with the Nazis). They lived in a Tudor house. You know, white with black beams. Well, according to my mother, my grandma painted the black beams bright blue until the council made her paint them black again three weeks later. She didn’t speak a word of English when she arrived and learned it from eavesdropping and watching television, much like
E.T
. or Daryl Hannah in
Splash.

‘Hellooo Daaarlings!’ My glamour Gran.

My grandmother was undoubtedly a bright cookie, and her vocabulary soon increased enough for her to get by. However, her accent would still hold her back. Trying to buy haddock at her local fishmonger’s, she would ask politely, ‘Do you hev a heddek?’

Unfortunately, the fishmonger thought she was saying, ‘Do you have a headache?’

‘No, I’m fine, thank you, love,’ he would reply. He thought she was a nutty foreign lady enquiring after his well-being. He was only half right.

The headache/haddock misunderstanding occurred several times until my grandmother burst into tears in her blue Tudor house. She asked her husband through her sobs, ‘Vot iz it vith dis cuntry, vy vont dey give me a heddek?’

My grandfather, whose accent was no better, stormed round to the fishmonger’s. He called the fishmonger a racist and demanded to know why he didn’t give his wife a ‘headache’ when there were several ‘headaches’ in the window. Luckily, the mistake was realized before they came to blows, which would have resulted in one of them having a genuine ‘heddek’.

My grandmother soon became fluent in English, so much so that she became quite the best Scrabble player I’ve ever encountered. She was even better than the ‘Difficult’ setting on the Scrabble App for my iPhone and would repeatedly beat her second husband, Jim, a Cambridge-educated Englishman. She was not only a tremendously talented Scrabbler, but also fiercely competitive and uncharacteristically arrogant when involved in a game, often calling me a ‘loozer’ or claiming she was going to give me a good ‘vipping’ or exclaiming, ‘Yuv got nothing, English boy!’

I enjoyed countless games of Scrabble with her in my late teens and early twenties. Not only did I enjoy the games, but there were serious financial rewards. You see, the Cambridge-educated Englishman was loaded, having made a fortune as a stockbroker. After his untimely death, my glamour gran was left to fend for herself. So I would visit her, and we would play Scrabble. If I won, she would give me a crisp £50 note, and if I lost, she would give me a crisp £50 note. So you see how this was quite an attractive proposition for a poor student. A lot of my friends were working as waiters and in telesales to make extra money, whereas I was playing Scrabble with my grandma at least five times a week.

You might wonder where these £50 notes were coming from. Well, my glamour gran didn’t really trust banks, so when her husband died, she withdrew a lot of money and kept it hidden around her lavish apartment in Putney. I’d open a cupboard in the kitchen looking for a mug and find one at the back packed with fifties. I once found 400 quid in a flannel next to the bath and two squashed fifties when I changed the batteries in her TV remote control.

K
₅
E
₁
R
₁
R
₁
I
₁
T
₁
Z
₁₀

‘Triple vurd score and “E” is on a duble letteer, so that’s sixty-six points. Read it a veep, loozer,’ said my grandmother in a particularly competitive mood as she stretched her lead.

Now, although she was a wonderfully gifted wordsmith in her second language, she never learned how to spell many of the words. Often she would get a word that bore no resemblance to the one she was attempting. The best of which was undoubtedly ‘Kerritz’. It was a sensational Scrabble word. To use the Z and K on a triple letter score and score sixty-six – exceptional. The only problem was that outside of her mind the word was fictitious. It soon transpired that only the two Rs were correct and that the actual word she was attempting was ‘carrots’. I must have laughed for about half an hour.

If I’m honest, I’ve never really been that into history, neither of the world nor of my ancestors. I hadn’t asked many questions about my Hungarian ancestry, and I suppose I must have tuned out if it was ever mentioned prior to my Budapest trip. But the time had come. My grandmother, sister and I were off to half my family’s homeland. Astonishingly, nobody had mentioned to me or my sister that we still had family in Hungary; nor did they mention that they were Jewish.

So when we were met at Budapest airport by a man resembling a stocky Jesus Christ, I assumed he was the cab driver. When he kissed me and my sister all over our faces, I assumed he was quite the friendliest cab driver I had ever encountered. When Grandma told us he wasn’t the cab driver, I thought for a fleeting moment it was Jesus.

‘Heelloo, I im yur Unkal Peeeteer.’ His accent was worse than my grandmother’s.

It turned out Uncle Peter was the son of my real grandfather’s sister, my real grandfather being Laszlo Katz, the Hungarian scientist, and not Jim, the rich English stockbroker who was my grandmother’s second husband and the man who enabled us to afford the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Budapest. Are you following this? I’m not and couldn’t at the time.

Uncle Peter was Jewish. There was no mistaking that. He had the hair and beard of the Messiah and a trait that is stereotypically shared by Jewish men. He had a nose nearly the size of the plane we’d just got off. I didn’t know I had Jewish blood; I always thought that my grandfather was Catholic. In fact, he was. He changed his faith, as Judaism wasn’t all that trendy circa 1940. But nobody told me.

Suddenly I’m Jewish. I instantly started to feel more neurotic and speak with the rhythm of Jackie Mason. I turned to my grandmother, ‘Oy vey, why did you not tell me already? I thought I was Gentile, but I have Jewish blood pumping through my veins. Did you not have the chutzpah to tell me? Did you think I was such a klutz I couldn’t cope with it? You wait till we schlep all the way over here, treating me like a nebbish. This is all too much, I have a headache.’