Tonight I was performing at
Robin Ince's Winterval Festival gig (it's got some convoluted name about prayers for godless children, but I am not sure what it is). I had been planning to do my begat bit from "Christ on a Bike", but it turned out I only had eight minutes, so instead decided to do the baby heaven bit from "Oh Fuck I'm 40".
I couldn't really remember how it went though so watched
my new DVD to find out what I said. I don't usually watch these DVDs back and trust the gofasterstripe team to edit them together. I just find it too tedious and usually embarrassing to review my own performance. Indeed I found myself to be a little too tetchy and sweary in certain sections of the bit I watched, which annoyed me very slightly.
But there was a bit of a surprise in there. As I talked about the idea of us all having won the cock lottery, the dvd cuts to an audience reaction shot and though it flashed by quite quickly I thought I had seen myself in the crowd, laughing at my own joke. In a bit that discusses the possibility of lots of tiny semi-clones of us existing in some sort of limbo because their sperm failed to make it to the egg it was strange to see another me in the room enjoying the joke I had just told.
I rewound to check I wasn't dreaming, but sure enough, there I was, in my striped jumper, chortling away, somewhat arrogantly at the joke I had just told on stage. Did I have a doppelganger? Had I just run very quickly from the stage to the back row of the theatre, like one of those kids at the school photo who realises it is possible to appear at both ends of the picture due to the camera scrolling to fit everyone in? Perhaps technology has wiped out this phenomenon.
It was none of these things. I had been in the audience of the second recording of that night, the marvelous
Tony Law - highly recommended and clearly the editor had snipped a bit of my reaction to his show and slipped it into mine. I presumed that this was a joke perpetrated by the fecund gofasterstripe supremo Chris Evans (not that one), seeing this perhaps as a Hitchcock style cameo by myself in my own DVD. Or possibly highlighting what it would be like to have clones of oneself. Or just out of sheer silliness in the hope that some fan would spot me arrogantly laughing at myself. It was a bit of a jolt to notice it, but I found it funny. And to be honest the chances of me ever having seen it were low to none. Chris knows that I don't watch most of the stuff back and for all I know could have filled all my DVDs with injokes at my expense, or people shouting out offensive heckles, or subtitles which say "Richard Herring is a fucking twat!" all the way through.
I emailed him to congratulate him on his situationalist prank, but he emailed back to say that he had no idea that this had happened. The editor had cut in the audience reaction shots and clearly for some reason, either by accident or design, had used some of the reactions from Tony's gig in my DVD (I think his gig went a bit better than mine and the audience were a bit more warmed up - ie Tony was much funnier - so maybe she did it to jolly my video along a bit). Yet without realising it (I am guessing) she had failed to spot that one of the clips she had included was actually of me. I had different clothes on and was in semi darkness.
But how funny and meta-textual that I am there laughing at myself. You must go and take a look if you've got the DVD. And if you haven't got the DVD, why not? And go and buy it.
The gig itself was a lot of fun, though my appearance was brief. I had been told that there would be food backstage, but by the time I rolled up the band and the other comedians and scientists on the bill had scoffed all but a few scraggy, hardening egg sandwiches with curling edges. So I drank red wine instead. A hungry Josie Long went out and bought a tube of Pringles and offered me one. It struck me as I ate the giant round crisp, just having supped on my red wine, that this was rather like an atheist version of Holy Communion. I opened my set with the observation adding that if church's gave out Pringles rather than those horrible round tablets of unleavened bread mixed with magic hippy flesh that they might be doing rather better for themselves. After all, once you pop you can't stop.
It proved to be a good opening to an enjoyable set (my original opening line - "I have a nice philosophy about religion. I think all religions have got it right, when they say that all the other religions are wrong"- had to be hastily dumped after Stewart Lee began his set with a spookily similar observation. Even all these years on we do still tend to come up with similar ideas and it is always independently as far as I can tell.
I also ad-libbed rather a nice bit about how stupid it is that God punishes us for sexual misdemeanours, having created us with sexual desires in the first place only to chastise us if we act upon them. For example, sodomy is perceived such a crime that the town that gave it its name had to be destroyed, but God created us in the first place. He made it so that it was possible and pleasurable (if that's your bag) to have anal sex. He has to take responsibility as the manufacturer and must have known that this was always going to be a possibility. I suggested maybe that He knew all along what He was doing and that He loves it when we do it. The Godless crowd enjoyed my blasphemy. We'll find out when I'm dead what God thought about it. If He laughs it off we'll know there's no truth in the accusation, but if He chooses to burn me in a big lake of fire I think we can only come to the conclusion that my comments were a bit close to home for the gigantic voyeur, who is at least guilty of entrapment. I hope that if there is a God he is able to laugh about Himself. But maybe He's just mentally ill after all and enjoys zapping us, like a child setting fire to ants with a magnifying glass. Spending infinity in a lake of molten sulphur will certainly give me some time to reassess my views. No time off for good behaviour. As far as I am concerned a sentence of infinity must mean infinity. The minute you make the punishment finite it loses all meaning.
It was pretty cool to be on the same bill as people as diverse as the rationalist Richard Dawkins and the superstitious Andrew Collings. Whilst Collings sounded just like Mr Bean, Dawkins' voice is reminiscent of Professor Yaffel from Bagpuss. He didn't do the dismissive laugh, but then he doesn't really need to, as most of his career is just one big dismissive laugh to the religious.
There was a lot of beauty and intelligence in the room tonight and a proper celebration of life. There is no need for God in this world any longer. Perhaps we needed him to get this far and to prevail against the harshness of the world. He helped us survive, I am sure, when life seemed bleak and pointless. But if we're going to survive any longer I believe we're going to have to do without Him. It was nice to believe there was once a celestial pilot guiding the Earth, but now we must understand that we're flying this plane and no one is going to arrive on a cloud and sort things out for us. We've got to take control or the whole planet is going down.
Congratulations to Robin Ince for organising this extraordinary series of events.
