I am feeling much better now after just a few hours of relaxation. Walking up the hill towards the shops today I was full of energy and felt super healthy. Once again as I discovered three weeks ago there is nothing like being ill to make you appreciate being well. I was getting so high off of the feeling that I worried I might become addicted to being ill, just so that I could experience the joy of being well again afterwards. I hope that I can stay well for the Fringe though. I am seriously beginning to believe that I will continue my vomit enforced healthy living. Can I really get through the whole festival without a drink of alcohol? Or will I be breathalysed and deported from Scotland for sobriety?
I was going to work today and I did write something of a lengthy blog in the morning, but on getting back to the flat (after taking my suits in to be altered and buying some groceries) I decided it would be a much better idea to take the day off. It is the first day for some good while that I haven't had to be dashing around and doing gigs or puking in a toilet full of my own diarrhea and I correctly ascertained that it would be much more helpful to rilll out. Though I suppose I didn't quite make a complete escape from my work because I did spend most of the afternoon and evening finishing off Stewart Lee's excellent book. Yet it felt great to be engaging with a book at all. I love reading, but when I am working get too easily distracted or tired and give up on things easily. But today I had the time to luxuriate and enjoy this self-aggrandising myth that Lee (
the Midas Magpie - if I use that enough I hope it will catch on) has created. It's required reading for any comedian or real comedy fan and throws up all kinds of interesting debates about the purpose of comedy. If you read only one comedy book this year then it has to be this one. I know that I have a comedy book out this year.
It's a shame that, as far as I recall, Stewart doesn't quote the brilliant Simon Munnery line, "Stewart Lee, who is not as clever as he thinks he is... but then, who is that clever?", though he does put in many great comments from that particular comedy genius and plenty of disparaging remarks. And he is pretty clever.
Is he right to want to move away from recognisable jokes - for me one of the delights of watching him is that he will occasionally be skittish and do a more traditional joke and that will be really funny, because it's the last thing you expect. Laughter is about surprise and it's good after 45 minutes of a man rolling on the floor backstage repeating the word "fish" over and over again (I deliberately choose the cliched word "fish" there, to infuriate and satirise Lee there - it's the word he would find least funny) to get a knock knock joke.
Lee has an amusing disdain for the general public, based on the fact that sometimes an idiot will ruin a gig or shout "Moon on a stick" at him (mistaking him for
Shappi Khorsandi who he increasingly resembles) and like the magpie that he is has tried to copy Daniel Kitson by affecting a desire to jettison these twats from his audiences. It is something I can sympathise with and I like the security of having a smaller group of people who "get" me coming to the show, but I don't think there is anything wrong with trying to reach a mass audience with something that is still brilliant and comedically rigorous. In fact I think that might be the ultimate goal. It's something that Morecambe and Wise definitely achieved at their best and arguably also Spike Milligan, Reeves and Mortimer, John Cleese and Ricky Gervais. And Stewart, like a maggot in a wound, needs the McIntyres and the Peter Kays in this world or he becomes redundant. There can only really be one Stewart Lee in any comedy scene because if everyone was doing what he was doing you would need a Stewart Lee to come along and do the opposite. Whilst he pushes further away from recognisable forms of comedy like a USS Enterprise in an ill fitting suit on a continuing mission to find strange new worlds, I wonder if there might be an interesting and alternative journey to be taking where a comedian attempted to create a show that was not post-modern or deconstructive or taking the piss out of how bad jokes were, and tried to do a show that was original and funny and didn't try to have its cake and eat it as both Stew and me and a lot of other modern comics manage to do. I think in many senses Stew might be on the way to that in any case. A lot of what he writes about is the purity of comedy and what makes something funny. It is adolescent to destroy what others have done, but maybe in middle age it is possible to try and create something new, which doesn't rely on pointing out the flaws in something or someone else.
You can go down the route of "Aren't jokes shit? Let's subvert them" which is something Stew and I have spent the last two decades doing and which also provide the fuel for most of Ricky Gervais' work (laughing at people whose sense of humour is crap or wrong) and nothing wrong with that. But wouldn't it be interesting to try and write a show that wasn't about that and which didn't undercut itself, but which was genuinely and beautifully funny?
I say all this in a bit of a blur because the book made me consider the nature of comedy and Stew's shows, most of the material in which I was seeing for the first time were properly, brilliantly funny. I just wondered if the more dangerous and exciting artistic leap was to attempt to confront the people you feared and to make them laugh, at stuff that you could be proud of. Perhaps it is impossible. And I was thinking about more for myself than for Stewart who I hope will continue to do what he's doing, because it is properly exciting.
Having finally read these routines though I was surprised (but then again not surprised) by how much Stew and me have chanced across the same themes and sometimes the same jokes independently. I don't think he ever saw Christ on a Bike, but his "90s comedian" ends with him and Jesus having a long conversation and I am looking forward to the first journalist who writes that my show has been clearly influenced by his, even though I wrote mine four years before he wrote his.
We are bound to come up with similar ideas after working together for so long and creating our comedic philosophy together.
But not everyone can see this. I remember, Brian Logan, my old friend, insisted that the bit I did about being wanked off by the stigmata of Jesus had to be influenced by Stew's routine about vomiting into the anus of Christ, but it really wasn't. I hadn't even seen the routine. I knew it existed I suppose, but my idea came up independently through ad libbing about having sex with wounds. But of course Stew and me did several tour shows together, where we would work in the same manner, ad libbing and wrong footing each other every night and taking some routines where we tried to push an idea so far that it would be delightfully and breathtakingly offensive. We have both taken this on in our solo acts, but now we attempt to shock and surprise and amuse ourselves with last minute ad libs that even we ourselves are not anticipating.
If I were to write a book like this about what has shaped my comedy philosophy (which I clearly won't now, because Stewart has done it so well and has a much clearer and better comedy philosophy than me and I would look stupid) I would certainly concentrate more on the early days that Stew skips over as a sometimes embarrassing irrelevance. The year I did the Oxford Revue and all the much documented (elsewhere in this blog) incidents that occurred with the furious stand up comedians berating us left deep scars and changed my comedy forever. Not entirely in a bad way, eventually at least, but it made me suspicious of stand ups and stand up and made me less inclined to engage with it for a long time. If I went to therapy I think that much of my future life, career and personality would probably have been shaped by Keith Allen almost making me cry on national television and a group of performers who claimed to be trying to wipe out the injustice of prejudice and making assumptions about groups based on stereotypes, venting their understandable annoyance with the system against some 19 year olds who were not to blame for what had happened and ironically enough did not conform to the stereotype that the comedians assumed they must.
I can't really blame them in hindsight, it's just interesting. And it turned me from a fairly confident comedy lover who played high status characters and was already a bit suspicious of stand up (preferring the TV sketch shows of Python and the Young Ones which is all I had known) into a somewhat insecure individual who now played low status characters and who felt that all stand ups hated him.
Stewart had a similarly, though not as extreme rough ride the next year, but had cleverly already seen the possibilities of stand up.
But I can't help wondering if subconciously part of my desire to return to this city every August is about somehow proving myself or proving those bullies wrong or something.
I worry if I think about it too hard everything will fall apart, so we'll leave it there, but it did take me a decade and a half to get anywhere near feeling comfortable amongst other comics.
It is fascinating and scary to think back to this stuff and obviously all of this gives a different dimension to Stew's book for me. But if you read this, which you apparently do, then you will definitely get something from his book.
If only a sense of inferiority.
And by the way, (I will do an extended footnote about myself, like I am some kind of a Stewart Lee) the phrase "moon on a stick" was not invented by Stew and me - it is an existing phrase, generally used by our grans, which we used to use a lot in conversation, which made us laugh and which it took us almost forever to realise we should probably use in a show. Shappi never saw our show and hadn't heard us use it (it all happened a long time ago) and came up with it as a title independently. She would have been insane to use it if she had known that it had been briefly popular amongst a minority of students in 1996. She is welcome to this poisoned chalice that still haunts us 14 years on.
If you see Stewart Lee do say "Moon on a stick" to him though, he loves it. Don't say it to me though. I didn't want the moon on a stick. Stew did. Say it to him. It will make him happy.
