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Authors: Stewart Lee
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to prosecute us for blasphemy, in-between smashing my head into walls in rage I began to wonder whether there might be a standup show in it. Becoming part of the news itself ought to offer the comedian-victim interesting creative possibilities. Would it be possible to comment, satirically and objectively , on a story, or a scandal, in which you yourself were a character? *
* Out of professional curiosity, I would like to have seen the TV personality Russell Brand’s 2009 stand-up show, Scandalous, in which he talked about his role in the Sachsgate scandal. A BBC producer had mistakenly broadcast a recording of the hairy corncrake telling the elderly character actor Andrew Sachs that he had enjoyed sexual intercourse with his granddaughter, who is one of these Goths that they have nowadays that are sexy. (In a grainy film of the phone call Jonathan Ross can be seen touching himself mysteriously in the background, in an act of magical transference, ingesting psychically the energies of his young buck.) As I say, I would have liked to have seen Brand’s stand-up show, but pretty quickly it became possible to sum up the whole story thus: two overexcited middle-aged men make stupid comments and are then persecuted by a slavering right-wing media to fulfil its own anti-BBC agenda, mobilising ‘decent people’ much in the manner of Christian Voice. And the thought of watching Russell Brand drag this out for an hour, whilst girls threw their bras at him, and then having to read him being described as the ‘closest thing we have to Lenny Bruce’ by Bruce Dessau of the London Evening Standard free-sheet made me, to be honest, bitter and resentful. I would also like to remind you all that despite the fuss about Sachsgate, the most-complained-about broadcast ever remains Jerry Springer: The Opera. I am not proud of this. But if this is a competition, and I have chosen to see it as one for now, I am still on the winning team.
In mid-February, I took a week off the tour to go to America and perform Stand-Up Comedian at the invitation of the Aspen Comedy Festival, which is basically a trade fair for the American TV comedy industry, hosted by HBO. As noted, my show didn’t really work, though Janeane Garofalo and all the cool teeth-grinding radicals liked it, which pleased me no end. The American comics in Aspen were mainly terrible, as usual, and luckily I managed to wriggle out of hosting a showcase full of acts whose worthless material, it turned out, would have made it very difficult for me to introduce them with any degree of enthusiasm and sincerity. But I did get to meet loads of my favourite underground American comic-book creators, who were doing a panel there, and I was smuggled into a rich man’s party, high in a mountaintop mansion, by the persistent and perverted writer Jonathan Ames, whose work I admired enormously. And the festival offered one of the last opportunities to see the brilliant Flight of the Conchords baffle an unprepared American crowd before they broke big, as they silently died in a tent in the afternoon.
But the single best thing about the Aspen festival was a film screening I attended, out of sheer boredom, of a documentary about stand-up called The Aristocrats, by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette. It features clips of over a hundred principally American comics telling variations on a joke known as ‘the Aristocrats’, which concerns an obscene vaudeville act. Gradually, the film becomes a hilarious and often moving treatise on shock, surprise, taste, humour, the art of storytelling and the creative imagination. I became an evangelist for The Aristocrats, writing lengthy pieces on it for the Sunday Times, cannibalised below, and The Wire (see Appendix III).
Apparently, the Aristocrats gag, though never repeatedonstage and unknown in Britain, had been a dressingroom staple of American comics for decades. It begins with a man entering a showbiz agent’s office to pitch him a nightclub act
* Out of professional curiosity, I would like to have seen the TV personality Russell Brand’s 2009 stand-up show, Scandalous, in which he talked about his role in the Sachsgate scandal. A BBC producer had mistakenly broadcast a recording of the hairy corncrake telling the elderly character actor Andrew Sachs that he had enjoyed sexual intercourse with his granddaughter, who is one of these Goths that they have nowadays that are sexy. (In a grainy film of the phone call Jonathan Ross can be seen touching himself mysteriously in the background, in an act of magical transference, ingesting psychically the energies of his young buck.) As I say, I would have liked to have seen Brand’s stand-up show, but pretty quickly it became possible to sum up the whole story thus: two overexcited middle-aged men make stupid comments and are then persecuted by a slavering right-wing media to fulfil its own anti-BBC agenda, mobilising ‘decent people’ much in the manner of Christian Voice. And the thought of watching Russell Brand drag this out for an hour, whilst girls threw their bras at him, and then having to read him being described as the ‘closest thing we have to Lenny Bruce’ by Bruce Dessau of the London Evening Standard free-sheet made me, to be honest, bitter and resentful. I would also like to remind you all that despite the fuss about Sachsgate, the most-complained-about broadcast ever remains Jerry Springer: The Opera. I am not proud of this. But if this is a competition, and I have chosen to see it as one for now, I am still on the winning team.
In mid-February, I took a week off the tour to go to America and perform Stand-Up Comedian at the invitation of the Aspen Comedy Festival, which is basically a trade fair for the American TV comedy industry, hosted by HBO. As noted, my show didn’t really work, though Janeane Garofalo and all the cool teeth-grinding radicals liked it, which pleased me no end. The American comics in Aspen were mainly terrible, as usual, and luckily I managed to wriggle out of hosting a showcase full of acts whose worthless material, it turned out, would have made it very difficult for me to introduce them with any degree of enthusiasm and sincerity. But I did get to meet loads of my favourite underground American comic-book creators, who were doing a panel there, and I was smuggled into a rich man’s party, high in a mountaintop mansion, by the persistent and perverted writer Jonathan Ames, whose work I admired enormously. And the festival offered one of the last opportunities to see the brilliant Flight of the Conchords baffle an unprepared American crowd before they broke big, as they silently died in a tent in the afternoon.
But the single best thing about the Aspen festival was a film screening I attended, out of sheer boredom, of a documentary about stand-up called The Aristocrats, by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette. It features clips of over a hundred principally American comics telling variations on a joke known as ‘the Aristocrats’, which concerns an obscene vaudeville act. Gradually, the film becomes a hilarious and often moving treatise on shock, surprise, taste, humour, the art of storytelling and the creative imagination. I became an evangelist for The Aristocrats, writing lengthy pieces on it for the Sunday Times, cannibalised below, and The Wire (see Appendix III).
Apparently, the Aristocrats gag, though never repeatedonstage and unknown in Britain, had been a dressingroom staple of American comics for decades. It begins with a man entering a showbiz agent’s office to pitch him a nightclub act
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