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Episode Two: 90s Comedian (2006)
1.2k Plays10 months ago
In this episode, Dan and Joe revisit Stew's seminal, revolutionary 2006 work '90s Comedian', which largely deals with the backlash faced by Stew and the composer Richard Thomas in response to their critically acclaimed (and Olivier Award winning) theatre show 'Jerry Springer: The Opera'.
Joe and Dan pick apart the finer points of this set and discuss the themes of censorship and boundaries of taste within it, whilst Dan both has a cold AND manages to find time to admit that Jim Davidson is a better comedian than him (for now).
To get tickets to our live show at Leicester Comedy Festival on February 24th 2024 please visit Across the Stew-niverse: A podcast about Stewart Lee - Leicester Comedy FestivalLeicester Comedy Festival (comedy-festival.co.uk)
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:10
Speaker
Whistling
00:00:34
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Across the Stewniverse podcast, the world's only podcast about the comedian Stuart Lee. My name's Daniel Powell, and this week, myself and my co-host, Joe Kirkwood, will be taking a look at Stu's 2006 special, 90s Comedian. Now, this episode was recorded on New Year's Eve of 2023,
00:01:01
Speaker
and joe and i haven't seen each other for a little while we normally bump into each other sorry at gigs and things like that but we've not seen each other for a little while so before this episode got started properly we had a fairly rambling chat about all the stuff that we'd missed which i have
00:01:20
Speaker
cut for time. However, there are some references to some of the stuff that we talked about in this episode. Now, I haven't decided what I'm going to do with it yet, but if you would like to hear that particular chat, it will be made available
Industry Reactions and Controversies
00:01:35
Speaker
at some point. So we cover topics such as Ricky Gervais' new special, some of our thoughts around that and kind of the thoughts of the wider industry and people within the comedy industry.
00:01:49
Speaker
And also what's kind of been happening at the same time is a bit of an online pylon on the comedian Rosie Jones. Now Rosie's a brilliant female gay disabled comedian and obviously some of those things are a bit of a dog whistle to certain sections of the community. So yeah, Joe and I got into that a little bit and kind of discussed some of that. So there are some oblique references to some of that.
00:02:15
Speaker
within the episode which obviously won't make sense out of context because I've cut the rest of it because otherwise it would have been a four hour episode.
Leicester Comedy Festival Announcement
00:02:23
Speaker
So yeah, other than that, just to do a quick plug, our live episode of the Across This Universe podcast is coming to the Leicester Comedy Festival on the 24th.
00:02:34
Speaker
and tickets for that can be found at the Leicester Comedy Festival website. I myself am doing a work in progress for my show, Breathless. Tickets also on the Leicester Comedy Festival website, that's also on the 24th of February. And Joe, I think, is bringing his show. I think we talk about this in the episode a little bit. I think we also plug it in the episode, so apologies. But Joe is bringing his show to the Leicester Comedy Festival also, which I think
00:03:02
Speaker
is the 16th of February, but again, tickets are available for that on the Leicester Comedy Festival website.
Discussion of Stuart Lee's '90s Comedian' Special
00:03:10
Speaker
So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. This is me and Joe talking about Stu's 2006 stand-up special, 90s comedian.
00:03:24
Speaker
So it brings us quite nicely to the special that we're here to talk about, which is Stuart Lee's 2006 special, 90s comedian. So you have watched it. Now you've done it in the way that you, we talked about last time, watched it in bits because your attention span is that of a child. Yeah, basically. I see something shiny and I go, oh, I'm going to do that instead.
00:03:51
Speaker
So before we dive in, deep dive, line by line, pretentious quoting of this special, overall thoughts, what do you think? So I think partly because I watched it into two halves. I remember late last week when I watched the first part, first half,
00:04:11
Speaker
I immediately didn't enjoy it as much as I did stand-up comedian. Wow! But I think it may have been because like we were discussing last time stand-up comedian has more kind of classic jokes and but I don't know I don't know if it was like
00:04:33
Speaker
maybe it's just that I really enjoyed stand-up comedian. And then when I was coming into this, because it's not exactly the same, even though weirdly starts, they both start with the terror attack. Yeah, well, I was going to mention that. But I think like, but then when I watched the second half, I think the second half of 90s comedian is better than
00:04:59
Speaker
stand-up comedian. I loved the last 20 minutes of this show and you can probably, knowing my style of comedy and what I enjoy, I kind of realized maybe
00:05:18
Speaker
that somehow all comedians take something from Stewart Lee. And like, because I just felt like, I mean, obviously there's a thematic similarity between his and one of my more recognisable bits with it, including Christ himself. But yeah, like,
00:05:42
Speaker
I just thought it was a masterclass like we were talking before where sometimes you don't laugh you just clap because you're just like that is outstanding yeah but I did both like I was in tears at one point that was just it's absolutely insane
00:06:04
Speaker
Right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to package that away for now because the entire last 20 minutes or maybe 30 minutes or whatever, how long it goes on is essentially the kind of climactic sequence of the story. So to run it back, this special is written in response to
00:06:29
Speaker
steward lee facing something of a kind of religious backlash on the back of being the writer or one of the writers and director of richard thomas's jerry springer the opera back in the early 2000s so that's a uh that's the period where he kind of gave up stand-up for a bit and um
00:06:48
Speaker
during this time, he got involved with a guy called Richard Thomas, who's like a composer and he was a comedian and all that kind of stuff. And they wrote this thing called Jerry Springer, the opera, which if you haven't seen it, I genuinely recommend you get a hold of it. It's incredible. You know, regardless of kind of where you stand on religious censorship and all that stuff. And Jerry Springer. Well, yeah, Jerry Springer. But
00:07:11
Speaker
It's a phenomenal piece of work. But anyway, this show is written in the response to the backlash that happened. And I think I've read, I believe that they were getting death threats or at least the producers of it were getting death threats. Certainly the BBC were gonna show it and the producers at the BBC, the executives at the BBC, I think they had to go into hiding. I think the phrase that he uses is 60,000 born again Christians.
00:07:41
Speaker
her trying to have a work band. And basically on the back of that... On the kitchens that have clearly read the Bible and clearly... Yeah, that's it. And that turned me on the cheek. Well, I suppose it's that thing. It's that thing. And like I said, it's quite apt that we're talking about things like the backlash to Ricky Gervais and all that kind of stuff. Because what I don't like is people slagging something off that they haven't seen.
00:08:08
Speaker
or slagging something off that they know nothing about. So what happened to Stuart Lee was that these Christian groups were saying that things were said in this piece that weren't there. He said there's plenty of material in there for you to pick from that's quite offensive, but you've decided to pick something that wasn't even in it. You've decided to lie. To criticize as well, which is unnecessary because there's lots of stuff in there that you could use. But
00:08:31
Speaker
You know, a similar thing was happening with Ricky Gervais. And the one thing I disagree with people on is criticising things just for the sake of criticising them. I like to watch them make an informed decision. Well, you can't criticise them if you haven't seen them because you're quite critical. Exactly. But that's essentially what this special's about.
Lee's Comedic Techniques and Style
00:08:50
Speaker
And that whole half hour section, which we'll get to in a bit at the end, is about essentially pushing the boundaries of taste and decency in the name of kind of pushing back against
00:09:02
Speaker
this type of censorship, which obviously ties up in the end of the special. But we'll start at the beginning. So he comes on stage to, again, fairly, I'd say, abrasive jazz music. It's Miles Davis trumpet solo type thing. And it's not the easiest of listens, which is something he likes to do, just to unsettle the audience. And he's out in line, thank you, it's great to be back.
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah, which is ironic because he's not back. He's not been there. Do you not? So I thought the joke there, because he laughs and it's out of character laughing, is I think the joke is that he's been on stage earlier before that saying, so this is what's going to happen. We've got cameras, blah, blah, blah.
00:09:59
Speaker
And then he's come on and gone, it's great to be back. And then he laughs out of character because unless you've got your Bible that is going to tell me that I'm not. I can tell you, well, what I can tell you is this gets a laugh at the Cardiff tape-in and I'm not sure why. Maybe, as I said, it's because it was an odd Sunday night at the London Palladium type thing to say. And obviously the first thing that he does is he comes on stage and draws a chalk circle.
00:10:28
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah now but he said or maybe it's because this transcript is of the second run at the recording and the audience knew i'd already done the same set in the same venue once already that day maybe so that it wasn't the same audience but yeah so they were aware that there was another one but by the sounds of it he wasn't expecting them to laugh at the opening line yeah okay and i think what i love about this this one in particular and um obviously you can
00:10:57
Speaker
refute if you wish given what you said earlier. The thing I love most about this one is this to me seems to be almost the birth point of a lot of his tropes. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I agree with that.
00:11:15
Speaker
even right at the start, I'm going to tell you a story. It's going to take about an hour and 15 minutes, which is already, you know, he does this in all of his subsequent work where he kind of essentially sets the expectation for what's going to happen. And I think again, it's just to give the game away.
00:11:31
Speaker
Yeah. You know, it's to kind of basically say, this isn't spontaneous. It's a written piece. Yeah. Yeah. He's what's going to happen. Yeah, definitely. You know, he's trying to kind of take that off the table. And then he goes into obviously a little section about if you get bored, you can leave. You know, if you're at home watching this. I think he genuinely believes that. He's just like,
00:11:54
Speaker
Well, as he's kind of shown every single time, as we'll find out, obviously, as we go through these, but every piece that I've seen of his, when people leave, he doesn't take umbrage to the fact that people are leaving. I think he knows deep down what he is and who he is, and he's very comfortable with that fact. And he even puts quotes on his posters to deter people. I think it was Carpet Remnant World or something where he says, it's not him that you don't come again.
00:12:23
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? It's that. Whenever I tell new people about him, I basically say he's a comedian who doesn't really like to write jokes. But he's also a comedian who doesn't want new people coming. Yeah.
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, if anything, he'd rather you not be there. Or at the very least, the character of Stuart Lee, the comedian. Yeah, exactly. It's very important to make that distinction. But when he says things like, if you need to go for a wee, you can do that. I'm not going to pick on you. If you're at home watching this on a DVD, I won't even know it's happening. Yeah, exactly. Then he gets into obviously the story. This is a story of all the things that happened to me this year. And like you say, he starts
00:13:04
Speaker
with a terrorist attack again. Same as with stand-up comedian, obviously, the sort of opening story there was about the September 11th attacks, and this one is about 7-7, the London 7-7. Hold on, the 9th of November. Yeah, exactly. Do you remember where you were, Joe, when 7-7 happened? 2005, I will have been
00:13:28
Speaker
my last year of school. Oh yeah, or a couple of years younger than me, haven't you? Yeah, so I did my GCSEs in 2005. Did you? Yeah, so I might not necessarily have been at school because the exams will have been earlier that year and then you don't really do anything after them, do you?
00:13:51
Speaker
Well, yeah, of course. Then you get all that time off first. It's that sort of age where I was, that's 10 days before my 16th birthday. Right. Okay. Yeah. To be fair, thinking about it is less than a week till I lose my virginity. Wow. So little did he know. Yeah. I don't think the two are linked. Little Joe Kirkwood, little did he know that in order for him to lose his virginity, he'd have to witness a terrible terrorist atrocity.
00:14:20
Speaker
One atrocity begets another. Yeah, exactly, before coming into commit. A crime against sex. Yeah. Which is different from a sex crime. Gone before his time. Which is different from a sex crime, I must say. Yeah, yeah. Now, I was at a music festival in Dublin. Oh, nice. I went to, I think it was called Oxygen Festival. They used to have tea in the park in Scotland, and then they had like a, what they used to call a sister festival in Dublin, which was Oxygen.
00:14:48
Speaker
And we arrived in Dublin on the morning of the 777 bombings. So we were in the air. I think we were in the air when it happened. But you didn't find out about it until you landed. But we didn't find out until we landed. And we were running around Dublin, believe it or not, running around Dublin struggling to find a bar. That is not something you associate with Dublin. That is impressive.
00:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, so we found a bar, we got in there and the TV was on and everybody was dead quiet. We were expecting, I'd never been to Ireland before and I was expecting, you know, blally stone, you know, fucking jig. Of course you are. All the stereotype shit, you know, because of a horrible xenophobe. Yeah. I was expecting all this stuff and we got in there and everybody was just dead sombre and we were like, what is happening? And once they'd got over the fact that we had English accents,
00:15:41
Speaker
they turned the TV up and we all just kind of sat there and watched what was going on. So, you know, much like he describes here, just sort of watching some of the news coverage and stuff, like not really knowing what to make of it. Now, at the time, I was not a stand-up comedian, nor did I have any designs to be a stand-up comedian. So I didn't think about it in the same way that he did. No, obviously. But what if I'm really interested about this 7-7 routine?
00:16:07
Speaker
is he does a thing here where I've seen, you know, we're relatively new in our stand-up comedy journeys. So obviously we're still learning. And I later found out that what he's done, whether consciously or subconsciously, is put a story within the story. Yeah.
00:16:26
Speaker
to kind of punch it up or, you know, add an element to it that kind of changes the tone or dynamic of the story. So he started with the seven, seven stuff. You know, he said, I woke up in London about midday, and I can already sense people saying, of course, you ditched you because you're a lazy standup comedian. Yeah. But then what he does immediately like moves away from the seven, seven story to contextualize why he was in bed till midday, which is where he gets into that, the little story about doing a gig in Lincoln.
00:16:57
Speaker
I don't know if you remember this bit because I think if you've watched it in two settings, this will have been a while ago for you that you saw this. Yeah, last week. Yeah, exactly. So he's basically saying he didn't get until half past three in the morning because he did a gig in Lincoln, which the line goes was optimistically billed as an Edinburgh fringe warmup. Yeah, yeah.
00:17:18
Speaker
And then he tells this story about... Yeah, I mean, the one that immediately springs to mind, and to be fair, it went all right in the end, but the one that immediately springs to mind is when you and I went to Sheffield. And that went all right, you had just been...
00:17:35
Speaker
It went all right, but right up until the last minute before we started the performance, I was like, this is not going to happen. This is not going to go well. I mean, I'm an eternal pessimist, Joe. That's just who I am. Yeah. But yeah, so he tells this story about being in Lincoln in front of 60 people. And a guy made the noise of an animal. Yes. Oh, yes. Which he, you know, he, I think he says something like, which I correctly identified as a sheep.
00:18:05
Speaker
you know, to try and nip that in the bone and stop it from building. And I said, if you want to do any more animal noises, I will correctly identify them. And I think, you know, then the routine goes on to say to them, like, you know, what followed was essentially 40 minutes of them making ever more obscure. Which is what would happen at a gig. Yeah, exactly. Like, I believe, like, what I don't believe is that he
00:18:30
Speaker
that he said it. To be honest, I don't think being as good a comedian as he is that he would say other than for this story that he would open himself up. Do you want another?
00:18:45
Speaker
yeah well he's uh consulting the bible yeah well that's it that's the fair that's the fair enough bit so he said this is this story is entirely true except that the animal noises section of the evening lasted about 20 minutes and not 40 right okay so yeah he probably to be fair if he thinking about it and a regular comedian wouldn't do that but he can he can fall down that rabbit hole
00:19:11
Speaker
Well, not only can though,
Comedic Timing and Tension in Lee's Work
00:19:12
Speaker
right? I can't remember where this phrase came from, but I've heard him say it a bunch of times, but I don't think it's his phrase. I think he's attributing it from someone else, but the phrase is, whatever happens in the room is the gig, right? So even if you've gone in there with the plan of doing this particular material or whatever, you've got a script or whatever you're doing, if the room itself decides to push that in a different direction, that's the gig.
00:19:37
Speaker
You know what I mean? Like if a microphone doesn't work whilst you're trying to eat an apple pie. And your intention is to not speak. That, honestly, that made my night. That sometimes changed. That really made my night. But yeah, so like, you know, what happens in the room is the gig and I think this is an example of him following that and kind of running the gig into the ground, but for the greater purpose of making it an evening for those people. But what I really like about this is when he says,
00:20:06
Speaker
I'd started to wonder if perhaps I'd been wrongly advertised as being a man that would come from London, the city, and correctly identify the animals of Lincolnshire from their sounds alone, in case the people of Lincoln didn't know what we called them.
00:20:23
Speaker
Right. So what it is, for me, this is an incredible, like, this is a level up. Do you remember the last episode when we talked about standup comedian and I had a slight discomfort about in making fun of working class people? Yeah. I think this is a more elevated version of that. And I think it's better. And I think it's much cleverer. Yeah. And more interesting.
00:20:49
Speaker
and funnier. I think that's him showing that he's how you feel as mean-spirited. Here's how you can do a joke about something.
00:20:57
Speaker
have it be almost targeted at those people, however, not in a mean-spirited way. And I just think it's a great line. And he sort of says that after a little while they stopped doing the animal noises and a guy started shouting out catchphrases from a television show that he used to do with Richard Herring that most people have forgotten. He said, and I had to explain to the other confused 59 people in the room,
00:21:21
Speaker
what that was and they started to feel like they were watching a performer in decline. So that was his explanation for why he got up late on the morning and the 7-7 bombings. So he gets back to the 7-7 stuff and he says the first thing I did was I checked all my emails and the first one was from a friend I can't remember it was who he said yes but he said the first the first one was from an American friend of mine so good who just said are you all right so I emailed back yes fine thanks how are you
00:21:52
Speaker
Because obviously at this point, he doesn't understand the gravity of the situation that's unfolding. Yeah, exactly. Which I 100% believe like that. Yeah, exactly. But the brilliant thing is, is obviously he keeps doing this. He's like, I had another one from a friend from New Zealand. Are you all right? So I said, yes, fine. Thanks. How are you? And what I love about it is, again, it's that stylistic trope of Stuart Lee, where it's repetition. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say that earlier.
00:22:22
Speaker
Because it carries on later as well. It's the exact same wording. But I think the difference here is, a lot of the time when he does the repetition thing, it's because you know where he's going. But I think in this instance, you know he's going to pop the balloon.
00:22:37
Speaker
He's gonna release the tension at some point, but I don't think you would immediately know how. Do you know what I mean? So he does it. Friend in New Zealand, are you all right? So I emailed back, yes, fine, thanks, how are you? There was about 15 more all saying, are you all right? Then I checked my text messages, 20 on there, all over Britain, all over the world, and he lists a load of names.
00:22:59
Speaker
And then he just starts repeating the phrase, are you all right? Are you all right? Are you all right? Are you all right? Different cadences and different whatever. And I think I read in the book, I'm not going to pick it up because I think I remember reading this bit anyway, but he said he wanted to kind of forget, almost try and make himself forget what he was saying.
00:23:21
Speaker
by just repeating the phrase, are you all right? Are you all right? Are you all right? And then the point where the tension is released, and he says, now, as you may or may not know, I did have quite a difficult year. Yeah, yeah. Which is fucking brilliant. Because again, it's slightly different now because I only know really about it. I only connected the dots because I know about the issues with
00:23:51
Speaker
Er, Jerry Springer. Yeah, exactly. But this is the thing he knows at the time. It would be much more obvious. At the time his fan base and people attending that recording would have known exactly what he was talking about. Now, but this for me, this is where he kind of gets into, he gets into it a little bit and he sets the scene for essentially what he's going to talk about for the next hour. You know, and he says I had to go to hospital in February, going a bit deaf. And in January, I was the director of Jerry Springer, the opera.
00:24:18
Speaker
became the focus of a hit campaign led by 65,000 right-wing born-again Christians, resulting in the threat of prosecution in the High Court for blasphemy, the collapse of four years working to financial non-viability, so it had been a difficult year.
00:24:33
Speaker
And, you know, he caps that off and basically says, I was touched on my friends had chosen to inquire after me, but it did seem strange that they'd all chosen that morning. Yeah. Which obviously, you know, that's not what they were asking about. But obviously, yeah, like the idea that because because what he's doing there is really clever. Yeah. Because actually, like, he's sort of playing on the, the thought of Sturely the comedian. Yeah.
00:25:00
Speaker
being or that the character is surely always thinking that everything's about him yeah of course yeah but at the same time if you look at it logically if he doesn't know yeah what else would like if you were in that situation what would you think what else would you think because you're not going to instantly think oh there's been a terror attack
00:25:23
Speaker
Well, I suppose there's a slightly different thing there, though, and I don't know about you, but even if two people ask me the same question, I'd propose nothing to steal a Stuart Lee phrase. Yeah, it would be why other people have asked me this. But his assumption is, well,
00:25:41
Speaker
they all must be asking about me but also that that's the genius of the character though isn't it is that he wouldn't even think to ask why yeah he would just accept yeah just they're all inquiring after me because i find this really horrible thing happened to me yeah yeah yeah but then he gets into what for me and i was i must admit joe i was a little bit crushed to hear you say you didn't really like the first half of this but only because
00:26:06
Speaker
What he gets into next is essentially probably one of my favorite ever Stewart Lee routines and it's the Joe Pasquale routine.
00:26:14
Speaker
right, which there's a 10-12 minute version of it on YouTube where he did it later live in Edinburgh for Paramount and it's probably one of the best 10 minute bits I've ever seen. To say that he's someone who does things as part of larger pieces or at least doesn't think that he does bits
00:26:38
Speaker
This is as good a bit as I think I've ever heard from anyone, really. So the Joe Pasquale routine, like I say, he begins by saying that he had to go into hospital because he's got a thing called diverticulitis, and then explains what that is about, you know, it's where your stomach starts to try and poison you, and only very old people usually get it. But then he says, but if you've been a stand-up comedian for 17 years drinking heavily and eating mainly ginster's pies in the night, which I think is a wonderful phrase,
00:27:08
Speaker
yeah because it's true and so true as well yeah yeah how many times have we been on the way back from somewhere and stopped at a service station for a yeah in my case a sausage roll yeah well to be fair you've usually had one earlier that evening as well so yeah i dare say there's there's diabetes in my future job yeah better your futures is currently my present
00:27:34
Speaker
Well, I should caveat that I don't have diabetes. No, right, yeah. So we speak about this quite a bit, but what you've just done there is made a reference to your weight, which I do quite a lot in my stand-up. And when we spoke in the last episode, we singled out a guy from the stand-up comedian thing that looked a bit like either one of us, but a much fatter version from the Scottish audience.
00:28:02
Speaker
And we kind of, I think, what was it we said? We said something along the lines of, if we all stood in a line, it'd be like the evolution of man. Yeah, yeah. Or something. Or the evolution of man boobs. Even better. Yeah. But yeah, so Jinsta's pie's in the night, which we can relate to. Had to go into hospital in North London. And while he was there, had to have an endoscopy, which he has clarified isn't an endoscopy, it's colonoscopy.
00:28:30
Speaker
Right? But he used the word endoscopy because he said colonoscopy would alert the audience to the fact that something's going up his arse. And he didn't want to do that until the crucial point in the routine. So he's called it an endoscopy. And he said, that's where the insert a camera on a fiber optic tube into your anus.
00:28:48
Speaker
And that's a phrase, again, that repetition thing, that's a phrase that throughout this routine repeats over and over again. Now on this occasion, Card, if it was my anus, but it would be your anus if it were you that were undergoing the endoscopy. Because in medical science, as a rule, there's a direct relation between who the subject of a procedure is and the information that they're trying to find out. That's why you can't send a friend along instead. Which I think is just a brilliant little line, even if they really love investigative surgery.
00:29:16
Speaker
And he gets in, he was being wheeled in there, lying on a slab and naked except for a third length floral print hospital gown. Again, another repeated phrase. And this is definitely, this next bit is definitely something, and we've talked about this a little bit, it's definitely something I've either consciously or subconsciously borrowed from Stewart Lee, which is the use of anatomically correct language over, you know, the word dick or something.
00:29:43
Speaker
He said, I've never understood the design of them because as a man, I'm not ashamed of my breasts. What I want concealed are my genitals, my penis, my two testicles. They're the source of my shame. But the design of the third-length floral print hospital gown makes it look as if I've chosen to expose them in a coquettish fashion.
Authenticity and Storytelling in Comedy
00:30:05
Speaker
Now, coquettish is a great word. I still don't even know what that means.
00:30:12
Speaker
I just think it's such a great word. I think it's like a flamboyant, you know? Right, okay, yeah. It's that type of thing. Someone told them medieval paintings that there was like a meme of at one point where it was this guy just in like, in a full length coat, but he'd literally just taken out, tapered from the genitals out. I think I've seen that picture. Stare at his junk. Yeah. Yeah, I think I've seen that picture.
00:30:44
Speaker
So he goes on, he was being wheeled in, layered on a slab, naked, except for this third-lived floral print hospital gown, which is really hard to say quickly, and had a fibre optic tube inserted into my lubricated anus, and then suddenly out of nowhere, and this is true, which I love, I love the phrase, and this is true, because it's a common stand-up comedy trope, which he will then
00:31:06
Speaker
go on to really make fun of in... Did you watch Snowflake tornado? No. All right, brilliant. Good. Because when we get to them, you won't have seen them, but there's a bit in Snowflake tornado where he really strings out a routine using the phrase, and this is true, just to make fun of... Yeah. This is true.
00:31:29
Speaker
Greg Davies does that a lot. Well, he mentions Greg Davies by name. Oh, does he? Yeah, it's because every other word from Greg Davies, in his specials anyway, and this is completely true. Which in fairness, right? But it's one of those things like I look at Greg Davies has been a bit like Bob Mortimer in that loads of weird things have happened to him. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't doubt for a second that a lot of it's very true.
00:31:57
Speaker
Well, I think it's things like that that make comedy difficult for some times because so, for example, one of my one of our good friends, Mr. James Mitchitch, who is also a bit bonkers, you think for ages until the last so the last time we I did my show in Bradford, audience member came up afterwards and was saying, oh, if you're aware of the story of
00:32:26
Speaker
the engagement ring story, came over and said, I think it's really interesting that that's how you met your wife. And I had to explain to her that
00:32:39
Speaker
not everything in comedy is 100% true. And that bit wasn't true. That was just for comic effect. And I thought that was obvious, which she was devastated. To be fair, I think there was some level of neurodivergence there, which kind of gave a bit more of a barrier. But James went, wait, is that not how you make your life?
00:33:04
Speaker
I was like, you have seen that routine. How many times? You've even also met my wife. So it's just really interesting. Even if you don't say, and this is true, people will still believe everything that you say, even how mad it is. Well, I thought it was clearly bullshit. I guess not.
00:33:30
Speaker
You'll know this, obviously, with your acting background and all that kind of stuff, but there is a certain way that bullshit stuff is handled.
00:33:39
Speaker
where the performer maybe can't help it, but their tone shifts ever so slightly into a less believable, you know, maybe a less believable cadence or something like that. Which is what I thought I'd been doing, but clearly I wasn't doing it very well. Well no, your performance was just, it was so consistent tonally that I don't think it, it looked as though you weren't trying to highlight the fact that it wasn't true.
00:34:03
Speaker
But anyway, right, so the phrase and this is true, like I say, it becomes a big thing later on in Snowflakes on Edo, but here it's just used as a, I suppose used in the purest sense, just to let the audience know this is true. You know, I was wheeled in, fiber-opted tube inserted into my lubricated anus, and then suddenly out of nowhere, this is true, the doctor said, I see from your notes, you're a famous comedian.
00:34:26
Speaker
Yeah, now I'm remembering it actually, I think it might have just been like the first 10 or 15 minutes where I wasn't kind of thinking about actually this story, yeah.
00:34:38
Speaker
But I tell you now, if you watch this routine, it's incredible. Yeah, it's so good. But I see from your notes that you're a famous comedian. I said to him, there's a problem with that sentence. Right, this is the thing for me, the timing that he applies to this bit. And I will try and replicate it here, but I can't because I'm not as good as him. But there's a certain cadence and timing that he attaches to this bit, which I think is incredible, which really sells it. And he says,
00:35:07
Speaker
And I said to him, there's a problem with that sentence, isn't there, doctor? Which is that if the phrase, you are a famous comedian, is preceded by the qualifying phrase, I see from your nose, which just for me,
00:35:26
Speaker
It's his timing throughout this whole show. It's so perfect. Yeah. And you can tell, and I suppose this is a testament to his way of working, I suppose, a lot of comedians, you know, we put ourselves in that we might do 10 work in progress gigs. By that point, you've kind of got it, you know, and then you start doing it properly. Whereas I think he does like months and months of working it out.
00:35:55
Speaker
So he'll do like true work in progress, you know, notes in hand gigs for a bit. And then once he understands it, or at least kind of, you know, knows it. I'd be interested to see him at that stage when he doesn't have the timing and down and he doesn't kind of
00:36:12
Speaker
Well, you're in luck because when we get to it, it's content provider, the show content provider from 2018, the disc that I've got, and I'm going to try and get you a copy of the same one. It's got a bonus disc of a set that he did at the Soho Theatre, which is a work in progress thing, and it is literally him stood on stage with notes.
00:36:37
Speaker
All right. When you watch the full thing, how it is in the South End Theatre, I think it was at the end of the tour, looking at it in that work in progress sense, it's so interesting to see. What stayed was...
00:36:52
Speaker
Well, what stayed and just whether the rhythm, which bits were in what order, because he plays around with the order and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, when we get to that, we'll look at that, but it's very much worth watching. So he says, you know, I'm not. And the nurse interrupted rather aggressively and said, well, I've never heard of you.
00:37:12
Speaker
So good. As if it were either an arrogantly introduced this vain and boastful notion into the endoscopic procedure. So I said to her, well, I am a comedian. And she said, well, you don't look like a comedian. And she said a comedian should look funny. Now, again, timing. I want the timing.
00:37:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The pause that he leaves after. Now at the time... Perfect. It's actually... her timing is more to do with pauses than anything else. Well also, I mean the cadence of the way he says things, but his pauses, his use of pauses is...
00:37:51
Speaker
For me, it's one of the best. I was lying naked on a slab in a third-line floral print hospital gown with a fiber optic tube inserted into my lubricated anus. Now, if I'd seen that, I would have laughed. But I suppose if you work in endoscopy, you're under the risk of becoming jaded.
00:38:11
Speaker
Now in this next bit, I love just for the repetition element of it because so I said to her, what do you mean? A comedian should look funny. And she said a comedian, she said, should be the sort of person she said that as soon as you look at them, she said.
00:38:27
Speaker
It makes you want to laugh, she said. Now, like Joe Pasquale. Yeah. But if you look at that whole thing, what do they always tell you? You know, I've done stand-up comedy courses. I don't know if you have, but I already know. You know, any kind of learning that you do, or even if you just talk to other comedians, one of the things that they always tell you is to, you know, boil it down and get rid of unnecessary words and things like that. And here he's clearly taken the exact opposite approach. Yeah.
00:38:56
Speaker
He uses, she said, five times in three lines of text, completely unnecessarily. However, what he's doing there is what, you know, and I think I mentioned earlier about the Adam Bloom book that I've been reading recently, Adam Bloom refers to it as inflating the balloon to the point where you pop the balloon obviously with the punchline.
00:39:19
Speaker
And the punchline in this scenario is the words, like Joe Pasquale. And I think that genuinely got a massive laugh because he kept going, she said, she said, she said. And even for you to, you know, our laugh is essentially breaking the tension. So for you to be able to break it, there's got to be tension there. So there's got to be some level of building. And that's just building more.
00:39:45
Speaker
Yeah. Then you would normally. Exactly. So as I lay there naked on a slab in a third-level floral print hospital gown with a fiber optic tube inserted into my anus looking at live video footage relay of my own rotting and bleeding internal organs, I thought about Joe Pascuali. Now this next one, and I've thought about Joe Pascuali once before in my life, they say that you think about Joe Pascuali twice in your career, once on the way up,
00:40:11
Speaker
and then he never finishes the joke. Because obviously we've all heard variations on that joke. And then he goes into telling a story about the first time he thought about Joe Pascuali. Now this is great because I think what he does here is he references another comedian's material but in the right way. Like I don't, I wouldn't consider, like he's talking about, he's directly talking about joke theft here.
00:40:36
Speaker
And yet, on the back of telling Michael Redmond's joke in this section, so he says, you know, in 1995, Joe Pasquale did a Michael Redmond joke in his Royal Variety performance set of that year. And he says, when he started out in the circuit, there was a guy called Michael Redmond, he was great, he lives in Glasgow now, but he had big bushy hair and a long droopy mustache. And he always used to wear a long brown coat, carry a little plastic bag, and he'd walk out on stage, stand there for about a minute in silence,
00:41:05
Speaker
And then he would say, a lot of people say to me, get out of my garden.
00:41:11
Speaker
Which is a great joke, right? And I've had so many variations on the same thing as well, though, since then. Yeah, this is the thing you see. I'd be interested to know, because I think Stuart Lee himself has said a lot of what gets done. It's variations on Old vaudeville type stuff. You know, even some of the stuff that he does, which he's kind of admitted, you know, he got from Old vaudeville people or unintentionally borrowed from vaudeville.
00:41:37
Speaker
but he he tells that Michael Redmond joke and it gets a massive laugh but it's in the spirit of telling the story which I think I really kind of like the way he's gone about it and he says it's the greatest opening line ever not just for a comedy set there's not a film or a book or a poem or a player that couldn't be improved by having that as its opening line yeah the book of genesis would be a lot better yeah yeah
00:42:03
Speaker
which I think is brilliant. Funnily enough, I do wonder if that went, because I don't think the laugh for that bit was massive. I don't know whether it went over a couple of people's heads, but it was quite funny. But yeah, so it got a much bigger laugh when Joe Pasquale did it on the Royal variety performance. And then he says there's always been a bit of a tradition of the mainstream stealing alternative comedy acts jokes.
00:42:23
Speaker
You might remember at the end of 2004, Jimmy Carr had to take Jim Davidson to task for stealing some of his material. Although to be honest, if Jim Davidson can steal your material, it's time to think about dropping it. Yeah. Which is quite funny. That's not even a joke. That's just true. Well, yeah. But then he obviously qualifies it and says to be fair to Jimmy Carr, it was a sexist woman-hating bit that was written with a sense of irony. Yeah, it was lost from Jim Davidson. That Jim Davidson was able to appropriate at first value.
00:42:56
Speaker
What is it? This is such a brilliant phrase. One of the kindest things you can say about Jim Davidson as a fellow performer is he's not a writer-performer troubled by the notion of duality of meaning. Yeah.
00:43:09
Speaker
such a good phrase because really what he's saying is much more simple but the way in which he said it like makes it funnier because he's able to articulate it properly so you know that he's able to do it with the nuance yeah exactly and that's mocking the thing that wouldn't be able to even explain it in that way because that's the difference you know that's the difference between
00:43:34
Speaker
We've already talked about this before, haven't we, in terms of you've got to be a good enough comic to be able to do that. Listen, I'm going to sit here and I will say on record now that Jim Davidson is a better comedian than I am. Just by virtue of that.
00:43:52
Speaker
I don't agree with his material, I don't like his material. However, what you can't, this is the same thing I'd have to say about Bernard Manning. I mean, Bernard Manning's dead, but what I'd have to say about Bernard Manning, Roy Jimmy Brown, all these people, right? By virtue of the fact that they've been doing it for 50 years, the one thing that they have better than me is the technicalities of how to deliver jokes, right? They are technically better performers than I am, right?
00:44:22
Speaker
I don't, if you take the material off the table and just look at them as performers, like Bernard Manning, right? What I would say about Bernard Manning is a lot of his stuff was horrific, but fucking hell that man knew his way around a joke from a technical standpoint, right? And I would say a similar thing about Jim Davidson.
00:44:40
Speaker
He knows how to write a joke. They're terrible jokes, but he knows how to write a joke. And I don't think there's a shame in acknowledging that fact. At the end of the day, someone's been doing something 50 years. It's gonna be better than someone who's been doing it for three. And if they're not, then they really should be. So I'm not... Yeah, if you take material content out of it, then just from a technical standpoint,
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah, he's just, you know, and I don't think that I think that's where it gets lost sometimes is people think when you criticise them, you're saying that they're bad at what they do. It sort of depends on the style of comedy as well. Like, it's just that I'm not a massive fan of that style of comedy. Well, I'm not a fan of it. I would say, I would say like,
00:45:31
Speaker
I wouldn't necessarily say myself, but they're definitely better because it's the style really that I think of. Even though some of the younger people haven't been doing it as long, you don't necessarily need to
00:45:48
Speaker
I don't even think it's as binary as that. It's not just a case of, because by that logic, you'd have to say Jim Davidson's a better comedian than Stuart Leakes. He's been doing it 50 years and Stuart Leakes has been doing it 30 years or whatever. That's not what I'm saying really, and I've probably articulated it poorly. But at the end of the day, we are new.
00:46:12
Speaker
I think it's the best way to put it. We're new at this and he is not. That's his profession. Think of it what you like. That's his profession. That's what he gets paid to do. That's what he's been doing near enough every day for the last 50 years. But by that same token, I'd take any professional comic. Did you know that Jim Davidson once asked Joe Leiser to support him?
00:46:38
Speaker
Really? Yeah, Joe Lysit's told this story a few times but he once asked Joe Lysit to support him and Joe didn't end up doing it but he said he did build up a weird friendship with Jim Davidson for a bit. He said, you know, he said he's challenged him on all his bigotry and all that kind of stuff and he said but he said he's not exactly what you think he is.
00:47:01
Speaker
He said, but he doesn't paint himself in a good light. And he is bigger, you know what I mean? I don't think there's any two ways about that. I don't think I'm liable in Jim Davidson by saying that he's a bit bigoted. But yeah, Joe Leisitz kind of said he was in a weird sort of friendship with him for a time. But I'd take someone like Joe Leisitz, who's maybe been doing this less than 20 years, but I'd say he's a better comedian than Jim Davidson.
00:47:31
Speaker
you know, it's just because I like his style a lot better. I think it's a harder style to do than what Jim Davidson does, which is just obviously sort of old working men's clubs, like pub gags, you know, that subject. But no, I think if you were to, you know, if you were to put me in front of an audience and Jim Davidson in front of an audience with the exception of maybe the Santiago's audience, you know, if you were to put a neutral audience
00:47:56
Speaker
yeah put him in front of the audience and me in front of the same audience i dare say he'd fare better yeah because just technically he's better than i am and i don't think that's you know that's
00:48:07
Speaker
that's what I was saying. I think that's the bit that's missing from comedy criticism sometimes. It's just acknowledging the fact that, yeah, in terms of what they do, they're going to do it. It's just, it's not great. Do you know what I mean? But anyway, from people who steal jokes. Yeah, I mean, that's a whole other, and I suppose that's what this routine's about, which is good segue, Joe.
00:48:31
Speaker
Thanks. So yeah, you know, he said, obviously, Joe Pasquale did this joke in the Royal Variety Performance. A lot of people say to me, get out of my garden. And he said, you know, he wrote this this column or this article for a newspaper back in 1995. And he ran Joe Pasquale up and he asked him, where did you get the joke about the garden? How did you come up with that? And he said, I thought if someone looked out of their window and saw me in their garden, they would say, get out of my garden. He said, no, that's not quite right, is it?
00:48:58
Speaker
Yeah. Because if you looked at the old window... Yeah, he dissects it, it's brilliant. Just again timing, if you looked out your window and you saw Joe Pasquale in the garden, you'd just go, is that Joe Pasquale? Yeah. In the garden, what could he possibly want? Especially at something like the Royal Variety, like he's clearly... Yeah. It's not just like a club comic that no one knows.
00:49:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And he just looks a bit weird. Well, I mean, obviously, there's there's that guy that's on our circuit that steals jokes. I don't know. Have you not? No, we'll talk about that later. OK. There's a guy, people keep calling out, calling him out for it on Facebook and he's just turned around and said, yeah, well, so what? I deliver them really well. If any of you have a sort of respect about law,
00:49:51
Speaker
All I'm saying is once I tell you his name, don't gig with him. Oh, no. Just because you might find out that somebody's doing guinea pig Jesus. Well, that's the I chose that just so that Jerry Pasquale wouldn't be able to. But yeah, so, you know, he says that joke, the Michael Redmond joke only works if a kind of anonymous weirdo is saying it. If you introduce a celebrity into it, it's structurally compromised.
00:50:21
Speaker
Yeah, you know, so he presses Joe Pasquale. Are you sure you made that joke up? And he said he couldn't remember if it was his idea. And I love this one. And it is difficult to remember if you've had an idea, especially when they occur as thick and fast as they must do in the mind of Joe Pasquale. It's so unnecessarily mean. It's brilliant. You know, he admitted one of his writers might have written it turned out what he meant by writers was not so much people that wrote for him as people who went around writing down things that other comedians had said.
00:50:50
Speaker
Well, ironically, more recently, we've got James Corden ripping off Ricky Gervais. That whole thing. Yeah, I reckon ripping off Ricky Gervais when actually it probably wasn't him. It was
00:51:03
Speaker
one of his writers or people that go around stupid jokes. I mean, listen, it was 100% one of his writers, because if you're a writer on a late, if you're a presenter on a late night TV show, there's no way you've got time to write all your own jokes. No, exactly. Especially someone like Corden. Yeah, never in a million years. You know, again, I think Ricky Gervais acknowledged that. To be fair, that bit that he stole, or one of his writers stole from Ricky Gervais, I do actually think it's quite a funny joke. Yeah.
00:51:31
Speaker
It's that one about the guitar lessons, isn't it? A bit ironic that Ricky Gervais is getting stolen from. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Yeah, I must admit that is quite ironic. Irony there, one of the many comic tools we'll be using tonight. Yeah. But yeah, so, you know, like I say, I made one of his writers may have written it. So Stewart Lee, obviously, it tells him that it's a Michael Redmond joke, you shouldn't be doing it.
00:51:58
Speaker
and Joe Pascuali's response is that you can't really own a joke. So Stuart Lee can. Well, yeah. So Stuart Lee goes on to then say, bearing that in mind, I've tried to write a joke that Joe Pascuali won't be able to steal. And then obviously he does the now common trope saying of pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket and reads the joke, which I've got to be honest, it's a great joke in and of itself. Joe Pascuali goes into a bar
00:52:26
Speaker
And he says to the barman, I'd like a pint of beer, please. And the barman says, why don't you just come around the bar, help yourself to the beer, and then walk off without paying for it? After all, you are Joe Pascuali. Or perhaps send someone else in to steal the beer for you, and then deny a beer can actually be owned.
00:52:44
Speaker
Yeah. Say you find the very concepts of ownership of beer hard to understand. Yeah. Or better still, insist that it is your beer, and that you brewed it at home in your house, even though your home lacks the most rudimentary of branches. Any use of the word rudimentary in a joke makes it great. Do you know what, I think as a final punch line,
00:53:06
Speaker
your home lacks the most rudimentary of brewing facilities could only be said by Stewart Lee, I think. I just don't think it'd sound right coming from someone else. Possibly. As I've just proved when I read it out. It'd be very different, but maybe Jim Sinek has that. Maybe so. But it wouldn't be the same tone. That's the thing. He couldn't do it in the way that Stewart Lee does it.
00:53:31
Speaker
I don't want to get into it, but speaking of James Acaster, he's been getting a hell of a lot of flack this weekend as well. Oh, really? Yeah, because obviously he did that routine. Oh, you haven't seen Coldler's on you, have you? No. All right, it does a routine in Coldler's on you.
00:53:45
Speaker
I won't spoil it for you, but basically he calls out Ricky Gervais for picking on trans people. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I've seen that better. OK, yeah. Well, obviously, every time Ricky Gervais releases a special, that bit does the rounds. Right, yeah. And then what you get is on Twitter.
00:54:03
Speaker
James A. Castor being piled on for, you know, them saying he's shit and, you know, weirdly enough, what they were doing was going after, saying, well, Ricky Gervais has got a Netflix special and who are you? It's like, well, James A. Castor has got four, actually, as it goes. Well, yeah, exactly. Fuck off. Yeah, exactly.
00:54:24
Speaker
So anyway, it is what it is. So yeah, even though your home lacks the most rudimentary of brewing facilities, like I said, brilliant punchline, pure Stuart Lee, I think. Yeah, definitely. Which he then goes on to prove because he says, oh, someone nearly clapped alone there. It's not almost clapped alone. Yeah. But then they stopped because of course, for a comedian, the only thing worse than the sound of no one clapping is the sound of one person clapping alone.
00:54:53
Speaker
which again is a joke. He's reused that a bunch of times. It's almost like an ad lib. But it is sort of true. I don't really know. It's 100% true, but when he says, it indicates what you have is a very specialized appeal and no commercial future as if I didn't know that.
00:55:15
Speaker
So the thing that I really, there's a lot I love about the Joe Pascuali routine, right? But one of the things that I really love about it is he always goes on about how his stuff is a continuum. It's not meant to be clipped and it's not meant to be lifted out of context and all that kind of stuff, right? The thing about that particular routine is that it's
00:55:38
Speaker
because I'm going to ask you to watch this at some point if you ever get the chance. There's a 10-minute version of this, like I said, of him doing it up late and live. I think it was like Al Murray hosting or something. Right, so it's not just the 10-minute clip of him in this, like he's done it separately. No, it's a 10-minute clip of him doing this as a separate bit. So that kind of proves, and you know, you can sort of say to him that he's wrong about his own work. He is correct. You know, you can't just lift
00:56:05
Speaker
a couple of words out of context like as he found that he did a routine about Top Gear about 10 years ago and he's done routines about like Russell Howard and stuff and bits of that have been lifted out of context so I get what he's saying but objectively the Joe Pasquale routine proves that it works as both a like a wrap around because the Joe Pasquale routine forms the basis of of the entire kind of arc of this
00:56:29
Speaker
this special, you know, he brings it back back in at the end. But also it works as a standalone 10 minute bit. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting because it is able to be both. Yeah, I can imagine. But, you know, aside from aside from just being a really, really well written 10 minute bit, all about one subject with great jokes, great lines. I think it's phenomenal. And for me, it's one of his best routines, like full stop. There's a lot of really good routines throughout his catalog. But as a standalone routine,
00:56:59
Speaker
for me that's one of the best. So he gets out of the Joe Pascuali routine obviously with the the kind of common trope as we were saying of the you know one person clapping alone indicates what you have is a very specialised appeal and no commercial future as if I didn't know that and goes back into the seven seven stuff and and that's one thing that I've noticed about this special I don't know if you've noticed it but he jumps in and out yeah he's got a lot of story within story
00:57:24
Speaker
stuff that he does here, which is quite like, you know, so obviously he talks about the actual he actually finally gets around to talking about the bombings themselves. He sort of says he puts the TV on
00:57:36
Speaker
And it was about three hours after the bombings, and there were journalists kind of, I think he calls them insensitive news journalists, running around. Otherwise they're journalists. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Insensitive journalists, otherwise known as just journalists, running around, getting statements from bomb survivors. And obviously, yeah, you know, I remember this bit now.
00:58:04
Speaker
this is the thing you see so like i always thought this do you watch boxing joe no not really well i'm quite a fan of boxing and and i don't know if you remember last year or whenever it was might have been last year possibly early this year when um anthony joshua got beat by um alexander utik
00:58:24
Speaker
Yeah I remember hearing about it. Well he had like an absolute meltdown and had a tantrum in the middle of the ring and like he was on the microphone shouting about something and I tried to develop a bit about it. It didn't really work but the whole the thought point of it is is like when someone spent 38 minutes just being battered around the head by a Ukrainian terminator
00:58:44
Speaker
But that's not the best time to ask them for a statement. And it obviously led to him kind of throwing a tantrum and going mad and being basically vilified in the press because he made a show of himself. And I've got to be honest with you, if I had a concussion on the back of him battered for half an hour, I'd make a show of myself. And I think that was his first loss as well.
00:59:08
Speaker
I can't remember because he fought him twice. So whether it happened in the first one or the second one, I can't remember.
00:59:16
Speaker
I think that's essentially one of the points that Stuart Lee's making here is that it's quite insensitive to run up to someone who's just been in a massive explosion and be like, tell us about it. You know what I mean? It's a bit much. But I just love the quote that he's used here. And I don't know whether this was a real quote. I'd have to look at the book and check.
00:59:37
Speaker
um it's it's out of my reach at the moment but uh a guy survived the king's cross bombing said to camera the rescue workers have been amazing really amazing i take my hat off to them i'm not wearing a hat obviously but if i was i would take it off which is quite a funny like especially with his tone exactly yeah yeah it's so dry yeah him reading that was brilliant you imagine it being a joke but actually
01:00:05
Speaker
in the context it probably was just someone just someone saying something yeah and kind of like their shell shocked yeah exactly that's it and i think that's the point he's trying to make is that they've unintentionally said something really funny when all they're trying to do is just they're probably like not even there and you know he follows that quote up obviously laughs over here a smattering of applause and then doubt spreading towards the back corner which obviously you know is a trope of his work to kind of split up the room
01:00:35
Speaker
and try and divide the room to make it harder for himself and then bring him back together later on. But he basically goes on to say that they shouldn't judge him for this because he is a stand-up comedian and it is his job to look at all these things and try and find the funny side. And he doesn't want to come across as someone who's insensitive or who doesn't feel for the people who are in this situation. But as we've just proved there with that quote, it is quite funny.
01:01:06
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? The whole situation is atrocious, but that wouldn't have been funnier than comedians. Yeah, 100%. Especially in interviews like that, where people...
01:01:17
Speaker
They're incredible. They're incredible. I mean, one of the funniest things I've ever seen is that guy who went to the BBC for a cleaning job and accidentally ended up on air because he thought he was like,
01:01:37
Speaker
Have you not seen it? No. I don't want to talk too much about it if you haven't seen it because it's incredible. But basically the context of it is that he went to the BBC for like a cleaners job or something and they must have got him confused with some important speaker, some world leader or something who was meant to be there to go on the news and be interviewed.
01:02:00
Speaker
So they put this guy on camera and you can see in his eyes, he's like, why, what is going on? Why am I here? What is going on? And they start asking him all these really complex political questions. And he doesn't know why they think that he's got no idea. But it's gone too far. It's gone too far and he's on camera and he can't tell them. I'm not the guy you think I am. It's gone so far. He's stuck.
01:02:28
Speaker
The one I always think of, I'd love to see where he is now, but the little kid that's got his face painted. I don't know if I've seen that one. I think it's in America. Right. It's like some kind of
01:02:45
Speaker
Harvest Festival sort of county fair thing, and he's got his face painted as a skull. He's an absolute legend because he clearly doesn't like journalists, even though he's maybe six or seven.
01:03:02
Speaker
yeah even younger than that maybe and they're trying to ask him like so like how did you find the festival like kind of just like standard kind of vox pop questions yeah and all he does is he goes i like turtles every single question i might have seen that yeah i like turtles yeah i might have seen that that's incredible yeah absolutely fuck with the mainstream media
01:03:29
Speaker
But that's what I'm saying, whereas, you know, you get the sense that in this thing that Stuart Lee is talking about here, that's, you know, that's not the case. It's not somebody, it's not someone who's been caught in the wrong, you know, in the wrong situation, like the guy who was on the news. Well, they have been caught in a wrong situation, but different way. And it's not someone who's intentionally going out of their way to be obtuse like that kid. But, you know, they've kind of just victims that have been preyed on by
01:03:56
Speaker
They're victims that have been preyed on by journalists, but they've inadvertently ended up sort of saying something really surreal and quite funny. You know, what's got to be realised is that the best depiction of a journalist, and it actually worked quite well against, in this situation, is the guy in Die Hard. Do you know what's funny? Me and my wife watched Die Hard last night.
01:04:21
Speaker
Yeah. Did you watch it last night? We did, yeah. We tend to watch it at least some point over every festive period. Yeah, I always watch it as like my first, like first of December that is now Christmas. Yeah, we've not got round to it, but we... And that guy is the worst.
01:04:37
Speaker
i can't remember all i know is that because i've watched ghostbusters the other day as well and he's one of his friends in ghostbusters as well yeah i can't remember his name in in die hard but the bit at the end
01:04:56
Speaker
I mean, obviously, you know, you watched a bit. It starts out, you don't kind of mind as such because he's not being reprehensible at this point. He's just being a journalist. He's like, I need to go down there. I need to cover this story, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it slowly comes to light where you're like, oh, he's got a file on John McClain. What's he going to do with that?
01:05:14
Speaker
and then when he shows up at the house and he threatens to get the housekeeper deported if they don't let him in. Basically what he's done is he's forced himself into a situation with minors where the parents weren't there. It's horrific when you expand out on it and think about it. I've not really thought about it until this year maybe. I was just watching it and going
01:05:37
Speaker
He's worse than Gruber. Yeah, Gruber just wants some cash. It doesn't matter if he's shot a guy in the face. He wants some cash. He's not hurting anyone's kid. Not to sidetrack too much, but one of my favorite things ever is when Gruber introduces himself to Khaki. Alan Rickman's incredible, but he sort of just
01:06:03
Speaker
He's got this horrible sinister thing where he's listing off all Takagi's lifetime achievements and all that kind of stuff. And then he just pumps this limp wrist out to him and just goes, how do you do? It's really funny. It's so good. And then when he shoots him in the head, he comes out and talks to the employees and says he won't be joining us for the rest of his life. He's so savage. When Alexander saw the breath of his domain, he worked for them a normal man to conquer.
01:06:32
Speaker
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. But anyway, right. So he does this bit, obviously, you know, pulling out these funny quotes. I think there's another one about the British Medical Association headquarters or something. I think it said like, if you are going to do it. But then he sort of segues from that into talking about the IRA.
01:06:55
Speaker
this like this is a genuinely it's a proper high point for me it's so funny because he sort of says you know about the the terrorists who are these inhuman bombers no respect for human life without even the cursory the courtesy sorry of a perfunctory warning it makes you nostalgic for the good old days of the ira if someone's going to be clipped and put together yeah exactly i could easily be taken out of contact
01:07:22
Speaker
Well, this is it. And then he sort of says, what's he called, like gentleman bombers or something? I remember reading the bit in the book where he says he's not sure, 100% where the phrase gentleman bombers first came from, but I'm sure he heard it from like Patrick Keelty or something like that. And then he makes the audience clap for the IRA. And especially, like, I don't know whether you felt the same, but like I realized, obviously, back then,
01:07:50
Speaker
was a lot closer to the time. Yeah, of course, yeah. So it was much more in the kind of public eye, the public knowledge, more so than it is now, I think, because essentially between then and now, there's been a lot more. The end will have happened. Yeah, of course there has. I mean, people think about before they think about the troubles. But when I watched it, I couldn't help but think there's shades of that in
01:08:19
Speaker
Bob Burnham's work, that particular, you know that thing of like getting the audience to do something reprehensible. I remember watching. Yes. Do you ever think you know what you're going to say? Do you know the one I mean where he's getting the audience? That's the one, yes. Yeah, it is so good. So good. And the play that lights up on him and going, who said it? Who said it? Which one was it? Yeah, it's so good. And I can't help but like think of that when I watch this.
01:08:46
Speaker
But then the absolute, one of my favorite things about this is where he says, he gets them to clap for the IRA and then he says they were decent British terrorists. They didn't want to be British, but they were. We'll miss them now they're gone.
01:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's that thing of always feeling morally superior. Yeah, 100%. And being able to get away with it and just being like, well, I can say well.
01:09:19
Speaker
Well you know in context it works because you know that you understand that there's an irony behind that and I think that's the difference between like a fantastic you know master craftsman comedian where it's clear that this is an ironic bit. Yeah and so it's why you never see any Jim Davidson bits about 77 bombings. Well he probably had loads but you know they were just they were just included loads of slurs
01:09:47
Speaker
whatever else. But that's the difference, isn't it? It's like there are comedians who are very good at irony, and there are comedians who are just, there's no irony in their work whatsoever. And then there are ones who have to tell you that they've been ironic because it's not great. Yeah. Basically means it's not ironic. Yeah. If you have to explain it. Now the Alanis Morissette of
01:10:14
Speaker
of comedians because they say that they're ironic, but actually not that this is ironic. Yeah, that's that's it. By the way, to quote Ed Byrne. Yeah, I was going to say, by the way, that's a great Ed Byrne routine. But yeah, so then obviously he's talking about the IRA and I really like some of the language that he uses here because what I find fascinating about him is he always manages to get quite complex, really quite flowery language around certain things into joke format. And I really love
01:10:45
Speaker
the fact that he managed to fit the phrase Western Judeo-Christian civilisation into a punchline. Do you know what I mean? Where he sort of says... His ability to lengthen punchlines and make them funnier. Well just... Without.
01:11:01
Speaker
There was one in Carpet Remnant World where he says something like Community Bridge Building Initiative or something, and that was the punchline. He always manages to get those types of phrases. So he just works out what the actual punchline is and then goes, right, what's a way of adding syllables?
01:11:21
Speaker
Well, I genuinely think what it is is he's what he's kind of focusing on rather than words as such. I mean, obviously the words that he uses are very specific, but I've heard him talk a lot about rhythm. Yeah. Where, you know, he there's a line in his book where he says he does wonder if he could go out and just make sounds in the rhythm of jokes.
01:11:45
Speaker
and have the same effect or something like that. He's wondering if that'd even be possible to not really have words and just have sounds but in the rhythm of how we tell jokes. And I genuinely think that that's what he does sometimes.
01:12:01
Speaker
is just focuses on the rhythm. What did the IRA want? They wanted a united island, and it's possible to imagine getting around the table to negotiate towards that. What do Al-Qaeda want? The destruction of Western Judea or civilization in its entirety. And it's harder to imagine getting around the table. Which, again, that's not even really a joke.
01:12:27
Speaker
No, it's a statement, but it's in the rhythm of... But that's what I'm saying. That's why I find it so fascinating. Obviously, you'll appreciate we're unable to meet all your demands, but here are some areas of Western Judeo-Christian civilization we'd be happy to let go. Like, splot. And I love this. If you watch enough of his specials and stuff, which we will do,
01:12:49
Speaker
you'll see that he does a lot of this. It's like that old comics trick of looking up something that means something to the people of that town. So a spot must obviously be something near Cardiff, I imagine. And just... Yeah, it'll be like a really small town or whatever. Yeah. And he's even said, I don't even know what that is. I just saw it on a map.
01:13:11
Speaker
It's the old panto trick. I've read so many panto scripts where it doesn't have words, it'll just have a blank space. Insert a local reference.
01:13:28
Speaker
And then he says, Splott and Joe Pasquale, he could be sent out as well. But then this is what, right? And you know how the last time we talked, when we talked about stand-up comedian, I think one of the points I kept making was how flawless a lot of the segues were? Here, he's taken a different approach because he moves away from the IRA stuff.
01:13:50
Speaker
and the IRA al-Qaeda stuff to talk about the wider war on terror and hooded Iraqi civilians. But the segue that he uses where he says, he does the whole splot thing and he says, but there are lots of good stories from the war on terror. And then he says, I hate it when comedians do that as a kind of intro, because basically the link between what I've just said and this bit is a bit contrived.
01:14:13
Speaker
So I go, yeah, there's a lot of good stories from War on Terror, but that wasn't what I was talking about. So he's almost, he's thrown away a segue in order to make a joke at his own expense. Yeah, well, he's doing what he does really well later as well, which we'll get into. And he does throughout, I think, all of his career, I expect from what I've seen. Well, yeah, I mean, this is like constructing what stand up is.
01:14:36
Speaker
Yeah, and like I said, this for me is kind of like the start point, if you like, for a lot of that type of stuff. This is the first show where it all really seemed to tie together. Like I said, Standup Committee was quite bitty. This, even though it's got really good standalone routines in it, is more thematic and more kind of like tied together. And a lot of the techniques that you'd go on to use, you know, I sort of picked up on for the first time in this routine. But yeah, he says I would have gone away with it, no one would have noticed, but there are a lot of good stories from the War on Terror, apropos of nothing.
01:15:06
Speaker
which is obviously a kind of commonly used phrase from him. He talks about obviously reading trial transcripts of American soldiers accused of human rights abuses and I remember seeing some of this stuff on the news and the line he uses where he says I don't know if you remember Charles Greiner he was a fat American soldier but he had a mustache so you could identify it.
01:15:28
Speaker
And he was the one who organized, I don't even remember the picture, it was basically a naked hooded bound Iraqi civilian, like in a cell. So he's talking about that and he basically says Charles Greiner's lawyer said that the naked hooded bound Iraqi civilian wasn't been dragged out of the cell but was crawling of his own free will.
01:15:51
Speaker
I want to know what he might have been crawling towards. I like to think he was crawling towards the notion of Western democracy. Yeah, but it's hard because he can't crawl towards a notion of something else. Yeah, what does he say? He was having some difficulty knowing which way to crawl because of the hood and because the fact that approach in a palpably abstract concept
01:16:16
Speaker
It's just... See, that's making essentially what is a classic sort of, I guess not classic with the content, but like the kind of observational sort of thing, like the joke about what is it crawling towards, sort of thing, but then making it shortly and making it go, well, actually,
01:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, well, I suppose that's the thing, though, isn't it, is that that's a fairly standard observation or way of kind of presenting that type of routine. So like if you were to take, you know, again, if you were to take Ed Byrne, right? I don't want to make assumptions about how Ed Byrne would have handled this material, but you have to assume that he would have taken a completely different angle than that, as I would assume would.
01:17:11
Speaker
taken an angle at all. What, not even handle this material? Yeah, I think, I think there's, all right, I'll tell you what, another one who, yeah, a better example would probably be someone like Russell Howard on Russell Howard's good news or something, right? So he obviously talks, he does a lot of political stuff on that show. Yeah.
01:17:30
Speaker
So it's entirely possible that were that show happening around the time that this happened, he may have commented on it. But I dare say he wouldn't. This isn't to disparage Russell Howard. I went to see him recently. And I actually quite rate him despite what Stuart Lee says about him. I quite like him. But his sort of MO tends to be
01:17:56
Speaker
silly and do a funny voice. Do you know what I mean? He would probably have put an actual voice to the Iraqi civilian, done an act out and that type of thing. Either that or actually what I think he'd more likely do is he'd do that but the opposite. So he'd do it for
01:18:21
Speaker
The soldier. The soldier. Yeah. Yeah. Because again, like I don't think he'd punch down. I think he'd punch up to.
01:18:31
Speaker
the soldier no of course he would but i think be like not that necessarily that's punching down i was going to say yeah i don't i don't necessarily think it'd be punching down to give a voice to the guy crawling i mean obviously the fact that it's a funny voice does make it slightly different yeah yeah i just feel like it's more ridiculing i suppose it depends on what you're saying yeah exactly but whereas i think like yeah there's but but what's grabber surely
01:18:59
Speaker
is he doesn't actually like the content isn't actually the joke if that makes sense like it doesn't feel like he's having a pop at any of them well i don't know i think if i were to look at this right and if we just take this section in isolation i wondered how many other lines of defense they rejected before they settled on that one
01:19:24
Speaker
So that opening line to me says that the target of this particular joke is the lawyers and the legal system and the defense team. But yeah, I just love the fact that, again, it's an example of what we were talking about earlier, where he's taken quite a wordy thing, the notion of Western democracy, a palpably abstract concept. These are really mealy-mouthed wordy.
01:19:52
Speaker
bits of business that I don't think most other comics would attempt. The idea is fewer syllables in a punchline, you know what I mean? But again, I think he's gone the rhythm route, and I think that's what really makes it pop and makes him work. But then he takes it off on a tangent because he divides the room up into team A and team F, because he basically does what's now a trope of dividing the room up and commenting on their different reactions to that joke.
01:20:23
Speaker
you know, there's laughs over here in this area and they tail away towards that back corner. And you know, I think he says something like, I don't have time to work a mixed ability room. And I just, I love the fact that he basically says, oh, you know, I'm not going to play to
Team F vs. Team A: Audience Dynamics and Humor
01:20:42
Speaker
teammate too much. I'm going to mainly concentrate on team F over in the corner.
01:20:46
Speaker
and then admonishes them for cheering that they're better than Team A. Yeah, which is such a surely audience. Exactly. They're so happy they're in Team A. Oh, tell me about it. Whenever I'd been to see them, I went to see them in Edinburgh on the Basically tour, which we're going to go see again in February. And one night, I went two nights for so long story, but I ended up going twice.
01:21:12
Speaker
There was one night where he basically
01:21:17
Speaker
he picked an area of the room. And obviously from where I was, I couldn't really tell the difference, but he picked an area of the room and it was the opposite side to where I was. So I was quite pleased to be in the good side, so to speak. It was an interesting thing. But then he basically just kept blaming everything throughout the night on them and then got to the last routine and refused to finish it and blame them. Really? Yeah, it was so funny.
01:21:43
Speaker
It was really, really fun. I actually refused to finish it. Well, yeah, but not in a direct sense. I think I knew this because I'd seen the show before, because I would have seen this show like three or four times though, basically, because I went to see it at Leicester Square Theatre last year or the year before, whenever it first started.
01:22:03
Speaker
There's a routine that he does at the end where he's basically going through the days of the week. I don't want to spoil it. It's to do with the days of the week and it goes on for ages. But obviously the version that he did on this particular time that I saw him in Edinburgh, he stopped on Tuesday. Oh really? Because he was just like,
01:22:27
Speaker
you know, but he didn't really give any explanation. It was really funny. But like I said, the kind of origin of that type of stuff, I think he's like here. And I love there's a line in this where he says, don't get up to team A, don't laugh at them, don't even look at them, look at me team A, but if you're sitting next to an F and they laugh at a clever bit, just reach over and give their hand a little squeeze. And we'll bring them along.
01:22:54
Speaker
We won't leave you behind. Yeah. All these jokes have worked before. So good. Yeah. But then he does a thing which I love and I've always wanted to do this. You know, when a joke's not working on stage or whatever, you perceive an audience isn't going for it. It happens to me before. It happens to me all the time. You know, where he says, he says, I've done this before where there's been a split in the room.
01:23:22
Speaker
He said, but tonight it's made it worse. There's attention in the room. And he starts talking about, he says, what's happening now is you've thought let's go sit in the dark and judge someone, but now you're being judged. And he's essentially flipped it round and judging them for being a bad audience. And there's times in gigs where I've always wanted to do that.
01:23:45
Speaker
But you just, you know. Having the balls to do that. Well, not only that, we're not Stuart Lee. And to be honest, even if we did turn it, if we turned it round and started trying to do it, essentially, it just looks like we're ripping off Stuart Lee. That's why it looks like that. But then he picks on one particular
01:24:06
Speaker
one particular, I say picks on, he picks out one particular person, he says, will that relax you, madam? Because it's okay not to like some of this, you know, and he's like, I've done this, I've done this about 90 times, did it for three weeks in London, and I've had people walk out before, and he tells this story about Robbie Williams. Yeah. One of the one of the walkouts was pop star Robbie Williams, who walked out about halfway through.
01:24:33
Speaker
And the woman from the theatre said, are you not enjoying it? And he said he remembered he had to go to a wedding in the morning. He said, do you think that's true? It's just so specific. If it's true, I hope he already bought the present and didn't get something from a garage on the way. Like a ginger's pie. Yeah, like a ginger's pie in the night.
01:24:54
Speaker
And then he's repeated this a few times, this anecdote, that Robbie Williams said that he was all right, but his voice would be better suited to meditational relaxation tips. I often think that about my own voice sometimes.
01:25:09
Speaker
quite monotonous. Not in a bad way though. That guy in Denver that's listed will be asleep now. That's just times I was done. Well done Joe. Well done.
01:25:27
Speaker
But yeah, that he's like, you know, he says that when he saw him in there, he didn't want him to come backstage because he wouldn't know what to say to him. Can you imagine? Well, this is it. Yeah, can you imagine just going to leave me and Robbie Williams? But he does a thing where he sort of says, what, what could I say to him? I liked it when you dressed as that skeleton.
01:25:49
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think that got a good enough reaction for what it was. No, it didn't, because I really loved it. Yeah, yeah. But it was the delivery again. It was the delivery again, it wasn't... Yeah. But yeah, then he pulls back out the team A, team F thing, and he's like, oh yeah, but team F, I think, and yeah, but in Cardiff, Robbie Williams plays in the stadium, not in this small room like you. So maybe you shouldn't learn something from him.
01:26:16
Speaker
Oh, can you imagine Stewart Lee in the stadium? Can you imagine? Well, he's talked about that before. I think we might have discussed this last time, but he's talked about that before, hasn't he? Because he could, conceivably. He sells out six months at the Leicester Square Theatre every year. Yeah, he could fill it. He could fill the O2. It just wouldn't work. Well, but I've heard him open up on this a couple of times, and one of the times he talks about him really went into some detail, which is unusual because he's kind of given the game away. But he talked about
01:26:45
Speaker
having something different on the screen to what's on the stage, having different audio at the back of the room to the front of the room to sort of almost mock, you know, the idea of a stadium gig or an arena gig. And he talked about like having he said like, like ABBA like wearing a motion capture suit and having the young version of having the young version of Stewart Lee on the screens. Like
01:27:12
Speaker
but on stage it's just I think he said something like on stage it's just him like a fat old man in a motion capture suit looking really unflattering I'd pay to see that I think he'd be great but yeah so he's uh you know he basically ends the routine by saying it's okay it's okay not to like this but if you don't like it that means you're the same as Robbie Williams
01:27:38
Speaker
Which, I've got to be honest, for a... Yeah, but I think for a Stewart Lee fan, that is quite the insult. Although, you know, I will say, I don't mind a little bit of Robbie Williams' stuff. I'm not averse to Robbie Williams. I'm not going out buying his albums out, but he's not terrible. He's not one of the worst ones. But yeah, so then he goes back to the war on terror stuff and he's talking about this female soldier.
01:28:03
Speaker
photographed pointing and laughing at the naked genitals of a hooded bound Iraqis. But the judge had sort of said that he wasn't convinced that she knew what she was doing. And I love this line. He says, I don't believe that because in my experience, when a woman points and laughs at a man's genitals, she's normally fully aware of the effect that will have in my experience. And he caps it off by saying, especially if he's hooded and bound in my experience.
01:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's that extra full stop that's just like... But again, this must have... It's so true of mine. Excuse me, it went over the room's head because he went back to the Team A, Team F stuff. Laugh-spreading into the Team F region for that because it's kind of a bit of satire about the news, but it's got cocks in it as well. Again, do you think that these Team A, Team F things are real? Well... Right.
01:28:58
Speaker
Again, I don't want to keep repeating anecdotes that he's sort of repeated, but I suppose that's what we're here for, really. He has said that because he started going deaf. Oh, yeah, I remember you saying, actually. We might talk about this last time. I think we did, yeah. He started going deaf, so he always had a sense that the, and to be honest, he talks about in the comedy vehicle episode, do you remember that we watched? The context, or? No, the other one. The one where he talks about the Maltese flies.
01:29:29
Speaker
and has a breakdown. But yeah, he's talked about it in interviews. I remember there's a really good podcast. Sue Perkins does a podcast where it's just her talking to someone for an hour and it's her talking to Sue at Lee for an hour. Yeah, Sue Perkins is great. But they talk about obviously coming up together around the same time in Edinburgh and stuff. I think they started around the same time.
01:29:55
Speaker
you know they knew each other back then they've known each other for a long time and but then they get into this thing of him and he starts talking about how going deaf developed his persona you know and like how he ended up thinking that the gigs were going really badly and shouting at audiences but then he when he realized that all of the people who weren't getting it always seemed to sit in the back right hand corner you know it's like oh maybe something's going on there
01:30:21
Speaker
But yeah, that's where the Team A, Team F stuff sort of comes from. He's him being deaf, I think. But he sort of says, you know, he feels like there's no, what does he say? He feels like we can get there, but it's a bit early in the evening and it's like there's loads of 1950s American teenagers splashing around in a lake in little shops and there's some other 1950s American teenagers and they're going, oh, that looks fun. I wish we could go in, but we can't because we've got orthopedic shoes.
01:30:49
Speaker
So he basically compared not getting a joke to having orthopedic shoes. But again, the phrase orthopedic shoes is brilliant. And then again, back to the war on terror. And he says about Americans throwing a copy of the Quran into a toilet. He says, which he obviously disagrees
Literary Critiques and Satirical Commentary
01:31:08
Speaker
with. He doesn't like the idea of a Quran being thrown into the toilet, especially when bookshops and libraries are full with millions of pristine copies of Dan Brown's new novel.
01:31:19
Speaker
I do like Dan Brown, isn't it? Be really. Yeah. Just because it's easy reading. It's very easy reading. Yeah. But I just love... I haven't read one since I was probably a teenager. Yeah, you might think differently by now, but... Dan Brown is not literature, and you should know this in the Land of the Bards. Dan Brown writes sentences like, the famous man looked at the red cup.
01:31:48
Speaker
i hope is a real quote i really hope it's real um intellectuals like me have tried to explain why dan brown is bad and it's not working no well it's just like like it doesn't work because it's not for intellectuals is it like no it's like it's like trying to explain why it's mass consumption stuff it's mass consumption stuff but i really love the bit he does next where he talks about a big poster campaign an anti-dan brown poster campaign
01:32:18
Speaker
a massive picture of a toilet. There's pieces of shit in the toilet and in the middle of the pieces of shit there's a copy of the Da Vinci Code with a speech balloon coming out of a piece of shit saying there goes the neighborhoods. He says that the Catholic Church are very worried about people reading the Da Vinci Code. The Vatican issued a statement
01:32:40
Speaker
reminding Dan Brown readers that the books are largely fictional and full of historically unverifiable information. And then he pauses for like ages, but the audience don't really.
01:32:52
Speaker
follow him don't laugh as much as a little bit but he says it's uh it's not a proper joke anyway it's based on a shared set of assumptions and it doesn't work but i do i think it did i i think it does yeah um but then again i have history of uh anti-catholic rhetoric anti-catholic rhetoric yeah and uh making assumptions about the last supper but it's not yeah but the great assumptions though to be fair i i still maintain
01:33:20
Speaker
that as far as a five, six, seven minute bit goes, that's flawless.
Religious Themes and Satire
01:33:27
Speaker
The whole bit with the iPad and going through the table of the Last Supper is flawless. I'm talking about your stuff, Projo. You're looking confused there. Honestly, I'm kidding this, and I said this before I knew you. I was like,
01:33:41
Speaker
That's incredible. I said to Andrew, we were at the back watching you and the first time you did it, I think it kind of sucked the life out of it a little bit because you didn't change the rotation settings on your iPod. No, I didn't. So you kept trying to flick along to the pictures and they kept changing.
01:34:02
Speaker
Yeah, it mastered the rhythm a lot. So I did like a little bit of absurdity to it, but it did compromise the rhythm somewhat. For the first time that I saw it properly done, like really properly done, I was like, that is just, and it's your cadence and stuff in the way you did it. So yeah, I'm going to stop praising you now, Joe, because I can see you're about to, I'm going to stop doing it. Standard. But yeah, so you know, it gets in obviously from there talking about Catholicism,
01:34:28
Speaker
And this line I love where he says, I don't want anyone to think I'm anti-Catholic. I'm not. It's my favorite form of clandestine global evil.
01:34:41
Speaker
People need to use the word clandestine more. Yes, they do. They absolutely do. Like the difficulty in my life as well is I married into a Catholic family. Yes. Well, I grew up Catholic. I was an altar boy and everything. But, you know, once you commit your own decisions. Yeah. What's the, there's a Mike Babiglia joke about that where he says I was an altar boy and just to answer your question. No, I wasn't. Yeah.
01:35:06
Speaker
And then he goes on to say that it's probably because he was a talker. That's great. Yeah, the standard kind of cliche thing of that was, oh, but they didn't because I was fat or because I was ugly or that kind of thing that it's like, well, that's actually a great turn on it. It's like no, it's because I was a talker.
01:35:33
Speaker
brilliant. But yeah so he says that he likes Catholicism because it combines a search for a profound spiritual meaning in the universe with Indian seaside tat. And you don't have to see those two. So much. Such a good thing. So much Catholic tat. Jesus on a tea towel. My grandma's got loads of that stuff. Oh she used to, she might not anymore.
01:35:58
Speaker
And he says in the Vatican at the start of last year, outside the big church, there were little cats selling lollipops with the face of John Paul II on them, Pope John Paul II. And he was wondering whether in the light of his death, whether sales of those lollipops went up or down. When the Catholics thought, ah, the Pope's just died, it would now seem inappropriate to lick a sugar effigy of his face. Or whether they'd go, ah, the Pope's just died.
01:36:26
Speaker
But what better way to pay tribute to his memory than by licking a sugar effigy of his face to eat it, swallow it, digest it and shit out of papal shit. An enchanted papal shit. And he talked about like asking his girlfriend, he said, if you drink holy water and then you do a wee, is that wee then magic? And she said, no, that would be ridiculous. Yeah.
01:36:50
Speaker
And he's talking about the Pope's last word. He says, they said that the Pope's last words on his deathbed were addressed to God. And apparently in his last moments, he said, I searched for you. You found me. I thank you. He said, that's the story they put out. Let's call it what it is. It's an obvious lie. Because even the Cardinals and the Vatican admitted the Pope was in a coma for two weeks prior to his death. And it seems like too much of a profound statement to make in a coma. And he says, I'm suspicious of that for personal reasons. And this one, right, this is interesting because
01:37:20
Speaker
I think this is a really traditional sort of like club comic type of joke.
01:37:27
Speaker
because he says, he nursed two friends, he says, I nursed an elderly relative and someone I'd known to school and they were both people that I loved. I nursed them both, I visited them both through very long illnesses, not dissimilar to the late popes. And I can assure you that their closing moments, neither of them were in a fit state to say anything as eloquent or profound as that. Although admittedly, I was holding pillows over their faces at the time. Which yeah, 100% that's a classic. It's a proper classic pull back and reveal joke.
01:37:55
Speaker
I mean, in the Stuart Lee style, obviously very wordy, very sort of syllable heavy, but...
01:38:01
Speaker
it's a very that you know where he sort of says that you know he made a made a trope of it later on by saying i can't write jokes i just choose not to he still does um you know even though he says he chooses not to he still does but he does them in his own style yeah because more of a club comic wouldn't be like they would be much shorter yeah they would say when i was looking after mine the only thing that he could say was
01:38:26
Speaker
yeah yeah that's it yeah or you know even if they were to do it in the same style they'd say something along the lines of oh I nursed a relative through their health and their last you know I didn't catch what their last words were mind you yeah I was holding a pillow over the face at the time or something like that you know what I mean it'd be really short and to the point but he calls it an act of love he said the first one was the second in retrospect I feel ambivalent about
01:38:54
Speaker
you get is a great rhythmical sort of way of phrasing that. You have to act in the moment, it's a kind of split second decision London anti-terrorist officers have to make every day. Which I assume is just a classic callback. Of course it is but I think I assume it's talking about, do you remember when that Brazilian guy jumped the barriers and they just shot him in the face?
01:39:15
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I think that's what he was talking about there because it would be one in the face. We're in the back. I don't know. I can't remember. It'll be like if I'm thinking of the same person, like he had his hands in the air saying, don't shoot me. I have a weapon. Yeah. But yeah, he and funnily enough, actually saying about this, about the Joe Pasquale routine, he did this part routine as a standalone 10 minute bit as well on the on the comedy central thing. The different
01:39:45
Speaker
because again, it's got a really great traditional joke in it, which he sort of ends the routine on. He says, I don't know if you remember, but the scheduling of the Pope's funeral caused some problems for the royal family because it ended up being arranged for the same weekend as the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Camilla back in Wales. So they ended up moving it to avoid a cost of interest. He says, they shouldn't have done that because that's what split screen television technology was invented for. Yeah.
01:40:10
Speaker
But then the line that he uses at the end, which I really love this, where he says, it is hard to imagine which one of those two events would have been the most distressing to watch, the public veneration of a wrinkled old corpse. Yeah. And then he leaves it for the audience to finish. Yeah, because everyone, everyone gets that. But oddly enough, I quite like that he doesn't. Yeah. Well, he doesn't do the rug pull because there's
01:40:37
Speaker
know because they fill in the blanks but so like the thing for me is on the again on the standalone routine i think it i felt like it went better than it did on this recording because the Cardiff sort of audience seemed quite quiet that bit they laughed a little bit but i didn't think it got loads and i've read i think it's in his book where he sort of says that sometimes if the audience didn't anticipate the joke he would deliberately ruin it
01:41:03
Speaker
by saying the public veneration of a wrinkled old corpse or the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, you know, like to deliberately ruin the joke. No, no, no. The joke is the public veneration of a wrinkled old corpse. Yeah, but that's what the joke is. But he would deliberately do it the other way around just to ruin it.
01:41:30
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah yeah and do it as there's no rug pole yeah basically right okay i sort of prefer that well yeah because you're actually doing the rug pole but it sort of does you know it does what it does achieve or at least in the in the context of the show it achieves what he set out to do which was to kind of unite the room in a shared understanding
01:41:54
Speaker
You know, the whole teammate, Team F, and he kept saying to them in six minutes, you'll be all right. In eight minutes, you'll be all right. You know, you'll get it. And he does that. And then he says to them, are you all right now?
01:42:04
Speaker
because obviously they all came together as one and understood what he meant. And he says, right, so the problem we've got now is that there's a section of the room ahead of the punchlines. You've all got to be up to speed now. Because the first half of the show, this is the fun bit. And the second half is awful. He said, so you know, he says, don't hold back. Don't be thinking, oh, he won't like it if we guess his jokes. He says, I don't care. I'd welcome it. It's good because having to write an hour and a half of jokes every year is quite hard.
01:42:34
Speaker
But what's just happened suggests is that with the correct encouragement of audiences, I wouldn't have to write any jokes, could just come out and list topics. And you could think of something amusing about them in your own heads. Yeah. And then if you didn't like the show, that'd be your fault. That'd be your fault. Yeah. Because you hadn't been very funny.
01:42:51
Speaker
But he says, it's about the apportioning of blame, I think. But yeah, so he then moves into the next bit and he's sort of segues. He says, you know, I was talking about religion, but it wasn't something I really wanted to talk about because I was one of a bunch of people that got in trouble with religious people last year. But I am going to talk about religion for about 20 minutes and then I'm going to run away. But then he sort of draws a circle in the dark.
01:43:15
Speaker
And he says, people are going, oh, why are you doing that? And he says, about four years ago, I went to Languedoc in the south of France, because I wanted to see the week where they recreate the medieval clowning techniques, the bouffant clowns. And they run through the, I'd love to go see this, by the way, it sounds amazing, whether they still do it. But yeah, so, you know, they run through the French mountain top villages and outside the baker's make fun of the baker outside the town hall, take the piss out of the mayor.
01:43:40
Speaker
But before they do stuff about the church, they draw a kind of shape around themselves in the dirt, so they're protected from prosecution under the magic spell of comedy. He said, so that's what I've done here. He says, now it doesn't work at all, but it's a concession to theatre. He said, this building receives some art subsidy, so I have to do this. Otherwise, you'd just be watching a piece of stand-up comedy, which, of course, has no value. I think I really love...
01:44:07
Speaker
because obviously the idea is he's been ironic there and we all know that he views stand-up comedy as being illegitimate.
01:44:17
Speaker
It's basically the one thing where you can do almost anything. But then he goes on to talking about the Jerry Springer opera. Yeah, almost. And we got accused of being blasphemous, which came as a genuine surprise because it had had good reviews in the church times with the Catholic Herald. And it was out in theaters and stuff. So he says it was, we got 65,000 complaints when it went on television.
01:44:40
Speaker
The BBC executives had to go into hiding, police protection, and him and Richard Thomas were going to be taken to the High Court and charged with blasphemy. But at the end of June, the High Court threw out the case on the grounds that it isn't 1508, which is a brilliant job. And he talks about this in his book.
01:45:00
Speaker
because obviously he goes on to explain in the live show, before you all write in, I know the first blast from the prosecution was 1628, but there's something rhythmically pleasing about 1508. And again, that's just a little window into how we kind of put jokes together, is that we will change a little bit.
01:45:19
Speaker
to make it sound better. It's like the whole thing from earlier, the colonoscopy endoscopy thing. If you put the word colonoscopy in there, it alerts the audiences to the fact that it's about bums. I think the same is endoscopy, but that's just a personal thing, I think. Because you can endoscopy the other way.
01:45:43
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, I'm not a medical practitioner by any stretch, but I always thought colonoscopy went on the back, endoscopy went down the throat. But then again, I don't know. Here's what it is. But yeah, so he's getting all this hate mail, and it was quite distressing. But he got a really funny one. He said, I got a really funny one in Mark's last year where someone wrote to me and they said, I enjoyed listening to you defend your work on Radio 5 yesterday. You seem like a very intelligent and thoughtful young man. What a pity you'll be going to hell.
01:46:13
Speaker
Which is clearly, clearly, you know, that's written in the rhythm of a joke. So either that person's very funny, or, you know, stupidly, like the people in the, in the bombings, and you've got to admire the commitment, you know, he says the way they constructed it, it takes you one way and then it goes the other, it's a classic Pasquale move.
01:46:39
Speaker
We thought he was at his home. We thought he was at home in his bedroom naked. Turns out he was on a bus, which is obviously talking about the whole, and then I got off the bus, conceit of joke writing. We got to the end of the sentence. We found out he was on a bus. We thought he was in his house naked. He'd given us no reason to believe he was in a bus till he got to the end of the sentence. Then we realised the nudity was amusing.
01:47:03
Speaker
Yeah, deconstructed. Yeah, it's fantastic. So good. But I love this next bit because he says it's weird getting accused of blasphemy and I don't know if any of you have ever been formally accused of blasphemy. Yeah. Right. He says I'm always relieved when people laugh at that idea because everywhere around the country when I say I don't know if you've been formally accused of blasphemy, people go ha ha ha no, that's ridiculous. He says, except in Buddhist Wells.
01:47:30
Speaker
Now, that's another one of those things where he's obviously taken a local place, right? That, you know, it might be, I've casted no aspersions on this place, I've never been there, but he's clearly painting it as some kind of archaic backwards place. I've never been there, so I don't know enough about it. He said, I don't know if you know that, he said, I said that there, and there was a kind of silence of people going, what have you heard? What have you heard about here?
01:47:58
Speaker
What have you heard about this apparently normal market town with a stone circle on the rugby pinch? This is weird to me accusing blasphemy because he doesn't believe in God but thousands of people do and they might be right but even if you don't believe in God the idea that you've offended a super being is quite intimidating. It makes the idea of having made Robbie Williams born seeming consequential.
01:48:22
Speaker
And then he uses the phrase, that's water off a duck's back, which then obviously, as we discussed earlier, rebuilt an entire routine around years later. Like a child's urine off an old man's face. But yeah, he says, that's water off a duck's back. Oh, were you bored? Oh, are you gone? No.
01:48:41
Speaker
Even if you aren't religious, you entertain the fact that it's your right to change your mind and you might want to become religious at a later date. But to feel like you've been cut off legally is quite a frightening idea. The threat of prosecution stressed him out, the idea of being cut off. He said, so in February of that year, I left London where I live and I went to live with my mum where she lives in a village in Worcestershire.
01:49:08
Speaker
And this is, you know, he paints this picture of it being like this little village. Got there really to see her once, and she wasn't in. So I walked around to the village shop and bought a muesli bar, and I ate it in a layer bite. And about four hours later, my mum said, oh, the woman next door said she saw you eat in a muesli bar in a layer bite.
01:49:24
Speaker
And he said, it's that kind of little village, the house opposite. I love this. This is like a great standalone joke. But again, in context, it's even funnier. The house opposite my mum's on the lawn. They've got a guy who's got a white flagpole and occasionally runs the Union Jack up it. And if he does, you know that British troops have committed atrocity abroad.
01:49:46
Speaker
It's such a great line. He goes on to obviously tell this story, running away to Worcestershire was a mistake because the new Labour MP for Worcestershire was one of the ones calling for the opera to be banned. And it was in all the local papers. So his mum's friends would keep coming round with clippings of me and the composer with the thing saying, bad men due to go to hell. And my mum would go, oh, you look a bit fat in that one.
01:50:16
Speaker
Never mind, I'll put it in the scrapbook. Never mind, I'll put it in the scrapbook with all other clippings of people calling you a cunt. Going right back to your school reports. And your adoption certificate. Reason for abandonment of infant. Infant is a cunt, clearly.
Personal Anecdotes and Village Humor
01:50:41
Speaker
Now, I was two minds as to whether to raise this. I wanted to just get basically put this to you. So I'm not going to name the person who this is about. I think we've talked about them enough, and I don't want to give their name any more air time. But there was a comic, you know what we're talking about, who used to do a routine. Yeah, used to do a routine with gratuitous use of the C word.
01:51:08
Speaker
Yeah. The C word being cunt, which I, you know, I like the word. I think it's great. I think it's a good word for making a point. I'm not one of these people that's just like, correctly. Yeah. And I think that I suppose that's the difference between someone who knows how to deploy a word. Because for me, the way he structured that,
01:51:29
Speaker
with all the other clippings of people calling you a cunt, going right back to your school reports and your adoption certificate, reason for abandonment of infant is a cunt, clearly. So he's only used it twice in that, but he's implied it a bunch of times. And I just think it's a much better, more subtle use of the word rather than the just kind of go for the cheap laugh. Yeah, it's not a free pass, like it's not like,
01:51:55
Speaker
kind of I don't think anyway like you can't you can't create a joke out of it well the thing is that that joke works with that word as a part of it right yeah and I think if you took that word away it would still work I think yeah but it is the appropriate word for the joke um but I think what some sometimes people do it where they've got a complete joke and it's not working
01:52:19
Speaker
You know what I mean? So they throw a swear in there. Whereas I think that is the perfect word for that joke. But yeah, so he says something like, and I took this line out of, I used to do this as part of my set and then I watched this back and realised I kind of nicked it. So I had to take it out.
01:52:39
Speaker
because he says, I expect this early childhood rejection will lead to him spending most of his adult life traveling the country in search of the approval of ever dwindling groups of strangers. And I used to have a line where I said something like, my life's clearly not going that well because I've driven 200 miles to seek the approval of a tiny room full of strangers or something along those lines. But very similar wording. But I ended up stopping doing it because I was like, oh, I think I've kind of written that off a little bit.
01:53:08
Speaker
But yeah, so he starts talking about the women in the shop. And I remember this fashion. Do you ever remember when people used to dress like Neil from The Matrix?
01:53:20
Speaker
Yeah. Like all the, all the golf kids you knew. I mean, yeah, same. I never had a long black leather jacket, but a load of kids that I did. My nickname at that age was, uh, finding emo because, uh, I always wanted to be an emo, but my hair doesn't grow in the way that it should for the emo fringe. Does it grow up? It grows up. And I just ended up looking like either a mushroom or a Lego man.
01:53:49
Speaker
Yeah, I tell you what the secret is, Joe. And we're going to go off on a tangent here. Because I have the same problem, however, I did have the emo haircut. When I met my wife, my fringe, and I'm demonstrating this now, people listening won't be able to tell. But I swept it this way, down towards my eye. And at one point, it got to here. Oh, wow. I could put it in my mouth. It was so that it was all the way down to my chin. I looked like Dave Havoc from AFI. But the trick to it is, Joe.
01:54:19
Speaker
if you ever fancy cutting an emo fringe in again, which I think you should, I think that'd be incredible. I'd love to see it. The thinning scissors. What you want is thinning scissors. So you want to keep everything on the top the same length, but just thin it. It's amazing. It's like shaving a sheep. Basically, that's how I managed to do mine. So it wasn't like entirely microphone on the top.
01:54:46
Speaker
it was nice and nice and flat you know all the wet look hair gel I could get and then yeah down to the chin but anyway I digress so he starts talking about the women in the shop and he says they really like him in the village shop and he says it's because he's got a long black coat he said and that's enough for those women in the shop he says oh he came in misterly in his coat whatever next
01:55:14
Speaker
It's like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, Gary Newman's come round.
01:55:20
Speaker
Villagers, that's all they need, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. It's just one thing to identify you by. Even the newspaper cuttings where people slag him off in the newspaper, they'll still laminate them and stick them on the wall and get him to sign them like an outlaw. Obviously, the blasphemy stuff really stressed him out. He had the legal threats, the collapse of all his work and all that kind of stuff. But what he did to kind of combat that was drink heavily.
01:55:45
Speaker
Yeah. Every day. He said, but in the countryside, it's quite difficult, you know, because you just have to go, you have to walk about two miles to the nearest pub. And then just be the same three old blokes every night. I know this, because I grew up in a total village, you know, they'd go the blasphemers arrived, cross yourselves lands. And they'd make him drink stuff without telling him what it was, have some of this. And he said, All right, I'll have a pint of that. And he says, I'd have about four pints of this stuff.
01:56:15
Speaker
he thought he was real ale turns out it was called it was a thing called barley wine oh wow and you're only supposed to have like an egg cup full of it but no one told him that because he wasn't from there obviously well the funny the funny story behind that is that
01:56:30
Speaker
that story of having the barley wine in pints comes from I think I'm sure I read it was somewhere where like him and Richard Herring went and rented a house somewhere to do some writing and they got really drunk on this barley wine stuff and they were vomiting everywhere like it was you know it's again he's taken a real thing that's happened but inserted it into a different story but which we all do
01:56:55
Speaker
And he said he left about half an 11 at night, could hardly stand, was mad and paranoid because of all the blasphemy stuff, stressed out, scared, in the dark, trying to get home and set off along the road. And he said after about two minutes, exactly what I was worried about happened. A lorry came round and I thought he was going to hit me. And to jump into an agricultural drainage ditch, I came out covered in water and mud and animal excrement.
01:57:18
Speaker
I carried on walking along the road, and then about four minutes later, 300 yards in front of me, on the right, I saw a white figure like a ghost. Now, obviously you and I know, and anyone who's seen this, and again, I hope people have watched this before they listen to this stuff, because why wouldn't you? So you spoke earlier about this being your favorite, I'm assuming it was this bit you're talking about, this whole, we're getting into the Jesus routine.
01:57:44
Speaker
you know, he says, I was drunk, I was under a lot of stress, I was paranoid. So I thought I'm imagining this and ignored it, tried to rock past it, but about 10-15 feet away from the thing, recognized it as being Jesus. But still thought, you know, I'm imagining it, it's in my imagination, because we all know that Jesus should be black or Arabic or Jewish or whatever, which
01:58:06
Speaker
is an interesting conversation to be had right now given the current climate. But still, yeah, but obviously it's to the far again at the moment. But yeah, he said, we all know Jesus should be black or Arabic or Jewish or whatever. And I had given him the face of Robert Powell, the 1970s television Jesus.
01:58:28
Speaker
He says, so I thought it was my subconscious or Jesus was real and he had chosen to appear to me in a form that I would recognise because he would also know that I used to watch the detectives. And he could have come as Jasper Carrot. I went watching that as a kid actually. I quite liked Jasper Carrot. I thought you meant the Jesus Christ of Nazareth stuff that Robert Powell was in. The detectives. But the funny thing about the whole, well to me anyway, the funny thing about the whole Robert Powell thing is that was the name of my granddad.
01:58:58
Speaker
I don't think when he said Powell. Yeah, the Robert Powell from the television is no relation to me, but my granddad, oddly enough, just to segue, my granddad looked like Peter Sutcliffe, was arrested.
01:59:15
Speaker
really yeah was arrested but so again we're doing this we're doing a segue but i feel i feel like we should cut this bit if we need to no i don't mind i feel like i feel like it's an interesting enough story no there's no need to cut it i'm not speaking out of turn but uh when i say arrest i don't time yeah when i say arrested i might want to just say question i don't know the full ins and outs of it but i know that he was picked up over it because during the ripper investigation when they were chasing uh
01:59:42
Speaker
the We're Side Jack stuff. You know, they got that Hook's, they got the Hook's letter, or the Hook's phone call, sorry. So they ended up looking for a guy with a Northeastern accent who looked like Peter Sutcliffe, who drove a blue Transit van. All these very specific details. And my granddad fit every single one of those. Really? He drove a blue Transit van. Well, yeah, because my family's originally from Sunderland. So he drove a blue Transit van. He lived in Bradford.
02:00:11
Speaker
he had a beard and the afro kind of hair cut that they had at the time. Basically, I've got a photograph of him and I'll see if I can find it. I'll show you. He looks just like Peter Sutcliffe when he was younger man. But yeah, mental. And his name was Robert Powell. So he looked like a murderer and he had the same name as Jesus.
02:00:30
Speaker
But yeah, so then he says, he kept thinking it was subconscious with going nuts, tried to walk past it, but got level with Jesus, and he took my hand, and he started to lead me along the lane, even though I thought, this is still my subconscious, what do I want? A, I wanna get home safely, and B, I have this anxiety about reconnecting with faith, and he's taking my hand, and in my imagination, that's what this is, it's not real. But then he started talking to me, he said, Stu. And he said, that kind of swung it.
02:01:01
Speaker
He said, Stu, I know that my representatives on Earth have come out against you and your co-workers and loved ones and accuse you of blasphemy, but I forgive you. And I want, if you can, to find it in your heart to forgive me. And I said to him, what do you mean, Jesus? And he said, well, Stu, there was another man wasn't there 2000 years ago who annoyed the religious establishment. In fact, a lot of people didn't like some of the true things he had to say. And in fact, they crucified him for it, Stu.
02:01:31
Speaker
And maybe, just maybe, you are the rightful inheritor of his crown. So, what I love about this, right, he's gone. Yeah. Yeah, but he's, so if you remember, we talked about this last time, because he did it, he did it in stand-up comedian as well, but he seemed to do it in a kind of reticent, like, oh, I'm not saying I'm Jesus, like, you know, whatever. Whereas at this point, he's quite clear that that is what he's trying to say.
Surreal and Controversial Comedy
02:01:59
Speaker
And he says, now, can I make clear at this point, I'm not saying I'm Jesus, okay? I'm not saying I'm Jesus, that's for you to think about. I'm not saying I'm Jesus, I'm not. But if I was him, I'm not. But if I was him, I'm not. And he goes through this whole routine of like, and again, this is another one where he said he tried to get lost in it and forget what he was trying to say. If I was him, I'm not. If I was him, I'm not, right? If I was, but if I was, I'm not. This is where he would, because then he goes to this is where, this is where I would come.
02:02:28
Speaker
Yeah, if I was him, this is the kind of place I would come and speak, not the vain, arrogant millennium centre. I would come here to this humble place. And I would speak to people like you, the drunks and the whores. I would come here to this simple humble place with adequate but ultimately limited wheelchair rack kit.
02:02:55
Speaker
where they can get in. Well, yeah, this is the thing. Not really. And he talked about this in his book, where he says, he says, in the wrong hands, this joke could be offensive. Yeah. He said, but if you just play it straight, it's, you know, he said it's quite clear what the intention is. And he's actually probably mocking something that is very obvious to the people that are in the room. Yeah, well, that's it. He said, I love the line where he sort of says,
02:03:22
Speaker
to this simple humble place with limited wheelchair access because I would know from the first time around they will come clamour and heal me, Jesus, heal me. And there's only so much one man could do. You can't have a quota. You can't have a quota. So it's just better to speak in a place where they can't get in.
02:03:41
Speaker
But it's also, you know, it's a joke at the expense of the venue. It's a joke at the expense of just like wheelchair access in general in this country, which is still again, you know, even 20 years, almost 20 years later, you know, we see enough and it is ridiculous, you know. But then he's like, oh, and he was leading me along the road within about a minute. The same thing happened again. A big lorry came around. I was scared, but he seemed to do something to slow it down or we became immaterial. It passed through us. We weren't hurt.
02:04:09
Speaker
but it panicked me and the alcohol kicked in and I started stumbling. He says and he grabbed my right arm, he hooked it over his shoulder and he started carrying me along like you would a drunk mate. He says now initially I thought this was an imposition but I realised he did have some previous experience carrying a heavy burden. It's so good. It is. Because he doesn't act, he doesn't.
02:04:32
Speaker
He never outright says any of it, yeah. And to be honest, under more difficult circumstances, he seemed to like the warmth of human contact. In that way, we finally got to my mum's front door, fumbling around to get the key in and I thought, this is a bit weird, Jesus is here, what's the correct etiquette? Yeah, do I invite him in for a coffee? I invite him in for a coffee and hope he doesn't read anything into that.
02:04:58
Speaker
Now I'm not saying Jesus is gay. Again, he's doing the thing. He's doing what he did to the Scotch people. I'm not saying he is gay, you know, where he did it about William Wallace. I'm not saying Jesus is gay. That's part of what caused the problems last year. But one in 10 people are and you can't, especially in a port town, you can't make assumptions.
02:05:20
Speaker
And while I was thinking about this, he disappeared. I felt bad because I was grateful he'd helped me home, but I was relieved. I didn't have to deal with it. And I felt like I'd betrayed him, but he'd gone and I was relieved. Now this, this next bit is obviously, it's the whole vomiting into Christ bit, which is essentially, it's a reworked, it is, but it's a reworked and extended routine of something that he did about 30 years ago.
02:05:44
Speaker
Oh, really? Well, he had a small routine like it's available on YouTube. You can find it somewhere on the comedy experience, I think. It's like a three or four minute bit of him talking about being sick. And it's that whole thing of the sink was overflowing with sick and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's not got any other Jesus stuff in it. It's just about him being sick.
02:06:08
Speaker
cats feet towel yeah exactly that's that's a beautiful detail it's a beautiful detail because i've never owned a cat obviously but i've relatives that have and that is a thing do you know what i mean which is just a lovely little detail i mean i've owned cats and i've never
02:06:25
Speaker
No, but I know some people who have had a cat's feet towel. So let me talk to the house. As soon as I got in, I realized I was going to be sick. But I didn't want to go upstairs when my mum was asleep and wake her up. So I ran around to this little room my mum's got by the back door. It's about as big as the front of the stage. There's a little hand basin in there. There's a toilet, a towel rail, and on the towel rail is a hand towel. And that towel isn't to be used for hands. That towel is only to be used for wiping the cat's feet when the cat comes in wet from the garden.
02:06:54
Speaker
So I ran round to this little room. Before I could get a grip, I was immediately sick all over the floor, all over my mum's floor. So I bent down. I wasn't myself. I was mad. And I tried to scoop up the sick. But doing that made me be sick again. And I was sick down my clothes until my clothes had become covered in sick. I groped around, ended up grabbing the cat's feet towel and used that to try wipe it up. And there was too much. The cat's feet towel became overwhelmed, saturated with sick.
02:07:19
Speaker
And if the cat had come in now with wet feet, they would have had to stay wet or put sick on them, which would have been worse. And then looking at the cat's feet, it made me be sick again. I was sick into the basin until the basin was overflowing with sick. Tried to scoop the sick out and fling it into the toilet, but doing that made me be sick again. And I was on top of the sick in there until the toilet was blocked with sick.
02:07:41
Speaker
and I stepped back, I shut my eyes, I thought, that's it now, surely, no more. But I felt the sick rising in me again, I thought, what am I supposed to do? The floor's covered in sick, my clothes are covered in sick, the cat's feet tellers are right off, frankly, the hand basin's overflowing with sick, the toilet's overflowing with sick, what am I supposed to do? Now, what I love about that whole thing that I've just read, near enough of a bam, is the repetition of the word sick.
02:08:08
Speaker
it's so hypnotic and so like it really just keeps you engrossed and listening to what's been said. Obviously the way I've just read it is just you know I'm conscious of time and we're trying to get through this piece but his rhythm and use of repetition and stuff in this is like I don't think it's ever been better really just in terms of that one particular word it's so hypnotic
02:08:33
Speaker
And I opened my eyes, I looked down, and on my left, on the floor, kneeling down, smiling, looking up at me with Jesus. And he was pointing at his open mouth. As if what he wanted me to do was to vomit into the open mouth of Christ. Which is so good. I thought, this can't be right, but he was pointing and laughing and smiling, encouraging me. And then I remembered he did have some history of sacrifice.
02:08:59
Speaker
So against my better judgement, it is insistence, I vomited into the open mouth of Christ and told the mouth of Christ was overflowing with my sick. And he does a thing here where he's brilliant. He basically says, I've been doing stand up for 17 years and I can sense when there's tension in a room. And I know why it is and I understand it. Basically, there's a performer audience bond of trust built up.
02:09:21
Speaker
We've worked on that together over the last hour and you think, yeah, there is, but you've broken that bond of trust because we weren't expecting to be made to visualize this image. There was no warning of this. It wasn't flagged up. There was no indication you would do something like this, especially when you open with all that light hearted material about the bobbins. Yeah. I wanted to kind of say about this before you carry on, is this is the bit that I really enjoyed because
02:09:47
Speaker
It's the deconstructing of how a stand-up show works. Yeah, of course. Also, some of them you can't generalize. What it made me realize was I did a similar thing in mine and the kind of common trope of getting most of the way through it and then dropping a bomb and going that no one expects. Yeah.
02:10:11
Speaker
and then that relationship is broken and just exactly what he's saying was like exactly what kind of happens in my show. It's really just in kind of looking at it from that point of view and him deconstructing it but also
02:10:29
Speaker
deconstructing it by the same time, confirming. We've got to remember that round about this time was like, I don't know if it was like the start or the peak time or whatever, but it's basically in this time of where the trend of stand-up, certainly Edinburgh shows and hour-long shows and things like that, the trend became the spill your guts.
02:10:51
Speaker
trauma show, if you like. I think some people like flip up, they call it a dead dad show or whatever, but it's that kind of thing. And I think that's what he's kind of commenting on really. But yeah, if you feel betrayed, you have my sympathies, I'm sorry, but I'm just trying to understand this. There's a performer audience relationship and there's probably people here thinking, you've presumed upon that relationship.
02:11:14
Speaker
This is inappropriate. It's too much too soon. It's gone too far. It's too presumptuous. It's like fingering someone on a first date. You wouldn't do it even if I'm wearing a mitten through the shattered window of a rural bus shelter at the end of an otherwise pleasant evening as an appropriate gesture of thanks. Yeah, it's taking that kind of for the rule of three and running with it. Making it the rule of seven. Yeah, and just going, well, I'm just going to keep going.
02:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, but why not? Because each one was funnier than the last one. Why not? That's the thing, as long as each one's funnier than the last one, then you can get away with it. But again, what I love is he's taken a thing that's quite a common thing. You know, fingering's quite a fairly hacky subject to do jokes about. And it's fairly root one. It's easy to get a laugh off of the word fingering. But he's taken it in a really, you know, he's taken it away from its core. And the more detail he adds to it, the sadder it gets.
02:12:12
Speaker
with your arm through a bus shelter like this fucking, you know, it's weird. It takes it into a really interesting place and it's no longer just like a route one, you know, half fingering joke.
02:12:24
Speaker
You know, there's probably people here going, yes, it is like a relationship, Stu, the performing audience relationship, but tonight what you've done, you've made it feel like a marriage, a marriage that's gone on for too long. And if you feel that like this is a marriage that's gone on too long, then maybe it's time for you to start seeing other comedians. And I can't pretend that I'd be happy about that. But if that would help keep the spark of this alive, then you should do it. You should go see them.
02:12:51
Speaker
Go and see the design to the audience. Yeah. So again, this is again become a bit of a common trope with the sort of full nervous breakdown. Yeah.
02:13:01
Speaker
And I will wait for you to come back to me because I love you. And I will come here when you're all laughing at something else, when you're laughing at Nico and Joe's Bad Film Club again. He's left a gap for a local reference. I'll come here and I'll be behind those railings up there and I'll be watching you, giving them the laughs that you owe me. And I'll be crying. But because it's you and I love you, I won't be able to stop myself from becoming aroused. Behind the fence thing, I'll be crouching down and I'll be watching you all laughing.
02:13:29
Speaker
And I'll be crying, but I'll also be masturbating. And I'll be enjoying the unique fusion of profound grief and violent sexual arousal.
02:13:38
Speaker
But again, it's all about the timing, the language that he uses. Again, he's taken a very root one bit and made it stewardly with the language and the timing. The guy that signed me for the row, which is so good. People were laughing at just that on its own. And you never have that feeling you wanted to tell me. And if you don't understand me, how do you expect this to work? You have to understand that feeling. If you've never experienced that,
02:14:06
Speaker
If someone that you love has died, don't take flowers to the grave, take whatever apparatus you need to achieve a state of mind whereby you compare them the highest tribute of all. So again, he's doing that thing where he's essentially telling someone to go and masturbate on a grave, but he's not telling them to do that. He's wording it differently. It's brilliant. So he gets back on the microphone.
02:14:28
Speaker
after some after like a short pause again put the perfect amount of time gets back on the microphone and says so I vomited into the open mouth of Christ and it's just that's a punchline in and of itself just after that pause I stepped back I shut my eyes and I thought that's it surely no more but I felt the sick rising in me again and I thought what am I supposed to do now
02:14:50
Speaker
And again, he comes back to the rhythmical thing. The floor is covered in sick. My clothes are covered in sick. The cat feet, towel is covered in sick. The sink's overflowing with sick. The toilet's overflowing. The other math of Christ is overflowing with sick. What? What am I going to... And then I opened my eyes and I looked down and he was there again. Jesus on my right. But this time he had his back to me and he was doing kind of handstand.
02:15:12
Speaker
and his reignment had slipped down and it looked like a third-length floral print, hospital gown, brilliant callback. And he had his right hand on the floor to balance him, upside down. And with his left hand, he was using the fingers to kind of splay open his anus. As if what he wanted me to do was to vomit into the gaping anus of Christ. And then he loses it again, goes off the mic and starts shouting about, you know, don't imagine I come and talk here about this lightly.
02:15:40
Speaker
And then he does the bit which we've discussed outside of this. I asked Tony Law. He's a Canadian stand-up comedian. He's the most reasonable man I know. I said to him, Tony, do you honestly think I can go around the country in front of people and use the phrase, I vomited into the gay Pinedis of Christ? And he said, well, possibly if it's in context.
02:16:03
Speaker
But you will be able to name your DVD after it. I'm not going to do that Tony, I'm not insane. But imagine the situation that's impossible, there's no right way out of it. I bent down, I said to Jesus, are you sure this is what you want? And he said to me, look, you're going to be taken to court for blasphemy for doing nothing. I feel like I owe you one knock yourself out.
02:16:26
Speaker
which is a brilliant throwaway statement to make. Against my better judgment, because he told me to, I did it. I vomited into the gaping ears of Christ. So the gaping ears of Christ was overflowing my sick. I did that. Are you happy now? He gets back on the mic and he says, I stepped back, I shook my eyes. I thought, that's it, surely no more. But I felt the sick rising in my again. I thought, what am I supposed to do? The floor is covered in sick, clothes covered in sick.
02:16:54
Speaker
Cat's feet tell he's ruined. Sink's overflowing sick. The toilet, the Ennis of Christ, and I remember lads. You know when you're doing a wee in the toilet? Yeah. And there's a bit of poo on the back of the bowl and you think, oh, I'll hose that off. That's my cleaning done for the week. Which is a nice little bit, little bit of... We've all been there. Absurdional. Yeah. Classic joke. It's lovely. What I did was I got my penis out and as respectfully and tenderly and accurately as I could, I urinated into the gaping Ennis of Christ.
02:17:23
Speaker
so that all the vomit there kind of phoned up and went on the floor, leaving just enough room for me to vomit one second and final time into the gaping anus of Christ, which I then did.
Symbolism and Conclusion
02:17:33
Speaker
Now, and then he concludes this routine with what was the punchline in the original sort of version of this routine. My mum came in, she looked at the sick on the floor, looked at the sick on my clothes, cat's feet, towel covered in sick. She was irritated by that. She looked at the sink overflowing with sick, toilet overflowing with sick, the gaping anus of Christ overflowing with sick.
02:17:52
Speaker
and she said to me, have you been sick? Rich, I think is my favourite line that he's ever said. It's so good, isn't it? I was crying, and I was hoping that it would finish there. It's quite disappointing that that's your favourite ever line because it's probably one of the first lines he ever wrote, given how old that room to is. I mean, there are still
02:18:17
Speaker
but then he says uh no it was like this when i got here the cat must have done it and she said the cat's in the cat's in the garden his feet are wet i don't know what you propose to do about that given the current state of the cat's feet tall
02:18:31
Speaker
And then obviously it's brilliant cause he's done this on a number of occasions. We're going to get to 41st best soon, um, next actually. But he uses this conceit of his mother giving him an ending. So his mother gives him the ending to the show here, although he doesn't, um, he doesn't point it out. But she said to me, let me give you some advice. And I listened to her because I love her and she tends to be right. She'd given you current situation, the state of the world under no circumstances should you consider talking about this incident on stage.
02:19:02
Speaker
and he says well I might have to and she said well I can't stop you but and he said that's what she always used to do and my mum used to do that I can't stop you but putting the ball in your car she said I can't stop you but if you're gonna talk about this you have to know why you're doing it what kind of point you're trying to make
02:19:22
Speaker
And I said to a well three things mother firstly to make the point that a symbol be it an icon or a flag or whatever is only as worthy of the respect and values of people that appropriate it. Secondly, if a symbol goes out into the world into places where it's not understood or wanted or valued.
02:19:37
Speaker
You shouldn't be too upset if it takes on a shape that you don't recognize as your own. And thirdly, that if you attempt to apply limits to freedom of expression, either through legislation or intimidation or threats, what will then happen is that reasonable people, often against their better judgment, will feel obliged to test those limits.
02:19:55
Speaker
by going to areas they don't feel entirely comfortable with. I personally haven't enjoyed the last half hour at all. I do it only to safeguard your liberty. Which is brilliant. And then so brilliant, in fact, that the audience clap. Yeah, right. And even says as much, you know, that's never had a clap before, which probably means it's time to stop doing this show. And then she said to me, that's very interesting to you, but I don't believe you. Why would you really be telling the story? And he puts the microphone back into the stand.
02:20:25
Speaker
Which is the universal signal that it's over now. And I said to her, all I want, mother, once in my life is just to be able to put my hand on my heart and say in all honesty that I've written a joke that Joe Pascuali won't be able to steal. And it's the great, actually thinking about it, that is the joke of the show. Well, this is my point. That's so good. What he's done is he's used away, he's found, he's used that initial 10 minute routine.
02:20:53
Speaker
which I think if you look, regardless of what you think about it, like I said, I think it's a brilliant routine on its own. But if you think about it in the context of the whole piece, it's essential. And it's so good the way that he tied everything together.
02:21:06
Speaker
So Joe, I'm aware we've been talking for ages. Yes, standard. My daughter is screaming in the other room and I am going to a New Year's party in 18 minutes. Just for anyone who wants a view into what we do with our time. Not too different to anyone else. But yeah, so final thoughts, Joe.
02:21:33
Speaker
I really enjoyed it. I think maybe I preferred... I don't know. They're probably about the same when I look at them in context, especially because I need to basically just watch them as one thing rather than in split shifts.
02:21:52
Speaker
No, you're gonna have to watch them in 20-minute increments, Joe, because that's your style. Yeah, but when I view them all together, it makes more sense in this area, so... Well... But yeah, that last 20 minutes is... Phenomenal. ...standing. Yeah. And I mean, to be honest... Not just hilarious, because there's a lot of times with Shirley where I can't... And we've talked about this before, where I just want to clap.
02:22:21
Speaker
yeah actually this one this bit was both yeah that it was kind of like actually it's making me fully laugh yeah it's hilarious without just being really clever yeah well you know that's so really clever
02:22:38
Speaker
That's the aim of the game, isn't it really? It's funny, it's clever, it makes you think. It kind of gives you everything you really want from a stand-up. It's not just kind of... And I don't devalue stand-up that doesn't make you think, to be honest with you, like Tim Vine or someone like that, which I don't think... It's still incredible, and it's a skill set that I don't really have.
02:23:00
Speaker
I do like stand-up that kind of gets you on a more intellectual level, to be honest with you, which is probably the wankiest thing that I've ever said. You've started a Stuart Lee podcast.
02:23:17
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. How much more pretentious could you get? Apropos of nothing. Apropos of nothing, without any sense of irony. I've not even been ironic. I'm genuinely enjoying myself revisiting all this stuff. But so just to look ahead to next time, when we get a chance to catch up and do this again. So next one is 41st best stand up ever. I have seen before. Yeah, well, that's fine. But you can reacquaint yourself with it. It was a couple of years ago, I think.
02:23:47
Speaker
Yeah, reacquaint yourself with it. We'll get together again. We'll have a chat about it. And then once we've done that, then we're into a series of comedy vehicle.
02:23:58
Speaker
so lots of good stuff to look forward to and yeah I suppose all that's left for me to say is whoever's listening the person in Denver possibly someone in Iowa the guy in Brussels I'm assuming guy I've made a massive assumption there apologies if you are if you do not identify as a guy
02:24:18
Speaker
Whoever's listening, thank you very much. If you are one of the number of listeners that we've had, because it is a number. Yeah, there is a number. There is a number, and the number is not zero. It's not just me and you talking to each other, Joe. But no, sincerely, thank you. Thanks to you, Joe, obviously, for giving up your time to do all this stuff, because they're not quick tasks, are they? Not for someone like me. Well, but also not for someone like Stuart Lee, to be honest with you.
02:24:48
Speaker
Do you know what I mean? But yeah, no, thanks Joe. And, um, I suppose. Okay, go for it. Yeah. What are you plugging? In January from tomorrow, uh, I am doing my show guide to therapy for terrible people and I am filming it. So it is possibly going on to, um, streaming services and going to be available on DVD. So, um,
02:25:16
Speaker
listen out for when that might be but it's definitely been filmed and definitely gonna be at least put on YouTube or something like that but hopefully maybe not Netflix because as I said to the person helping with the kind of distribution side they need 4k as minimum and no one needs to see my face in such high definition and also as I said to her
02:25:45
Speaker
I can't have a Netflix special because I don't have any anti-trans jokes. It'll be somewhere else available. I just thought I'd give it a nice little plug. No, definitely. And what I'll do, Joe, is when you've got more links and stuff for that is I'll put them in the show notes and we'll push them out that way as well. It's a great show. It's a great show. I've seen it several times. It's a great show.
02:26:15
Speaker
trying to work out how that's possible. Yes, I have. But no, it's a fantastic show. Award nominated, best newcomer at the Brighton Fringe, 2023. And been put forward for best debut show at Leicester in February. Yep, cool. So that's Joe's plug done. Yeah. Just to re-plug, because the plug's come out and the water is leaking everywhere.
02:26:44
Speaker
we are doing this live at the Leicester Comedy Festival on the 24th of February with a special guest hopefully if we can get that over the line it'll be somewhat incredible either way it's going to be a good time there's going to be games there's going to be prizes
02:27:06
Speaker
and other such fun things. And I'm also doing a work in progress of my solo show, Breathless, again on the 24th. One of them's at three o'clock and one of them's at quarter to five. And I can't remember which is which, but all details, all details are on the Leicester Company Festival website. It's on the 16th. If yours is on the 16th. Yeah, if you can't wait for the DVD. And for anyone interested.
02:27:31
Speaker
And for anyone interested, this isn't my stuff, but it feels obtuse to talk about Stuart Lee without plugging some of Stuart Lee's stuff. He's currently on tour doing the basic Lee tour. I don't know what tickets are left for that, but if you go to his website, you'll find them. Joe and I are going to Leeds in February on that. And he is in Leicester doing a chat with, I can't remember the name of the guy, but the founder of the Leicester Comedy Festival on February the 18th.
02:28:01
Speaker
Jeff someone. He's chatting to Jeff someone. He's chatting to Jeff someone at the West Comedy Festival, I think in the De Montford Hall, possibly. I think it's in the De Montford Hall, but I'm going to that.
02:28:16
Speaker
And that's on February the 18th, I think at four o'clock. Again, best comedy festival website for that. So all that's left for me to say is, Joe, thank you. Enjoy. Happy new year, everyone indeed. And Joe, I'll see you at Scratch and Sniff on Wednesday. See you then. Bye. See you.