Read How I Escaped My Certain Fate Online
Authors: Stewart Lee
How I Escaped My Certain Fate (12 page)
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Here it was absolutely necessary to use vocal inflections that
suggest
that Wallace’s homosexuality was entirely acceptable, and not a matter of controversy in any respect. Thus, any audience
objections
about this apparent abuse of a Scottish folk figure would hopefully freeze in the mouth of the heckler, for fear of them appearing homophobic. It was not difficult for me, personally, to say these sentences without appearing that I had any issues with homosexuality, as I absolutely don’t. At least two of my best friends are gay, and the composer Richard Thomas, with whom I worked for five years continuously, is a minimum of 80 per cent gay. I even enjoy the work of many gay writers and some of the world’s
gayest
musicians. That said, even though I have lived in heavily multicultural areas for two and a half decades now, I still do not have a huge amount of black or Asian friends, apart from Andrew Mallet, whom I see every Christmas and who is Malaysian or Hawaiian or something. I appreciate that this looks bad and am already working to correct it. I have always got on reasonably well with the Labour MP for Hackney, Diane Abbott, when I have met her on TV
politics
shows, and may try to cultivate a friendship with her, because as well as being an individual black woman she also represents the black community as a whole, which would help me enormously in meeting my friends diversity quota with the minimum of effort. That said, I said hello to her in the street the other day and I don’t think she recognised me.
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Again, here I would stave off the psychotic boredom of doing this show for months on end by always changing the love-letter
location,
but the trick was to find somewhere suitably obscure that would delight an audience by its apparent oddness, but at the same time ring enough bells to get laughs. I suppose that’s a trick many of us employ throughout our stand-up – trying to employ a
reference
or a structural device that’s just close enough to the edge of comprehensibility to make the audience feel flattered, whilst at the same time not doing something so arcane that it deliberately freezes out the majority of the room.
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Again, who could object, here in Glasgow, to a man familiar with specific technical terms for specific Scottish Iron Age archaeological structures in the Hebrides? The exact purpose of these ring-shaped stone structures is not clear, but the Broch of Gurness, in Orkney, is particularly beautiful, and Clickimin Broch in Lerwick is one of the few real attractions of Shetland, where my wife Bridget and I erroneously spent our honeymoon in December 2006.
So … Now … So, er … Wow, Braveheart, our national hero, was gay. And when – you know – when I was talking about this in Edinburgh in the summer, people were going, ‘Well, why didn’t we know about that, you know? Why …?’ And the reason is ’cause the graffiti and the letters were written in Gaelic, so it wasn’t translated. And people are going, ‘Well, why wasn’t it translated? That’s just the ancient language of our nation, of the Scots. Why wasn’t it translated?’ Well, it wasn’t. What Gaelic actually was, was a very kind of highly evolved form of medieval Scottish homosexual patois. And the clue’s in the name if you look at it, right. Gae-lich. That means ‘gae’ – homosexual, gay – and then ‘lich’ is
language
or tongue. So Gaelic is literally the language of gays.
And … you know … I was booed off at the
Assembly
Rooms for saying this in Edinburgh. But it’s true. And I don’t think it’s … I think it’s really great that, that our national hero, er, William Wallace, was gay. Because Scotland’s always been a much more progressive,
liberally
minded kind of a nation that’s not afraid to show its feminine side.
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And I think that, um, compared to
England
, which is a very backward kind of bigoted place. And I think that it’s really good that as we enter the twenty-first century, one of your national folk heroes can embody a kind of progressive notion of sexual identity. I think that’s a really brilliant thing. And I wish that some of the English, er, folk heroes, like, er, King Alfred or, or Robin Hood or King Arthur had, had been gay. But … but they weren’t. And … it’s only William Wallace, Braveheart, the Scottish one, that definitely was gay.
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Again, this would get derisory laughter from the Scots, and yet at the same time, they were confused as to their correct response. Shouldn’t they be pleased that I am saying their land is
liberally
minded and progressive? I love the confusion of a room that doesn’t know how it’s supposed to respond. I’d rather the punters scattered like startled birds, flying off into all different directions, than all in one direction, waving their Union Jacks and cheering.
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I don’t think it’s funny in and of itself to suggest that Braveheart was gay. My point here is that Mel Gibson, and to be honest many small-minded nationalists, are usually engaged in quite macho mythologising of notions of nationhood, of which Gibson’s ugly and homophobic movie is just one example. So therefore it’s funny to turn this on its head, and also to complicate things by
appearing
to praise the Scottish folk hero for his assumed
homosexuality
, taking the gamble that while my audience might feel a little insulted by this, their usually impeccable liberal mindsets won’t let them attack the routine in terms that could be misconstrued as politically incorrect. When I played this routine to Scottish
audiences
that hadn’t specifically come to see me, such as on a mixed bill at the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms late show in August 2005, they were not slow to boo me off and threaten me for saying that their national hero was gay. You see, this is the problem with David Baddiel and Frank Skinner having opened up the exclusive club of Alternative Comedy to football fans – suddenly you can’t assume that the audience is just weedy liberals.
And of course another …
AUDIENCE MEMBER
: Robin Hood, surely.
Sorry?
AUDIENCE MEMBER
: Robin Hood, surely.
Someone, er, said that Robin Hood was, surely …
AUDIENCE MEMBER
: Men in tights.
And someone there saying ‘Men in tights’. But of course the ‘men in tights’ addition to the Robin Hood legend was made in the nineteen-eighties by Mel Brooks. The, er, facility to make those kind of tights didn’t exist in medieval England. If it had have done, maybe they would have worn them. I’m sure that a thin denier tight is, er, an ideal garment for medieval combat, offering as it does no protection whatsoever to the human leg.
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This was off the top of my head, in response to the heckle, but one of the advantages of having stolen, as a younger man, the slow and ponderous delivery of Ted Chippington, Arnold Brown and Norman Lovett is that, compared to the average comic, I get extra thinking time between each word, and so really ought to be able to come out with something at least half-coherent.
But … of course the other major inaccuracy of that film was that in the Middle Ages there was no such country as Scotland. Scotland was actually invented, as you all know, in 1911, by the McGowan sweet company as a way of
marketing
Highland toffee. Because of course, traditionally, we think toffee’s better if it’s manufactured at a high altitude.
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I didn’t bother improvising around the theme of Highland toffee if I was south of the border. In Scotland there might be five minutes in it, but a man has to know his limitations. Readers of these footnotes may find this surprising, but I do not think that everything that occurs to me is worth saying.
But again, I was making a number of kind of crass generalisations about, about the Scots, about my country there. And I don’t, I don’t believe any of them. Again, I did it for comic effect.
But you do meet people who have very fixed notions about other groups of people. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I got in, er, a cab in, in London in
December
, and about five minutes into the journey, a propos of nothing, early on a Sunday morning, the cab driver turned round to me and he said, ‘I think all homosexuals should be killed.’
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This actually happened to me, in the summer of 1999, as I pulled off the Westway towards BBC TV centre in a car that had been booked by the BBC. If you’re driving someone to the liberal bastion of the BBC, it’s reasonable to assume they won’t think all homosexuals should be killed, and of course there’s always the high statistical chance that your passenger will themselves be gay. Where did the comment spring from? Was there something on the radio that I didn’t hear, or a billboard I didn’t see, that provoked it? Also, why say it at all? Even from a business point of view it can’t make sense for a service-provider to risk causing such massive offence. Why are cab drivers not concerned about appearing to fulfil,
completely
, their stand-up comedy stereotype? It’s almost as if they enjoy it.
Now, whatever you think of that, Glasgow, as a statement, you have to admit it’s a bold opening conversational
gambit
. You know, with a stranger. And I was a bit taken aback. I went, ‘Oh, why do you think that?’ And then there was a pause, ’cause he’d obviously never had to go to the next level of the argument, fraternising mainly with cab drivers, so … where that was just accepted as a point. No …
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Yes, I am aware that, paradoxically, I am arguing for more humane attitudes towards the gays while at the same time
stereotyping
all white, working-class cab drivers as being ignorant bigots. All I can say is that there are times in the act when I deliberately move into a kind of persona of a bigoted, middle-class, über-liberal for comic effect, but even I am not sure exactly where this character begins and I end, especially when I find myself behaving like this in my actual life.
And he said, ‘Well …’ after a moment, he said, ‘Well, because homosexuality is immoral.’
And I said – this is honestly true – I said, ‘Um, I’m not sure how much weight you can afford to place on the notion of morality in this argument, because morality’s not a fixed thing. It changes its parameters, culturally,
historically
, over time.’ I said, ‘For example, look at ancient Greece. To this day, we still take most of our most
fundamental
principles about ethics, aesthetics, er, philosophy, medicine, science, whatever from ancient Greece. And yet’, I said, ‘in ancient Greece, love between two men, far from being immoral, was actually considered the highest, most ethical, most profound, if you will, most moral form of love that there could be. So all I’m saying’, I said to him, ‘is I’m not sure how useful morality is, given its flexible nature, as a cornerstone of your argument on this subject.’
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I did honestly say something along these lines at this point, but even as I was saying it I passed a point where I was aware it had been an absurd decision to try and reason with the man, and so just went for broke, going on and on and on past the point of no return, enjoying the futility of it. These days I have utterly lost patience with cab drivers’ nonsense. Last year, on finding out that I was a comedian, a cab driver started to explain to me how Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown was the best comedian in the world, and where once I might have agreed politely and waited for the encounter to end, I just said, ‘He isn’t, and anyone who likes him must be a moron.’ And that was that. Enough is enough.
And then he said to me – this is honestly true – he said to me, ‘Well, you can prove anything with facts, can’t you?’
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The cab driver actually said this. I think it is one of the single funniest sentences of all time. Its implications are endlessly terrifying, and endlessly hilarious. I wish it had been meant as a joke, but it wasn’t.
For a minute, I went, ‘Yeah.’ And then I thought, ‘Hang on! That’s the most fantastic way of winning an argument I’ve ever heard! “You can … I’m not interested in facts. I find they tend to cloud my judgement. I prefer to rely on instinct and blind prejudice.”’
And I came of age, for want of a better phrase, in the, in the nineteen-eighties when we had political correctness.
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And people look back at that and they go, ‘Oh, political correctness was shit, wasn’t it? Being fair to people.’ And I think, ‘Maybe it was good, ’cause people wouldn’t have said that, and you wouldn’t have had happen what happened in May last year, right.’ If you remember, er, Ron Atkinson, the football manager, he got in trouble for calling a black footballer a lazy, thick nigger.
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Right? And loads of
people
complained about it, understandably. And then on May the 17th, Jimmy Hill, the BBC-employed football
commentator
, came out in Ron Atkinson’s defence. And he said that, in his opinion, it was a load of fuss about nothing. He said, ‘What you have to understand’, Jimmy Hill said in the papers, 17th of May, ‘is that in the culture of football,
calling
a black man a nigger is just a bit of harmless fun.’
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