How I Escaped My Certain Fate (19 page)

Onstage, Gottfried’s gag about taking an internal flight with a connection at the Empire State Building died.
Someone
shouts, ‘Too soon.’ ‘You can see him stall,’ remembers Provenza,

Cutting between Gottfried’s grinning face and the sight of people literally falling off their chairs laughing and gasping, in pain, for breath,
The Aristocrats
made a
convincing
case for absurdity as a logical response to tragedy. I wept, not tears of laughter, but tears of joy. I wept tears of joy watching a tiny man describe a family of four sexually and physically abusing each other, and any animals in the vicinity, in the name of entertainment. And after an hour and ten minutes of
The Aristocrats’
surgically precise
analysis
of how we are made to laugh, and why we laugh, I think I almost understood why.

In my mind, Provenza and Jillette’s extended essay on the mutable nature of offence synced up immediately with all the spurious debates unravelling at home about the
offensiveness
of
Jerry Springer:
The Opera, which until now had been universally praised, even in the religious press. The nature of offence was not objective. It was essentially
subjective
. We are offended. You are offended. I am offended.
But is anything offensive
in and of itself?
In short, if a tree says ‘fuck, cunt, abortion, piss’ in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, is the tree offensive? And could there be any circumstances under which those words could even convey the opposite of offence, whatever that is? What delighted me about
The Aristocrats
was watching material which, on paper, should have been indefensibly obscene transformed by context and performance skills into something funny, something sometimes even moving or cathartic. There needed to be something of the flavour of this approach in whatever I chose to do onstage about the
Jerry Springer: The Opera
debacle.

Added to this, my bleeding arse, my orange piss, my contorted stomach, watching my blood bubble around the needle in the drip, feeling the cool saline fluid in my veins, suddenly losing and gaining and losing weight, feeling like a tube of screaming meat whose only purpose was to
process
the muck I ate and crap it out the other end, eating only potatoes, feeling the burn on my left side if I strayed to coffee or whisky or soft drinks, the mildly hallucinogenic vibe of my recovery period, the Scottish junkie I urinated on, the endless pressure on my weakened bladder through all those long car journeys on tour, and the wolfman’s weeping sores, had made me acutely aware of the physical world, the pungent world, the world of flesh. I was poised to make something of it.

When the tour with Josie wound up, my good Edinburgh reviews wafted me away to four months of work in festivals and touring in Australia and New Zealand. In Melbourne no one really came to see me for a month, and I struggled to keep the set alive. But I did get to know the marvellous Mike Wilmot, whose show I went to see repeatedly because it moved me, and it shouldn’t have done, being an evening
of dirty jokes capped with a very long routine about
licking
someone’s anus. Just when you think you can’t stand hearing another middle-aged male comic moaning about his marriage and how he can’t please his wife any more, along comes this Falstaffian Canadian, who can invest an hour on these tired old subjects with unexpected levels of humanity, surprise and inventiveness entirely absent from the work of more self-consciously original comics. Mike’s act was knee-deep in filth, and every night he pretended to need an extra beer because the gig was going so well at exactly the same point, but all the time he was really talking, from the heart, with utter sincerity, about what it meant to be in love. On the bills of the pathetic Nasty Show, at the Montreal Comedy Festival, Mike, a great artist, is annually misfiled alongside the usual predictable American racists, homophobes and misogynists, and yet this good-natured honey-bear of a man seems not to mind at all, and just gets on quietly with the business of rendering their noisy
whining
irrelevant.
*

In Auckland I played a full 150-seater venue every night for a month, The Classic, arguably a tie with The Stand in Edinburgh for the world’s most perfect stand-up room. Late at night the same space was used for a club gig, where, one evening, I was suddenly seized by the spirit of Phil Nicol, who was out front hosting the show to a room full of enthusiastically oiled punters. Phil is a total performer who thinks nothing of beginning his shows naked and screaming and then trying to move forward from there.
He does not understand the notion of peaking too early. That night he was improvising wildly with the public, his shirt pulled up over his head so that he looked like a kind of stunted Weeble, swinging his arms, singing hillbilly folk songs, and gesturing repeatedly at his bottom. I forget why. Far away from home, cut adrift, if you like, I suddenly felt that every thing I did seemed tame and trite and safe, and that it was my duty to just walk out and try to do
something
I had never done before, without a safety net. I had nothing to lose. No one knew me here anyway.
*

I tried to jam an old routine I wrote in my early
twenties
about coming home drunk and being sick at my mum’s house onto some kind of scatological encounter with Jesus, without any real planning. I don’t really know why I decided to do this. I suspect I was subliminally under the influence of
The Aristocrats,
but I don’t really
remember
what I did, or how I did it, or how it was received. It was late and I was probably drunk. But when it came to assembling the new stand-up show, I remembered that I had tried it, and suddenly it seemed that with some careful thought, it would be the perfect way of exploring the idea of religious offence.

After the Auckland festival was over I went on the road in New Zealand for a week in a package show, flying over vast forests and mountain ranges in tiny tin aircraft, and sweating in Maori hotsprings. I learned at the feet of the Australian Zen master of everyman observational comedy, Carl Barron, scored an out-of-print Penguin of Algernon
Blackwood’s
The Centaur
in an Oxfam bookshop on a deserted beach, and had a transcendental moment
watching
a psychedelic trio called Jakob in a student dive
somewhere
on the South Island. Then I travelled for a
further
two months in the same kind of set-up in Australia, backed by some kind of bung from the Australian
equivalent
of the Arts Council, which is just one woman in a floral-print headscarf, crying alone in an empty room. By the time I reached the Great Western Desert I felt like I was completely off the grid. We watched a Little Feat
covers
band in a Chinese gambling den somewhere in the middle of nowhere, genuflected to a statue of the Red Dog of Dampier, and played towns inhabited only by miners and strippers, where no live entertainment ever went and the only places you could get a drink were topless joints. Near Kalgoorlie we saw the biggest man-made hole in the world. ‘This place is a hole,’ said the cat impersonator Sam Simmons, with hilarious inevitability. Again, I felt far away and disconnected.

During a week of the package show in Perth, in a
soldout
1,000-seater variety theatre, I did my whole half-hour set from behind the curtain, with just my feet showing, as I improvised as many variations as I could think of on an old routine I had written fifteen years ago about arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness. I was reckless. What had caused it? The threat of prosecution for
Jerry Springer?
Starting stand-up again and loving it? Jumping off the Auckland Sky Tower? Seeing
The Aristocrats?
Filling a bedpan with my own blood? Wondering, if only for a night or so, about dying? Being far from home for so long? Or eating only potatoes for five months? Whatever, I was not quite myself.
*

On a west coast layover at a little town called Exmouth, staying in a deserted American air-force base abandoned at speed after 9/11 and now a motel, we jumped out of a spotter boat to go swimming with forty-foot-long whale sharks as they migrated north. The eco-tourism guide got in the sea with us and shot footage on an underwater camera. The antipodeans, Frank Woodley and Jesse
Griffin
, were confident and graceful deep-water swimmers. I, our tour manager Edwina Lunn and the American comic Jackie Kashian weren’t entirely at home. But I splashed alongside a whale shark all the same, even if I was
spluttering
through my snorkel. Months later, I received a DVD of the edited footage of us all cautiously trailing the mottled giants, set to a soundtrack of dance music and ambient house. That wasn’t what I was hearing in my head. At one
point, I accidentally got above a whale shark in the water, which you’re not supposed to do, and he just sank, as they warned us the whale sharks would, slowly, slowly, deeper and deeper, until he had disappeared into the dark. All I heard was a cold and beautiful silence.

On my last week on the road, like the sinking shark, I’d finally had enough of Australia. In Perth, I went to a record store to get the new album by Oasis, who I had never
previously
liked, and then I went to a British novelty shop and got some Bovril, which I had never previously drunk. I am sure there were things I should have been visiting in Perth – museums of genocide and islands full of rats. But I stayed in the hotel, listened to Oasis, drank Bovril and dreamed of England, where my heart lay. There was work to do at home.

At some point while I was away my management asked for a name for the show for Edinburgh. I called it ’90s
Comedian
because it made me laugh, it being 2005, but as the set started to come together I wish I’d been able to give it a better name.
’90s Comedian
was looking like being one smooth through-line of a single story, drawn from the physical and mental traumas of the previous few months. If I fudged the dates of my stomach illness, I could blame it on the stress caused by persecution by the Christian right. Then I could use the invasive probing of my anus in the colonoscopy I was subsequently required by the hospital to endure as a way into the second half of the proposed show. And the second half of the show would be a version of the drunken religious encounter I had improvised under the influence of Phil Nicol and
The Aristocrats
onstage in Auckland, during which I planned to describe
vomiting
repeatedly on Christ, in an attempt to explore
genuine
limits of expression, rather than the imagined ones the
Christian right had extrapolated from exaggerated reports of the content of
Jerry Springer:
The Opera.

I did not conceive these two sections of the show as a Rorschach mirror image of each other, but I doubt that the second half of the show, in which I am invited by Jesus to use him as a receptacle for my vomit, would have worked so well, if at all, had I not chosen to show myself
suffering
my own rectal invasion, due to an illness exacerbated by pressure from the religious right, in the early stages of the piece. The gruesome subject material would also give me a chance to experiment with an aspect of
The
Aristocrats
I’d enjoyed enormously, namely the notion that the piling up of obscenity might reach a point where it became transcendental, or even beautiful, and reveal the
objections
to our opera for what they were – subjective
opinions
about material which was inevitably altered by
context
and intent. But I also liked the fact that
The Aristocrats
was about comics talking about jokes, and I wanted to give people the same pleasure the film gave me, of letting us see behind the scenes of how a joke works. Even if the show was formed as one massive overarching idea, I still wanted it to be just a joke. I was newly proud to be a comedian once more. And whatever meanings might be laid on top of the show, I wanted to end it by reminding everyone that I was a stand-up comedian and this was a piece of
standup
comedy. Not a piece of theatre. Or an opera. Even if the arts editors of the
Guardian
and the
Independent
were
suddenly
fans.