Context Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

This programme contains adult humour.

People feel stand-up comedy is about attack. They say, "What are your targets?

"What are you going to attack?" The older I get, I realise that I'm attacking myself.

Not verbally or intellectually but just physically, with various

levels of unfitness, lack of exercise and a general sloth.

And I think it would be interesting to see how far you can go

with that and what comes out the other side.

This is an extraordinary, if I may say so,

confused blend of real, genuine danger that

-you're putting yourself in and totally artificial shtick.

-Mmm.

APPLAUSE

Thank you...I know.

So, erm, I was in another cab, right?

I don't just go around in... I don't just go around in cabs.

It's just that I mainly look after kids or do gigs,

so the only time I get to talk to adults and get

ideas for routines is if I pay them to drive me around, basically.

LAUGHTER

Anyway, I was in another cab and in the front of the cab the guy

had all England flags and EDL stuff, I thought, "Here we go".

I judged him, basically.

Which you shouldn't do.

My grandad always said, "You should never judge a book by its cover."

And it's for that reason that he lost his job as chair

of the British Book Cover Awards panel.

LAUGHTER

I can write jokes, I just choose not to.

LAUGHTER

Anyway, the bloke's started out with all this BNP type stuff.

And I got a bit... I got more bored than annoyed by it in the end,

to be honest.

In the end, I said to him, "You know what? I'm going to get out here."

I said, "Stop the car and don't expect a tip...my wife is black."

Now, she isn't black.

But if she was, I'm sure she would have been very annoyed by what

that cab driver had to say.

Or maybe not, maybe she would have engaged with him

and used her intelligence and her personality

and her sense of humour to, sort of, talk him out of his prejudices.

I hope so.

I hope that's the kind of woman

my imaginary black wife would have been.

LAUGHTER

Not like my real wife, my white wife, as I call her.

LAUGHTER

She's Irish, so she probably would just have been drunk

and hit the bloke.

Absolutely awful.

But my black, imaginary wife, what's she like?

I tell you what, she's very...

LAUGHTER

..very laid-back, cool,

chilled out sort of person.

She's very good with the children, she never gets riled up by them.

My real Irish wife, if it's after six o'clock, forget it.

She's drunk, violent, aggressive, incoherent, religious bigot.

LAUGHTER

I won't negotiate with her.

LAUGHTER

Or with any of them, to be honest.

But my black, imaginary wife...

When we first met it was difficult

because back then people in the UK were more suspicious

of mixed-race relationships but it's much better now.

And also, it's easy, because it doesn't...it's not real,

I've imagined it. So, I don't really know what it's like.

It's sort of patronising, liberal delusion.

LAUGHTER

I was in another cab on the day that the House of Lords were

discussing the gay marriage bill.

And the cab driver, who as it turned out was a Hindu,

he said to me he was against sexual unions of people of the same

gender on religious grounds.

I thought to myself, I thought, "I wonder which Hindu god it is

"objects to the sexual union of two people of the same gender.

"I do hope it's the Hindu god that looks like the result

"of the sexual union of a human and an elephant."

LAUGHTER

But I didn't think of that at the time, I'm not funny in real life.

I thought of it... I thought of it when I got home

and I wrote it on my desk and I learned it and I've come

and I've said it to you tonight.

And I've learned this, as well, that I'm saying now and written that.

And this now, I've written that and learned that.

And this, just going like that going like that, ehh...

I've learned that and I've written that

and this now, I've learned this.

And this, and this now...and this.

And just going...ehh, I've written that and learned that.

Everything's written and learnt.

So, I didn't say that, I said to him, "Do you know what?"

I said, "Stop the car, I'm going to get out here

"and don't expect a tip, my wife is a man.'

LAUGHTER

Now, he isn't a man, he's a woman.

But if he was a man,

I'm sure he would have been very offended by that Hindu cab driver.

Or maybe not, maybe he would have engaged with him

and tried to laugh him

out of his prejudices using his sense of humour.

Cos you know what? They've got a hilarious sense of humour,

-haven't they?

-LAUGHTER

The gays...very witty, acerbic,

caustic sense of humour, the gays.

Not like my imaginary black wife, she's very serious,

or my real white, Irish wife, who as I've said, is a violent hooligan.

A harridan...little better than a gutter thug.

LAUGHTER

But my gay imaginary wife is absolutely hilarious,

he's the funniest person I've ever met.

He should have his own chat show, they should try that.

He's so funny, I reckon, after five minutes alone with him,

that Hindu cab driver would have opened his own Grindr account.

-He's hilarious!

-LAUGHTER

He's fantastic, I love him. I love all my wives, they're all great.

Now...

LAUGHTER

..one night I ate too much cheese

and I know, I can see you thinking,

"We can see that, mate.

"We can see you've been at the cheese since the last series."

And in your mind's eye you are probably picturing me

eating a massive block of cheese.

I'm not a pig. I wouldn't do that.

I'd eat that much cheese but I'm a connoisseur of cheese.

I'd eat that amount but little bits from all different types of cheese.

I absolutely love cheese.

I love cheese, I love cheeses.

I love all the different cheeses.

LAUGHTER

PROLONGED LAUGHTER

Red Leicester.

LAUGHTER

All the cheeses, I love all of them.

So...

..one night I ate too much cheese and my black imaginary wife

and my gay imaginary wife, well, they met in my sub-conscious.

Now, they both knew about my real white, Irish wife,

but they didn't know about each other.

And the shit hit the fan!

My black imaginary wife was stomping around.

My gay imaginary man wife, he was going,

"What if your real white, Irish wife were to find out about all this?

"I wonder if your marriage would survive?"

And it was at that moment, I realised, I had no option

but to murder both of them.

LAUGHTER

Now, in my mind that's the punch line of that bit

but it never gets a huge laugh.

And, I think, the problem is that the character of the black imaginary wife

and the gay imaginary wife are so richly drawn, aren't they?

They're so three dimensional. They avoid all the usual stereotyping.

And I think it's as if you know them

and you've got a very real relationship with them.

You're going, "No, don't take them away."

LAUGHTER

So little is expected from a stand-up comedian.

They're viewed with contempt

and thought of as the very lowest form of entertainer, I think.

And so, if you, like, bring in the slightest illusion of thought

or intelligence, you appear to be some sort of genius.

It's interesting, I think that's part of the cocktail of what

you present to people that makes them constantly unable to

rest, is that at one time you're destroying yourself physically and

yet almost in the same breath you will describe yourself as a genius.

-Yeah.

-Which you have just done.

-Maybe, yeah.

I mean you have to, surely you have to,

otherwise where do you get the nerve to even begin this stuff?

Well, it's a...it's a...well, from drinking.

It's a Dutch confidence, I think it's called, and I feel

if I can get out there,

if I can just stay upright for half an hour, keep talking,

shout over any interruptions, I can probably get through it.

Now...because I'm better than you,

I live here in multicultural Hackney, in North-East London.

Which means that I interact with people of different races, creeds,

cultures, backgrounds, whatever, often two or three times a week.

And this...

LAUGHTER

..coupled with talking to loads of racist cab drivers,

gives me a massive overview of the notion of offence

in contemporary British society.

Here's two examples. Where I live in Hackney on our street,

there used to be a jazz club in an old medieval building

and I used to go there a lot.

Not to watch normal jazz, I used to go to see the experimental, improvised free jazz.

And then, one day, this building got bought by Nando's who were

going to knock it down and make a Nando's.

So, me and my wife, we joined the anti-Nando's campaign.

And one day a black woman I know was walking along the street

and she saw me and she came up to me and said,

"Oh, I see you've joined the anti-Nando's campaign."

And I went, "Yes", and I assumed the body language

of a man awaiting praise.

LAUGHTER

And she said to me, "Shame on you!" And I said, "What?"

And she said, "I notice you didn't complain when the Chinese restaurant opened."

I couldn't work out what was going on, I said, "What's going on?"

Turned out, the assumption is that Nando's is popular with

the black community in North-East London, I didn't really know that.

And she thought I didn't want a Nando's opening

because I didn't want black people eating on my street.

And I said to her, "No, that isn't the case at all.

"We're trying to save the jazz club.

"And jazz is a black music, so I'm not racist at all."

LAUGHTER

And she said, "Jazz IS a black music,"

she said, "but not the sort of jazz that you like."

LAUGHTER

"The free, improvised, experimental jazz,"

she said, "though it has its roots in the innovations of black

"performers like Sunny Murray or Albert Ayler, its chief sphere

"of influence is drawn from the white, European post-war avant-garde."

-IMITATES WEST INDIAN ACCENT:

-Bombaclat.

LAUGHTER

Good to be back in multicultural London

and get a laugh for that line.

I was doing this bit in Edinburgh in August,

I say that, people just looking around going, "Oh, dear, is that racist?"

They look around to see if there's anyone to check with

and, of course, there isn't.

LAUGHTER

So it's good to be back in London where everyone should live.

LAUGHTER

To be fair, I've been slightly unfair with that joke.

Obviously, that woman had had experience of actual prejudice.

Enough to assume I was being prejudiced, which I understand.

Although I don't think you should judge people.

My grandad always said, "Judge not, lest ye be judged."

And it was for that reason...that he

lost his job as Lord Chief Justice

of England and Wales.

LAUGHTER

Terrible waste of public money to appoint him with that...

Utterly irresponsible.

Even the most cursory check of his employment record would have

revealed that he had a lifelong pathological aversion to any

job involving judgment of any sort.

What's the first, most racist joke you would say?

The first, most racist joke?

If I was going to do a racist set,

I'd like to make sure that I've offended everyone.

And I think if you offend everyone,

that's the same as not offending anyone.

But you have to start right back, all through time.

So, I'd probably do the Samarians or the Incas.

Some people like that.

Would you really let Australopithecus have it?

Yeah, I would.

I'd particularly go for them and all forms of early man, Ice Age man.

I would mock the cave paintings of the Ice Age man

and their primitive sculptures.

The title of the show is - it's two hours long, it's live -

A Hard Of Hearing Man Mocks Every Race That's Ever Existed In Chronological Order.

That would be the title of it.

Wembley Arena?

Wembley Arena, long running West End hit.

Course, now the Nando's has opened, I love it.

I love Nando's, I go there all the time.

Jesus Christ, it's made me really fat, going to Nando's.

The problem is I do like jazz more than Nando's though.

The conflict of interest I would have would be if Nando's were

to invent some kind of jazz chicken.

By which I mean a chicken, which

while still recognisably a chicken, used improvisation and chance

procedure to operate at the very limits of what a chicken could be.

LAUGHTER

For my money, that's the best joke in the series, right?

It's gone all right here but not great. It's gone all right.

Makes me die a little inside to just have that go all right.

But I'm a professional,

I'm just going to press on into the rest of the routine.

So, erm...

Here's another example of what I'm talking about.

I was in Dalston, right, in East London.

I was driving down Dalston High Road.

I was going slowly because there were loads of potholes

and my wife was pregnant at the time, it was about three years back.

And I got to Dalston Junction...

Now, right, I know this is going to go out on the telly

and already, what will be happening is there will be people in Scotland

e-mailing in and Twittering in and stuff like that and going,

-BAD SCOTTISH ACCENT:

-"How dare you, you mentioned..."

I can't do all the voices, but they are going to be going,

"How dare you mention Dalston.

"I don't know where that is.

"How am I supposed to understand your joke

"when there's a place name in London I've never...

"I've never heard of that.

"It's absolutely outrageous that you would do that.

"It's so London-centric."

What I say...

What I say to the Scots, that's who that was,

who say, "What is Dalston like?"

It's all right. It can be a bit rough,

can be a bit violent sometimes.

Dalston's like the 90% of Edinburgh

that the Scots keep hidden behind that rock.

All your tourists walking around, aren't they,

"Let's go in the tea shop, that's nice.

"Let's go in the museum. Let's walk up Arthur's Seat...

"Aagh!"

"They spat heroin into my face!"

Just get over it. It's obvious what I'm talking about.

It's just a bit of town.

You don't have to be from a place to understand...

I know what the Loch Ness Monster is, I'm not from Scotland,

but I know what that is.

Lot of people think the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist,

don't they, actually? Now, I don't know anything

about zoology, biology, geology,

geography, marine biology, crypto-zoology,

evolutionary theory, evolutionary biology, meteorology,

limnology, history, herpetology,

palaeontology or archaeology,

but I think...

..what if a dinosaur had got in the lake?

It would live there for a million years just eating mud...

Could have done.

Maybe there's like a family and over through history

became their job to warn it of danger

and they had a bagpipe and they would go...

HE MIMICS BAGPIPE

"Loch Ness Monster, look out! The scientists are coming.

"And they've got a radar.

"Go in a crack."

So I was at Dalston Junction...

I didn't really know where I was going,

so I was dawdling at Dalston Junction.

And you must never dawdle at Dalston Junction, Scotland,

because if you dawdle, if you dawdle at Dalston Junction,

one of two things is going to happen.

You're either going to be shot in the face

or you're going to have a satirical anti-capitalist graffiti mural

sprayed on you by a white, middle-class, art-school dropout.

And which one of those two things happens depends on which way

the tide of gentrification is flowing that week.

So I was at Dalston Junction, I was dawdling, I was holding up

the traffic and a black guy pulled up alongside me in a car and he

wound down the window and he shouted at me in a jaunty, encouraging,

not unfriendly sort of way, he shouted,

"Come on, move your ass, nigga."

Now, as a white, middle-class liberal,

I have terrible anxieties about the use of that word.

And the Football Association, for example,

have struggled terribly with that word in recent years.

As they have, to be fair, with all words.

Unless they're a synonym for the phrase, "Ah, the lad's done well."

Race is a hot potato in football, ongoing one.

Reg Hunter, who is a black comedian, he got in trouble for using

the N-word at a football do, and David Bernstein,

the then-head of the FA, he said the word was unacceptable,

irrespective of context.

And I completely understand the genuine anxiety behind the thinking.

But far be it from me

to take issue with a footballer's grasp of semantics...

..but can you have a context-free word?

Can you have a word, the meaning of which,

has no relationship with the meaning of the words around it?

Isn't that just what language is? I don't know.

Can you have a context-free word?

If you call a tree a twat in a forest...

..and there's no-one there from the FA to adjudicate,

how do you know if that's offensive?

If you shout "tits" at a shrub, in a cellar, is that wrong?

If Ricky Gervais shouts "mong" in a forest, over and over again,

and there's no Americans there to tell him he's a genius...

..is that then offensive? I don't know.

Can you have a context-free word?

And if you can have a context-free word,

what does that say about my experience of a black man calling me

the N-word in an apparently friendly way in multicultural Dalston?

Was it an insult, was it a compliment,

was it a case of mistaken identity?

I've got no idea whatsoever.

I don't understand what's going on.

If you want certainties, you have to go and see Roy 'Chubby' Brown.

In his new touring show, An Evening Of Certainty.

The advertising strap-line,

"Leave the same as you arrived, only more so."

I don't know. I don't know.

But what I say to footballers is this.

Footballers, do not attempt to advise writers and artists

on the way that words and sounds become couriers for nuanced meaning.

And we won't attempt to advise you on how best to change ends

at half-time with a drunk teenager in a hotel penthouse.

Now, this is exactly the sort of thing that I'm talking about.

There was laughs, wasn't there, applause

and some anxious sort of booing over there.

And I think I know what's going on, the audience, generally here,

they thought, "We understand the thrust of this, broadly.

"He's asking questions about the relative merits of misogyny

"and racism in football culture.

"We understand there's a broadly liberal thrust to the joke.

"But we're uncomfortable, Stew,

"about the violence of the imagery contained within it."

I understand that and I'm very alert to taste issues in stand-up.

I've been trying to think how best to deal with taste issues

in stand-up, and to that end, I've been watching

Jimmy Carr on Channel 4's Ten O'Clock Live and I know now

if you've got a joke and you're not sure about the taste implications

that it throws up, when you've said it, at the end, you just go...

And that's the same as having thought about it.

I'm a huge fan of political correctness, I think it's

a great contribution to sort of public discourse.

But I also love swearing and offence.

Some people are brilliant at swearing.

The best person at swearing I ever met was my father,

who was hilarious.

He was to swearing what Miles Davis was to the trumpet.

What the desert wind is to the sandstone rocks.

What Simon Cowell is to shattered dreams and crushed hopes.

He was a poet, an artist, a sculptor.

And the single most offensive sentence I ever heard him say...

He said it on the gangplank of a pleasure cruiser

in Greenwich Harbour in May 2002.

This amazing sentence, which managed to be simultaneously both sexist,

racist, sizeist and blasphemous

and yet it contained only eight words.

Five of which were abusive and the remaining three were a preposition,

a pronoun and the verb "look".

Which, working in the moment, to be fair,

he had not managed to make offensive, but I think given time

he would have come up with something.

It was an amazing, amazing sentence.

And now if, right, if there was just us here,

the live audience in this room,

I could probably say this sentence because you've had to go

to some difficulty in getting tickets for the live recording.

I sort of trust you to some extent to understand that I'm not...

If I was to say that sentence, I wouldn't necessarily

be endorsing it, I'm just putting it out there for your consideration.

The problem is this is on television,

we've no idea who is out there watching this.

There could be literally anyone they allow to watch television.

There could be journalists there watching it,

who will remove all the cushioning I've put around the sentence

and strip it back

to a kind of clickbait piece of controversy so I actually can't...

I can't say the sentence. It can't be let out into the world.

Although the irony is, in the last 20 minutes,

I have said every single word in that sentence.

Although none of you found them offensive

because of the context in which they were used.

I mean you ridicule the idea of a context-free word.

But you're worried about a word being taken out of context.

-Yeah.

-Now if you take a word out of context

and put it in another context,

then surely for a moment it's got no context.

While it's in transit?

Yeah.

Yeah, if you could grab it at that point

and see what it tasted like, then you would know

whether you could have a context-free word or not.

Well, here's perhaps more food for doubt.

What about what happens to words when you're asleep?

Yeah...

MUSIC: "Prelude in E Minor" by Frederic Chopin