Death Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

This programme contains some strong language.

What I'm going to do now is talk for 28 minutes on the subject of children's attitudes

to death, right? I know this is quite a heavy subject, you can't go straight into it,

so I'll soften up the ground by doing a quick, light-hearted

three-minute celebrity-based anecdote.

So, I was on tour, and I was... LAUGHTER

Yeah, yeah, I was. I was in Dundee,

and it was the day of the last lunar eclipse,

and I'd forgotten it was the lunar eclipse.

But I woke up in the hotel room and I put the telly on,

and I saw Professor Brian Cox and Dara O Briain

talking about the lunar eclipse.

I say I saw Professor Brian Cox talking about the eclipse.

I couldn't see Professor Brian Cox talking about the eclipse

cos Dara O Briain was standing in front of him.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

And I thought what an amazing cosmic coincidence it was

that...God or nature or whatever you believe in

had made Dara O Briain exactly the perfect size

to completely obscure Professor Brian Cox...

..on one day of the year only...

..when viewed from a particular point

on a Dundee hotel bed.

You must never look directly at Professor Brian Cox, of course.

Always view him through a colander.

LAUGHTER

So, a bit of fun. Light-hearted routine that

just to get us into the more serious material.

It's not been without its problems, that routine.

A lot of the younger comics have been in criticising it.

The...the younger comics, they're obsessed with me

but they hate me as well.

They go, "I hate Stewart Lee.

"I've seen him 400 times.

"And I speak exactly like him." But...

Yeah, you know who you are. But I... LAUGHTER

But, no, they've been going on about that routine on the Twitter.

Apparently the problem with that routine

is it's not scientifically accurate.

Yeah, I know. Well, it isn't.

Actually, it isn't, because the way an eclipse works,

if you think about it, is that it's not like in that joke.

The way an eclipse works is that

the larger body is obscured, isn't it,

temporarily by the smaller body,

because the smaller body is sort of closer

to our point of view on the earth.

So, fair point.

The way that routine should work,

if it was scientifically accurate, is like this.

So, I was in Dundee, and I woke up on the day of the eclipse,

and I saw Professor Brian Cox and Dara O Briain

talking about the eclipse.

I say I saw Dara O Briain talking about the eclipse.

I couldn't see Dara O Briain talking about the eclipse

cos Professor Brian Cox was standing in front of him.

Yeah, it's not as funny, is it?

It's not as funny. LAUGHTER

And that's why I wrote it the way round that I did.

So...

So, I woke up in Dundee on the day of the eclipse,

and I walked down to the River Tay.

And I stood on a bridge over the River Tay in Dundee

looking at the eclipse and thinking about time...

..and eternity and how insignificant human life is.

Not just in Dundee.

LAUGHTER

Throughout Scotland and the North generally.

LAUGHTER

Don't write in. But, erm...

I think the first time that most of us learnt about death

is from the death of a pet, such as a goldfish,

and conventional wisdom says this helps prepare us

for the death later on of a relative,

such as a grandmother,

particularly if our grandmother dies

having been scooped out of an ornamental fish pond.

Tossed high in the air and left to expire on the lawn.

We warned Gran about taunting that cat.

Yeah, a bit of fun, innit, that joke? A bit of light-hearted fun.

Easing us into the more serious body of the main routine.

Again, not without its problems.

A lot of the younger comics have been in criticising that routine.

They hate me, but they're obsessed with me, the younger comics.

And the problem with that routine, I read on Facebook,

is they're going,

"If Stewart Lee...if his grandmother is a goldfish, as he claims,

"then why does he himself not display

"any goldfish characteristics...

"such as fins or scales?"

And the reason for that is because I'm adopted, all right?

Yeah.

But I don't like to make a big deal about it, all right?

I was adopted by goldfish,

so I don't have the physical characteristics of goldfish.

Although, weirdly, I have always chosen to reproduce

by releasing my semen directly into freshwater.

LAUGHTER

It's the old nature-nurture argument.

It's quite complicated, isn't it, being you?

It is. It's difficult, and people don't appreciate it.

I mean, if I wasn't me, I would hate me.

And I am me and I hate me a bit.

-If you could see yourself on television...

-I'd turn it off.

-..what would you say?

-I'd turn it off.

If you...if you were 22 and you had a Twitter account...

Actually, no, probably about 30 and you had a Twitter account...

-Yeah.

-..what would you say about yourself?

-I would hate it.

I'd hate the conceitedness of it

and the sort of...the kind of fact that

it's not as good as it thinks it is, and, you know, I'd hate it.

Do you think that's what young comics do?

They hate it and yet, in some way, they can't resist being drawn in?

Of course, if one of these young comics they had now

had been adopted by goldfish,

you'd never hear the fucking end of it, would you?

They'd have written a depressing,

award-winning, serious one-man show about it.

Depressing, award-winning, meaningful stand-up shows -

that's the new trend in stand-up.

They're not on BBC Two.

Obviously, by the time any comedy is on BBC Two,

it's of no artistic value.

But... LAUGHTER

It's the new trend - depressing, award-winning, one-man show.

IN WHINY VOICE: "I was adopted by a goldfish,

"and I was really depressed and confused

"and I lived in fear of toilets,

"but I was able to see the funny side.

"Can I have an award, please?"

"Oh, I've got eczema. It's really itchy.

"But it's taught me something about life, having eczema.

"Can I have an award, please?"

"Oh, my dad's dead, and he's died and it's really depressing. But..."

Oh, fuck off. Shut up. Give your award back.

All our dads die.

We all die.

What are we?

We're just meat being shovelled into a grave.

You don't want to hear that on a night out.

LAUGHTER

Sad, depressing, meaningful comedy - what a waste of time.

"I've only got one arm!"

Fuck off back to New Zealand and shut up.

I could do a sad, meaningful, award-winning comedy show.

Loads of terrible things have happened to me.

I've...I'm deaf,

65,000 born-again Christians tried to send me to prison.

I've got irritable bowel syndrome.

I could do a show about that, couldn't I?

IN WHINY VOICE: "Oh, I've got irritable bowel syndrome,

"but as long I avoid carbonated drinks,

"it's not too bad, really. Oh, it's not..."

I could do a sad, meaningful, depressing stand-up show,

but I'm not going to

cos I've got some dignity and some self-respect,

and I think some things should remain private

and are not a fit subject for comedy

unless there's the possibility of broadsheet newspaper coverage

and broadcaster interest.

LAUGHTER

I think the first time that I learned about death...

..was from the death of my pet mouse

which was given to me by my uncle when I was six.

I say uncle - he was a man I met at a bus stop.

But he said he was my uncle...

..and his pockets were full of mice.

At least he said they were mice.

I mean, they squeaked.

But, you know, I loved that mouse,

and as a child, I sort of imagined the mouse

had some kind of relationship with me.

This is an extract from my childhood diary.

1976. I was eight years old.

"Mum and I are a single-parent family now...

"..not that that matters...

"..because every night, after school,

"I tell my mouse about my day,

"my worries and my concerns.

"And he lies on the floor,

"scratching and eating and making smells...

"..and then he turns his back on me

"and goes off and urinates in the corner.

"It's just like before Dad left."

LAUGHTER

Erm...you know, looking back,

I think that was a bit unfair of the eight-year-old me.

My father was a very funny man, and he...

You know, I admired him enormously. He lived for the weekend.

And...at the weekend, he would spend the whole weekend in his flat

wearing just a pair of leopard-skin Speedo swimming trunks

eating only little pots of jam

that he'd stolen from Dutch hotel rooms...

..watching only documentaries about Hitler

and pausing only to go out into the garden

to throw stones at cats.

Or to look through a crack in the curtains

at women passing in the street outside

through a high-powered telescope.

As a younger man, I wondered if my father had been truly happy.

And now, as a middle-aged man,

I realised he was happier than I will ever be.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

It's those little pots of jam I remember - he loved those.

No, he really loved these little... He loved jam.

He loved...he loved jam.

He did. He loved jam. He absolutely loved jam.

He loved all the different kinds of jam.

LAUGHTER

Plain.

LAUGHTER

Plain jam. He liked plain jam.

He liked jam, but he didn't really like the fruit element.

The whole programme really comes across as

a sort of desperate attempt to convince people

that you're a genius when you're not, really.

You're a sort of cross between

-a reasonably intelligent person and an idiot.

-Yeah.

It's a comedy about a man who would like to be thought of as a genius,

but isn't, and I'm aware of that.

I think that even applies to these interview bits.

-I mean, they're annoying.

-Yeah.

-They're very annoying.

They're used in the name of being interesting.

In an actual fact, the only people who could possibly like them

are people who have just enough brain to think they might be clever

-but not enough brain to realise they're not.

-I know.

You know, they serve a purpose.

They have a flavour of cleverness about them,

but they're not doing anything

that a few bright colours swirling round

against a backdrop of forestry wouldn't achieve.

-They're much worse than Christmas lights.

-Yeah.

But nowadays I'm a prisoner of sober parental responsibility,

but I look back on my father and he was an outlaw.

You know, he lived beyond the bounds of society.

The only thing stopping my father being regarded as

a countercultural icon

in the vein of Charles Bukowski or Serge Gainsbourg

is the fact that he had a Birmingham accent.

LAUGHTER

Which is weird cos he was from Truro.

OK. They're laughing at that.

Do you think that's all right, that joke? I don't know.

Cos it's getting laughs,

but it sort of breaks the truth of the story, doesn't it?

Do you know what I mean?

I think the thing is when you're doing sort of

serious kind of confessional-based stand-up that's about something,

I think you've got to put little light-hearted moments like that in,

otherwise it's just theatre, isn't it?

And no-one wants that.

LAUGHTER

That's why it has to be publicly subsidised.

OK, I don't even agree with that joke. Right?

I just did it to get in with them. Right?

I don't even agree.

God knows you don't need me to make the case

that art has no inherent value other than its financial worth.

We have John Whittingdale, the Culture Secretary for that.

A man who, if he were to see the aurora borealis

twinkling over a Scandinavian snowfield,

would see only a missed opportunity

for a public-private finance initiative.

A lot of...a lot of non-movers in the room there.

See that?

Kind of...I can see along the back there sort of...

I don't need to be regarded with suspicion

by members of my own audience for that...for that joke

cos I can go home and I can go on Twitter

and I can see all the young comics.

They hate me, but they're kind of obsessed with me.

They've been in live and seen that,

and they go, "Oh, he's lost it. It's really embarrassing.

"He's virtually dead. He's fucked.

"He's doing this joke about the public-private finance initiative.

"It's absolutely meaningless and it's not funny

"and it's not even a proper joke."

And, you know, whatever you think of it, it is a proper joke, that.

You may not find it funny, but it is a proper joke, that joke.

It is because it has the structure and rhythm of a joke,

so therefore it is a joke.

It is. It goes, nah-nah nah-nah, nah-nah nah-nah, nah-nah.

Nah-nah nah-nah nah-nah, nah-nah nah-nah,

public-private finance initiative.

LAUGHTER Right, that is a joke, see?

That's how a joke works.

APPLAUSE

That's getting applause, right?

What they mean when they go, "Oh, he's lost it. Oh, he's got..."

They mean it's not about living in a flat or something like that.

You know, it's about... I'm trying...

As usual, right, I'm about seven years ahead of the curve, right?

And the problem with being seven years ahead of the curve

is by the time everyone else has caught up with you,

they've forgotten that you did it in the first place.

It's better to be about three years ahead of the curve.

And I'm trying to do...I'm trying to, as usual,

I'm trying to take the form of this and do something with it, right?

Take it somewhere it's not been.

I'm using the shape of jokes,

but I'm trying to use them,

not as an obsolete joke-dying figure,

but as someone trying to strike at

the very heart of the moral bankruptcy

behind the free market philosophy, right?

Yeah, and you're not going to see that on Comedy Central.

And if you do, which you won't,

it'll be coming out the mouth of

a 30-something wannabe panel show team captain

unconsciously plagiarising me

as part of an unacknowledged oedipal struggle.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Of which there can only be one winner -

a 47-year-old man with irritable bowel syndrome.

There's a joke about the Culture Secretary, John Whittingdale...

-Yeah.

-..being such a philistine

that if he saw the northern lights,

he'd think, "Oh, there's a missed opportunity

-"for a public-private finance initiative."

-Yeah.

-That's the joke, isn't it?

-I know, yeah.

-However...

-Yeah.

-..it doesn't make any sense.

No, I know. I know, I know, I know that,

and I kept thinking, "Oh, I must change that."

Then the next thing I knew I was on stage saying it

and it was too late and it had been filmed...

Well, what the hell... I mean...

I know, it's a piece of utter, just, bullshit, the whole thing.

And then it goes back into this other thing about...

-It's infuriating. It's absolutely infuriating.

-I know it is.

Don't think I'm not ashamed of it.

I did a thing. It was rubbish. I meant to sort it out. I couldn't.

So I instead wrote another bit

where it gave the impression that it was supposed to be rubbish anyway.

You know what? That's what I do, and I'm aware of it.

I'm aware of the hypocrisy of it, the repetitive nature of it

and the fact that it's a one-size-fits-all escape route

for any error and failure and lack of effort, and I feel...

-You feel proud of it.

-No, I don't feel proud of it.

-The way you're talking now, you do.

-No, I don't.

-Yeah, but you actually do.

-I feel like my whole life

I've been winging it from one chance to the next,

and you unravel it every now and again,

and I think how lucky I've been.

But you probably walk away

-sniggering about the whole thing, don't you?

-Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

My childhood diary again from...

..1978. December.

It was a cold December, I remember.

Back when we used to have weather.

Rather than just nothing punctuated by catastrophes.

LAUGHTER

"Today, I came home from school,

"let myself in with the key from under the flowerpot,

"and I saw that the mouse was obviously dead..."

AUDIENCE MEMBER LAUGHS

LAUGHTER

In the serious confessional stand-up show,

the laugh point is at the point

where the comedian processes the tragedy into comedy -

not at the point of the tragedy itself.

LAUGHTER

You know what your problem is? You're ahead of the curve.

"There was blood in the mouse's mouth

"and his neck had got twisted

"as he tried to bite his way through a bar of his cage.

"I assumed he had been contented enough.

"I mean, he had a wheel.

"But it appears my mouse had been so depressed

"that he had killed himself while trying to escape.

"Sometimes I wonder how well can we ever really say we know anyone?"

A very wise little boy.

LAUGHTER

You know, now I'm older,

I wonder is that what gets us all in the end, you know?

A slow...creeping realisation of

the sheer pointlessness of existence.

Run, run, run...

..on your wheel...

..on your treadmill...

..but you can never outrun death.

Unsurprisingly, my pitch for

the Fitness First advertising account was...

LAUGHTER

..was rejected out of hand,

as were all my other...subsequent attempts.

"Fitness First -

"run, jump,

"swim, cycle,

"die."

LAUGHTER

"Fitness First -

"postponing the inevitable since 1993."

"Fitness First -

"a series of increasingly futile gestures

"in the laughing face of mortality."

"Fitness First -

"why not book a one-to-one session

"with one of our fully qualified personal trainers?

"And then die."

LAUGHTER

All rejected. Rejected out of hand.

My childhood diary again. The same night, this is.

"Mum helped me bury the mouse in a sock in a shoebox

"in the back garden...

"..and then she went out to night school.

"When my mum came home,

"she said a woman at college had told her that mice hibernate."

LAUGHTER I know. They don't, do they?

They don't hibernate.

But, you know, I always admired that about her,

her hope, her hope in...

"My mum insisted we dig up the mouse's now damp and frozen body,

"hang the mouse in a sock in the cupboard,

"stick some brandy into the mouse's clearly dead, blood-filled mouth...

"..and blow-dry him with a hairdryer."

LAUGHTER

And I remember the mouse's fur all sort of fluffed up round his neck

like a weird kind of...ruff

or sort of long-hair kind of weird collar thing,

and it had the strange effect of making the mouse

look exactly like Dave Hill from Slade.

LAUGHTER

The dead mouse looked exactly like Dave Hill from Slade

if Dave Hill from Slade had been dressed up

in a full-size mouse costume,

hung up in a massive sock,

blow-dried with a giant blow dryer

and had had a weird mixture of blood and brandy pouring out of his mouth.

A situation which, I now learn,

given the now well documented excesses of the glam rock era,

Dave Hill from Slade enjoyed backstage on a number of occasions.

LAUGHTER

Well, I came down the next morning, and you know what?

Despite the so-called certainties of science...

..despite my cynicism, despite having been pronounced dead,

buried and exhumed...

..hung in a sock, blow-dried, fed brandy

until he looked like Dave Hill from Slade,

that little mouse, which I had cherished,

which had been almost like a father substitute to me,

was obviously fucking dead. It was obviously dead.

LAUGHTER

Maybe the alcohol killed it.

Maybe it was hibernating and it came round

and then died from alcohol poisoning.

We'll never know.

They don't do pathology reports for mice.

There are no pathologists small enough.

LAUGHTER

There are no nano-pathologists.

No-no, no-no nano...

LAUGHTER

..no-no, nano, no-no, nano-pathologists.

I'll tell you why I've done that, right.

A lot of the kids, they've been on the internet

and they've been going, "Oh, he's lost it, he's blown it.

"You know, he's so dead and old,

"his idea of a pop culture reference is Slade from the '70s, right?"

So I put that in to try and bring it up to date.

You know, No Limits.

Ebeneezer Goode, all that, you know...

But it was a school day.

We were already running late,

and there simply wasn't time to rebury the mouse

with full ceremony in the garden.

And so my mum took the lifeless body of my mouse,

my best friend, my confidant...

..and she just threw it in the bin.

Which isn't so different, I suppose, to what will happen to many of us.

Wheel or no wheel.

Fitness First or no Fitness First.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

creeps in this petty pace

to the last syllable of recorded time.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Out, out, brief candle.

Life's but a walking shadow,

a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage

and then is heard no more.

It is a tale told by an idiot

full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Free water bottle...

LAUGHTER

..with every Fitness First membership...until April

and then this offer must end!

APPLAUSE

# ..up on his sleigh

# Do the fairies keep him sober for a day?

# So here it is, Merry Christmas

# Everybody's having fun

# Look to the future now

# It's only just begun... #

MUSIC: Hilary by The Durutti Collection