My Shit Life So Far (20 page)

We were both in a strange place, doing something we didn’t really want to be doing. The show was a reflection of our grim state of mind. We wrote a bit that I really liked for the Reverend about how a lot of show-business gays have had ‘an Ass-child. Fifty per cent gay faeces and fifty per cent gay semen makes an Ass-child. You know Frankie Muniz from
Malcolm in the Middle
? Bruce Willis’s Ass-child. He denied it at first but his DNA was found on scrapings taken from the end of Demi Moore’s cock.’

My favourite bit from that show was the Reverend’s book he’d written to help people better understand the AIDS virus. It was called
How I Beat the Gay Rabies: Three Years Living in a Steel Cube Buried in the Desert
.

I started doing a bit at the end of the show called ‘Thought for the Day’. I’d come on in one of the costumes hanging in the dressing room and shout jokes from a book in a weird staccato English voice. For a while I’d wear a costume that had a sort of Renaissance gentleman feel to it, from a one-man show called
The Fisher King
. The Fisher King came along one night and saw this, leaving behind a note telling me sternly not to do it again and signed ‘The Fisher King’.

There was a peculiarity in that I could get jokes to work in that voice which never worked in my own. They were sort of prosey jokes. My favourite was

‘I have a thought about army training. The real training for any soldier in the British Army is not the six weeks that he spends at camp, but the seventeen years that he lives on a housing estate. The moment of epiphany for any soldier is the first time that he is punched in the stomach by his commanding officer.

And he realises that his father had been pulling his punches, and had loved him all along.’

Perhaps you need to see me saying it with a beard in a World War I uniform. The last joke in the show was always:

‘I have a thought about sexual politics. Why is it that when I find a vibrator in my girlfriend’s drawer, she’s liberated? Yet when she looks in the chest that I keep under my bed and finds an artificial vagina, I’m a pervert? So what if it is a dog’s vagina that I keep alive with batteries.’

The one night we sold out we did the most disastrous thing we could have done. We gave the final ten minutes of the show
over to doing a thing called ‘Jools Holland’s Tiny Hootenanny’. This involved having toys on the stage arranged as little bands.

We’d introduce them as various bands and then we’d play a CD of their biggest number, produced to sound like a tiny, highpitched voice was singing it. I think it was as a doll of The Mighty Thor sang Norah Jones that everybody walked out.

I’ve never really felt any sense of kinship with other comedians; they’ve always seemed too needy. I don’t think I need the love, approval, affirmation, whatever it is, that other people are after. Maybe I did at the start of my career; I can’t remember because I was drunk. At that festival a fire alarm went off during one of the shows and the building got evacuated. Everybody was doing their shows in the courtyard. The show had to go on. We just slunk off with our hoods up, glad of a night off. I don’t think it’s entirely about me being a miserable bastard. Stand-up needs a roof and a microphone, and I’m not so desperate for love that I’ll yell my jokes out in a car park, like a cunt. God only know how hard those guys’ dads must have been able to punch.

I never read reviews anymore, not mine or anybody else’s. It really depresses me how much attention comics pay to that stuff. 100 words that the classical music critic’s wife writes for gin money can make or break somebody’s year. That’s clearly ridiculous and a position that any intelligent person should be able to think their way out of. If you want an opinion, invite somebody you respect and ask them what they thought. Comedy criticism is basically what a cunt thought of something they didn’t understand. I know a comic who did a show called
Beyond the Pale:
100 Years of Irish History,
basically a potted history of Ireland, and it was very good. He told me that his main review that year said that he went on about Ireland a bit too much. That’s the level of most comedy criticism. It’s amusingly shit I suppose, but sad for anyone who actually takes it seriously.

Jimmy Carr saw us at the festival and gave us a job writing for him on his quiz show
Distraction
. Even then, Jimmy was at an echelon of show business that we could only dream of. He had access to drugs that allowed him to speak almost any language and could teleport at will. We’ve got to know him socially since, and he’s a lovely chap. Most of his time is spent in a huge
Lawnmower Man
-style machine with Jonathan Ross. He says that they use it to commune with aliens and occasionally make love, but knowing him as I do it must be something infinitely more sinister. There are rumours that it’s part of a plot by Jimmy to re-imagine the earth in the shape of his own face. At least it will be bigger.

I think for
Distraction
we had to write jokes based on the biographies of the appalling people they chose as contestants. These were generally beery rugby blokes or sex-case tour reps. Looking at the details of their ‘lives’ was like peeking under a rock. I say ‘I think’ because we were desperately stoned at the time. Jimmy might have been presenting the news for all I know.

I stopped smoking dope after that. When you finally get off drugs, the world seems like a much less threatening place. I ran into my old crystal-meth buddy the other day. Turns out that the talking cat from outer space was just a movie we saw when we
were high. Actually, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about drugs.

They don’t make you paranoid. That’s an idea the CIA injected into our culture through hidden messages in
Happy Days.

I found it quite hard to finally give everything up. The way your body keeps craving stuff. Thank God I never took cocaine. It’s amazing how extreme the physical reaction is to withdrawal. My body would have turned into a missile that fired itself at Colombia. Jim kept going and these days the only way he can get enough tranquillisers to come down is to dress up as an escaped lion and jump around in the cafeteria of the local zoo.

The main reason I stopped smoking dope was that it started to give me a crippling, overwhelming fear of my own mortality. I remember it hitting me with total clarity that I am going to die and everybody I know is going to die too. I was sitting having a joint in the afternoon, watching a home-improvement show when the reality of death crushed all interest in the conservatory of a sexually ambiguous project manager. Mortality is a good thing to face up to. I reckon people meditate for years to achieve what I had right then, a frenzied, disabling horror. Looking down at my legs I could see the muscles twitching in a classic flight response. My legs were trying to run away while my brain grimly reminded them that there was no outrunning this thing. A fact that
OK!
magazine wanted to remind Jade Goody of when they dedicated ‘an official tribute’ issue to her earlier this year. The only trouble being they did it while she was still alive. This must have been shocking to Jade, particularly as the obituary explained she died in a motorcycling accident while trying to
jump twelve London buses. That sounds like a good idea for a new reality-television show. Terminally ill people are given obituaries written by the public which they have to enact as accurately as possible to win money for the people they leave behind. You can imagine Noel Edmonds: ‘…Next up on
Suddenly/Peaceful
we’ll have Maureen, 95, who needs to die in a circus-tent fire, as she attempts the world’s first display of flaming midget juggling.’

Poor Jade Goody. If you were going to guess her final words, surely they would have been along the lines of asking her children to take good care of her husband. She said she was looking forward to going to heaven; unfortunately she thought that heaven was a region of Portugal. I missed the reports from the funeral, but luckily for quite a while her coffin-cam was screening footage through the night on E4. Of course, we’ve all fantasised about our own funeral, wondering how sad everybody we know will be, having that girl we always loved turning up distraught, leaping from the coffin as a zombie and becoming Ground Zero for the death of humanity. Wendy Richard was buried in an eco-friendly coffin woven from bamboo. I’m planning on doing the same as that’s how I’d like to go. Ripped apart by ravenous pandas.

Inspired by our time writing for
Distraction
, Jim and I went into a kind of development hell working on a pilot with Craig Hill for BBC Scotland. There was a real tension between BBC Scotland
wanting us to do a basic, shitty show with jokes about Scotland and us, well, not really wanting to.

One of the main battles was our desire to have a guest host, Fish from Marillion, which they eventually let us do. Fish was great. He just didn’t give a fuck and did whatever gags we asked him to. He opened with ‘Hello people of Scotland. We know that you won’t be watching this if you’re in Dundee, you’ll be outside date-raping a seagull.’ Fish was also our interviewee in an item called ‘Jungle Bus’, where we were to interview celebrities every week on a bus full of mercenaries, fighting its way through the African jungle. We’d do the interview, while the celebrity helped us man a roof-mounted machine gun, and then we’d kick them out of the bus with a small scrap of map, and they would be immediately murdered by the natives.

I don’t think I can really explain how much the commissioning editor hated this show. I had a character who was a revolutionary from the Spanish Civil War and he asked me if I could make him a Scottish janitor. That’s the kind of gulf we’re talking about. We made it during winter, which is always a mistake in Scotland. People we knew and had worked with before just acted like they’d been replaced by alien seed pods. Cunty alien seed pods.

My favourite bit of the show was a thing we all wrote with Jim. I think we were all on Valium for the writing sessions, which gave it a weird prosey quality. It was a monologue by an overblown, Jerry Bruckheimer-style movie producer called T. Carter Mondell. Here he is:

I like all pictures to come in under twenty words, including the words I speak. That’s ten. What? A man in a house? What kind of shit idea is that? Can’t the house be a prison and the man be a vampire?

I feel that I have a lot more energy than a lot of people in Hollywood because I’m not a fag pretending not to be a fag. That’s gotta take up a whole lot of time. Attempted assassinations? I’ve not lost a lot of sleep over that, just a few wives and a child.

Dennis Hopper liked to challenge himself at the end of every take. He would drink a bottle of Scotch and smash himself in the forehead with a mallet. The challenge was to remember his lines. He forgot his lines. He also forgot what movie he was in, who he was, where he was and what he was. He would start screaming a number that he claimed was the key to the universe. We learned later it was the telephone number of a local head surgeon.

Phil Spector was doing a cameo as a bagman till he fashioned a tree out of cocaine and it fell on him. The crew were great friends with Phil Spector, despite the fact that he was always trying to murder them. Every morning he dived out of his trailer spraying bullets across the set. People were surprised when they heard that he killed a woman. What surprised me was that he did it with a gun. He always insisted that if he got the opportunity he’d do it with a golf club. I had my doubts
about Phil since I saw him masturbating at the O. J. Simpson trial.

Roman Polanski didn’t move to Europe because of a rape charge. He moved because the standard of living over in the States is so high that he could no longer overpower the average 13 year old.

They sent a stripper to my room. I thought it was one of the hookers that you’re allowed to beat. That’s what I ordered. She’s suing me for assault and battery, and I am counter-suing to be allowed to come in her ears.

Wherever the conflict in your movie set is, you need to send a white guy in. A black hero? As far as Joe Schmo’s concerned, you might as well rub black cum in his daughter’s face or have some black guy blow his windows in with black sperm in a drive-by from his pump-action black balls.

You’ve got to make movies about the stuff that people want to see. What people really want to see is chicks in sports bras being stabbed by a psycho. Have you seen the African version of Rainman , where the boy is taken into a clearing and has his head smashed by rocks? He never learns to count. The rest of the film is about Mseste Mtbmu’s desperate search for food and water.

People ask me where do I get my ideas for my movies—I drive out into the Mohave Desert, sit upon the mesa and smoke a combination of herbs and gekko sweat, then I go into a deep meditative state and enter the
Dreamtime where I open all of my senses to the rhythms of the universe—then I drive back to my office and read the scripts I’ve been sent. I gotta real knack for developing scripts. I remember this writer comes to me and says he’s got an idea for a romantic comedy set against a backdrop of racial oppression—I had the vision to take that script and make Full Moon Lockdown. Another time I got a script for a road movie. A middleaged guy discovers he’s got two teenage daughters and takes them on a road trip of discovery across America. Right away I knew I had found the movie I’d waited all my life to make—Full Moon Lockdown 3.

I remember a script lands on my desk this one time. It was for a movie about a team of US commandos that fly into South America to take down a scientist who’s threatening to unleash an army of zombie soldiers. It was like the writer was reading my mind. I took his script and made Terms of Endearment 2 . I see my movies like I see my children, at weekends in cinemas.

This is a business…show business. Sometimes the business of making money, arranging for a certain race of hooker to be placed in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s camper van, sometimes arranging for the body of a certain race of hooker to be removed from J-CVD’s camper van. And sometimes it’s about making movies.