My Shit Life So Far (23 page)

I find it amusing just how touchy some people are about royal jokes. I mean, what year is this? Who gives a fuck about the royals? They’re innately ridiculous and, according to David
Icke, big white superlizards with shovel-shaped heads in their transformed state. People say the royals are inbred and I can see why. Look what happens when they try to widen the gene pool—a couple of deaths, a ginger son and a marriage to a horse. Earlier this year the Queen opted to celebrate her 83rd birthday with a simple meal rather than having a lavish banquet, so that she didn’t appear out of touch during the credit crunch. It’s hardly a show of solidarity with those affected by the recession when she’d be eating while wearing a crown and sitting on a throne inside a palace. Hope she enjoyed her swan-flavoured crispy pancakes. Next, people will be suggesting that her having two birthdays a year makes her elitist.

The whole Ross/Brand thing just seemed disproportionate anyway. It reminded me of a great article where Jon Ronson described the popularity of David Icke as ‘part of a larger backlash against rational thought’. Manuel was a great character but can you imagine
Fawlty Towers
being made today? Every episode would just be thirty minutes of a Polish waitress in a bedsit crying.

In response to the climate of censorship I have created a computer program called ‘The
Daily Mail
Random Headline Generator’. It lets you feed in all the recent front-page headlines from the
Daily Mail
and uses the information to predict the next one. I popped it on this morning. It looks like next Monday’s front page will be ‘Asylum Seekers Carry a New Type of AIDS which Lowers House Prices’.

That said, I was quite lucky with my last DVD. The only thing that was withdrawn for legal reasons was a section about shamkidnap munter Shannon Matthews. The thing that’s surprised me most about that whole thing is that with her family background Shannon Matthews wasn’t a cyclops. I don’t believe Karen Matthews knew where Shannon was. I’d be amazed if she knows where any of her kids are.

The launch of the DVD meant that when I sat down to start writing the following year, I had to say goodbye to a lot of jokes. But with President Obama getting elected it seemed a great time to be writing some new topical stuff. Obama had just been given high approval ratings but then again he did follow Bush. You could put a brain tumour in the Oval Office and it’d get better ratings. And construct better sentences.

Obama’s not infallible though—he apologised after his plane swooped low over Ground Zero for a calendar photo. Which is like Gordon Brown posing on the District Line with peroxide and a fuse.

Shortly after he was elected, Obama invited Gordon Brown to a working lunch in Washington. I think Gordon was a bit surprised when he ended up serving bread rolls and pouring the wine. Brown said his meeting with Obama was ‘to help sort out the world economic crisis’. The meeting took less than an hour! What exactly did he do? 60 Hail Marys? Gordon did make a speech to Congress though, and it was truly embarrassing. At one point he said, ‘With faith in the future let us together, build tomorrow today.’

Is this such a great speech? It sounds like it’s been cobbled together on the plane from the clues of
The Times
crossword. ‘Outgoing partners once left home to catch a Rolling Stone.’ Applause. ‘The Spanish ambassador fools about with Mickey Mouse.’ Standing ovation. He received nineteen standing ovations in total. I’ve always thought a standing ovation is a strange thing. ‘I’m enjoying what you said so much I’m going to clap, not louder, but higher than before.’ The problem is what do you do after the first few standing ovations if the speaker makes a point that you like even more? Do you jump and clap? Or get on the table? Typically, a standing ovation comes at the end of a speech. Essentially the Congressmen tried to get him to finish nineteen times. I mean, why would anyone want to listen to a man whose own country is in meltdown? It’s like Fred Goodwin starting a Christmas Club. While in America, Brown also announced that Edward Kennedy would receive an honorary knighthood from Britain. This is a man who fled a car accident in 1969 that led to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. He doesn’t deserve a knighthood. A liar, a coward and a criminal. Sounds more like a Lord to me.

After my tour ended I decided to move back to Scotland. It’s been a real relief. I hated the intensity of life in London—walking around a Scottish city is like walking around London after an apocalyptic viral event. I knew that I really needed to get out when Boris Johnson got elected. Voting for Boris Johnson can’t
have been that different from voting for a Labrador wearing a Wonder Woman costume. He’s sort of like a wee boy who’s woken up in his dad’s body. The Labour Party must really be in trouble if they can lose control of London to a fat albino with Down’s syndrome. Earlier this year Madame Tussauds unveiled a waxwork of Boris Johnson. It’s so lifelike the only way to tell them apart is that the waxwork is slightly better at running London. I mean, what a waste of money. Boris does so little work he’d have been happy to go down to Madame Tussauds for a couple of hours a day and just stand.

Boris’s election made it clear that it’s time we went for an entirely different system of government altogether. How about instead of voting, we all write two—to three-hundred-word essays about how we’d generally like things to go. Then we appoint a random celebrity—Jeremy Clarkson or that guy from
The Kumars
—and they have to work their way through what we’ve written and make as much of it happen as possible. Often the things we’d write would be contradictory, so much of the government’s work would involve things like ripping up all the roads and then building them all again. Then, at the end of their term of office, we would burn our leaders alive, just like the old Celtic tribes did (to be honest my source here is Slaine in the comic
2000 AD
).

Yes, it’s a voting system that would very probably return our nation to the Dark Ages. On the other hand, we’d get to kill Clarkson! Is everybody in?

Since moving back I’ve realised there’s lots of bizarreness in Glasgow, particularly if you’ve spent your whole life looking
for it. Queen’s Park has a disturbing Victorian Insect Museum. That’s something I’d avoid if you were on drugs. Or recommend. Really, it depends on the drugs. Probably avoid. The park also has a big flagpole where there’s a beautiful view out across the city. Anytime I go there somebody clearly on drugs comes up and raves almost stereotypical mentalness at me. One time it was a guy telling me to make a tinfoil helmet to stop the government reading my mind. I moaned at Jim for several minutes about the way somebody on drugs always comes up and spoils that view before I remembered that I was also on drugs.

I moved back to Scotland the week that Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor were thrown out of the Scottish football team as they were deemed unfit to represent our country. I dunno—I think a couple of drunks making obscene gestures at a crowd of strangers represent our country pretty accurately. We’ve had to put up with drunk or abusive Scots representing our country in the fields of cinema, cuisine and international diplomacy…and football is where they draw the line?

Since I got back to Scotland I do find that I’m a bit more recognisable, but probably only in that vague way that makes people think I’m probably somebody who owes them money. I was out camping a couple of months ago and some old guy followed me through the woods and back to my tent, sticking his head in and asking for an autograph for his son. I wrote, ‘I fucked your Dad. As we came, we both thought of you’ and folded it up nice and tight.

I moved back to Scotland in time to see my daughter finish nursery. They had a cute little graduation ceremony and she sang a song about the continents. I lurked in the background with my boy, both of us drawn by the strange attractor of the buffet. We looked like two guys who didn’t care how many continents there were. Afterwards, one of the nursery assistants came by with a plate of cake. I snatched a big bit with a cry of ‘Cake!’ and bit into it. ‘That cake is for the children,’ she grimaced. I tried to make light of it by saying, ‘All the sweeter!’ but blew crumbs everywhere as I did so. It’s so rare we get to see ourselves as others see us. That was a tragic time for it to finally happen for me. Still, I love icing. I read that once a wild bear starts coming into a town they have to go and capture it and release it hundreds of miles away. Basically once the bear has tasted peanut butter there’s nothing in nature that’s going to top that, so they’ll always come back. I feel like that myself. I know there’s cake out there, so it’s hard to eat salad. Look at the stuff we have access to! Who wouldn’t feel like a bear? If your neighbour’s bin had a tub of choc-choc-chip ice cream in it would you tear it apart like a bear to get at it? Of course you would! I’d fuck a bear! Rrragggghh! Ice cream!

Sometimes I wish I had more of a regular routine to my life, but a lot of the time I do enjoy the weirdness. I did a weekend recently that involved doing a show at some freakish ball in London, then driving to Switzerland and doing a gig in Geneva. At the ball I wandered round the wonderful grounds of the country club it was being held in and enjoyed the snotty looks from
real members. How do you get to the stage where you can look down your nose at somebody wearing a tuxedo?

There was a huge glass atrium in the room in which I was playing. In a fit of boredom, I pretended that my contract specifically excluded me from playing atriums. ‘No atriums! Did you guys get the old contract or something?’ Just before I was due to go on I stuck my head out the back door for some air and swallowed the most enormous moth. I could hear the guy who was going to introduce me talking me up while I knelt on the steps trying to vomit up a living creature that was thrumming somewhere in my vocal cords. It was horrendous. I puked something that looked like a cross between a bat and a tumour, then did the gig sounding like I’d just survived a house-fire.

My friend Craig Campbell met me at the club and drove me to Geneva. To pass the time he played lectures on the philosophy of the mind. An American gentleman, speaking patiently for several hours, finally made me appreciate that my body might not exist. We grabbed a couple of hours sleep in a lay-by. As I got out and stretched beside all the big trucks, I saw for the first time how liberating the life of an itinerant serial killer might be. You could work your way through all kinds of lectures, have an exercise programme you could do in a motorway toilet and just really develop your own style. I might not even kill some days, I reasoned as I breakfasted on a Cornetto.

Geneva is a strange place. The streets were full of ridiculously beautiful women. Perhaps beautiful women are very good at working in the finance industry; that’s one option. Or a lot of ugly
guys use the money they make in the finance industry to lure beautiful women there. I honestly can’t decide. The gig was one of those typical expat things where everybody was sat with their boss. I think expats are chosen for their ability to tolerate bosses.

Could you imagine British bosses going out with their staff every weekend? The only boss who should do that is somebody leading a team of behavioural scientists exploring the exact moment when banter turns to violence.

Sometimes I think doing open spots doesn’t really tell me that much. Either it’s a nice crowd and they laugh at everything, or it’s not and they don’t. I had to do every open spot in Scotland to get myself match-fit for this year’s series of
Mock the Week
. I did a ‘Best of Irish’ comedy night and pretended to be Irish. ‘Like all Irish people, I’m mad for the racism!’ That was my catchphrase, which they hated. A guy came up to me after that and introduced himself as the best impressionist in Scotland.

‘Do you watch
Family Guy
?’ he asked, in what may have been the voice of a
Family Guy
character.

‘No, I don’t, I’ve never seen it.’

‘You don’t watch
Family Guy
?’ he shouted, in what was clearly supposed to be the voice of another
Family Guy
character. ‘Geez, I can’t believe you don’t watch
Family Guy
!’ He said that in an English voice that I think may be the voice of the
Family Guy
dog, or perhaps baby.

‘I don’t have a TV, mate.’

‘You know who else doesn’t watch TV…? Robert De Niro. Hey, what you lookin at…?’

I hid in the toilet while I heard him ask for me in the voice of Robert De Niro and then somebody else I couldn’t identify.

At my shows, I always like to have as many Scottish people as possible. Not for nationalistic reasons, but because a largely English audience means that I won’t be able to spend about a third of the show throwing lazy, clumsy blows at the city of Dundee. Hats off to Dundonians, they can certainly laugh at themselves. Although, looking around their city, maybe they just love any kind of punishment. It’s the sort of place you imagine everyone would have put all their lights on during the Blitz. It’s their fire brigade I feel sorry for. Very difficult to do your job properly when the locals are queuing up to throw themselves into the flames.

Another thing I’ve been doing since I moved back is writing a pilot for a sketch show with Jim and our friend Tom Stade. Tom is a laid-back cannabis-defined Canadian whose natural joyousness and extrovert nature terrifies the people of Scotland. I’ve stood patiently in a cafÉ as he’s attempted to get an elderly waitress to high-five him. His joshing good nature is often ignored by Scottish people in the hope that he will fuck off. He never notices because of his joshing good nature. We’ve all written stuff together that’s easily as mental as anything Jim and I used to come up with back at peak ecstasy consumption. That’s made me very happy. I suppose I always feared that if I went off and did straight stand-up and panel shows that maybe when I came back the magic wouldn’t be there. The magic is still there! The fact that we are the only people who think it’s magic is irrelevant.

The other day Jim reminded me of a Dr Presley sketch that went out where Dr Presley controls a defeated-looking grown-up version of the kid from
The Wonder Years
.