Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (23 page)

Recent research shows that 20 per cent of children are obese. It’s the other children I feel sorry for. That seesaw is going nowhere. In addition, the number of teenage boys with eating disorders has trebled in the past decade. Although to put a more positive spin on things, if you measure it by mass it’s actually gone down.

Be sure your kids take care trick-or-treating. I always send my lad out the night before. Not only does he avoid the rush, it means I’ve plenty of sweets to give out on the 31st. I’m joking, of course. They all go straight into his Christmas Day shoebox. I recommend a jumbo bag of jelly babies. They’re perfect for chewing on as you sit in the dark waiting for the knocking to stop. It’s always difficult finding a costume that will frighten kids as soon as you open the door. This year I’m going with Y-fronts and an ankle tag.

One in five school-leavers is overweight. Surely that’s just a sensible precaution, building up fat reserves for unemployment. It was estimated that there were already one million obese teenagers in the UK in 2012. Good, finally a bit of peace on the top deck of the bus. Britain is the fattest country in Europe – it seems a generation has been inspired by the Olympics to get diabetes. One in three kids is obese – although there are fears that figure might rise to one in two if the fat ones start eating the others. There is one upside to greater numbers of obese and anorexic kids – arranging them in lines could be a great hands-on way to teach binary to paedophiles.

The weight of Britain’s fattest teenager – Georgia Davis – has shot up to a worrying forty-six stone. I suppose on the plus side it shows bullying has clearly gone down a bit. There are upsides to her putting all that weight on. Apparently, her order for five new pairs of knickers is all that’s keeping Harland and Wolff open. Georgia has gone back into hospital after having a pain in her leg. It must be really annoying to be hospitalised by something you haven’t seen for three years. She’s been described as being a prisoner to her own armchair – I think you’ll find the poor armchair is very much the victim in this scenario. It’s not surprising that her legs are struggling – essentially you’re asking a pole designed for tents to hold up a motorway flyover at rush hour.

• • •

Along with obesity, alcohol is another worrying threat to our children’s health. The people of Hull were saddened to see an eleven-year-old drinking a bottle of vodka with his mum. Mourning the loss of one less bottle of vodka available in the shops. The pair were spotted arguing outside a shop. I think it was over what made the best mixer for vodka – tonic or Um Bongo. It’s not typical in Hull to see mums passing cans to their kids; most of the populace have yet to discover the melding process that can bind tin to steel. Amy Johnson was from Hull. It’s telling that its most famous daughter is known for risking her life to get to the other side of the world.

In a way, it makes a change to see a woman passing alcohol to her son in the fresh air rather than the traditional British method of through the placenta. The boy was said to reg-ularly get drunk with his mother, unlike now, when he’ll be regularly getting drunk with the staff of his care home. The boy’s been taken into care so he’ll no longer be in the grip of his mother – or any mother, considering nobody wants to adopt an eleven-year-old boy. He might be pissed, but he’s the only eleven-year-old in the country who’s facing being sent to an enormous building in which he will be incarcerated for five years alongside a bunch of terrifying teenagers, with a feeling of numb confidence.

Alcohol is bad for the children of Britain. It will affect their ability to adhere to Simon Cowell’s touring schedule. The incident in Hull is going to be turned into a film – they’re just waiting for Will Smith’s kid to be addicted enough to meds to find his motivation. Joking aside, you should on no account go drinking with an eleven-year-old. They’ll only get refused when it’s their turn to buy a round.

Drivers caught speeding past a primary school in Mersey-side were forced to either face a ‘pupils’ court’ to explain their behaviour or have three penalty points on their licence. I know it’s illegal to drink and drive but it’s not illegal to be drunk when you go into a primary school to explain why you were speeding. I’d love to stand up in front of the class, drinking a can of super-strength lager, and explain that your boss is a dick and he goes mad when you turn up late, and that you can’t lose the job as you’re going through a divorce and need the money to pay alimony otherwise the judge will rule that you’re an unfit father and you shouldn’t see your children. By the time I left that school the teachers would never allow another human being into the classroom and the kids would be so on my side that they’d be asking if in technical-studies class they could be allowed to draw go-faster stripes on to the side of my car.

Nicotine is another danger to our kids, and school children as young as twelve are being given nicotine patches on the NHS without their parents’ knowledge, although surely they get suspicious when their kids stop stealing their cigarettes. The problem has got so bad that kids are now sneaking to the back of the bike shed to have hypnotherapy.

Ministers announced that raunchy pop videos should carry an age warning so people can tell which ones are suitable for children. Not, as I thought, to let men know which ones are worth bothering with. I think this is great, as age ratings will let dads know when they’re too old to watch a Taylor Swift video. I do agree that the likes of Katy Perry and Lady Gaga jumping about in their pants are inappropriate, although when it comes to Beyoncé and Rihanna I think I need to do a little bit more research.

Experts suggest you should watch raunchy music channels with your kids so you can add comment and context. I can’t see me doing that; I feel uncomfortable enough as it is masturbating in front of the cat.

There was a drive recently by mental-health groups for people to stop using mental-health labels metaphorically, which was thought to trivialise serious problems. A press release from one of the organisations had a quote from a doctor about a patient’s mother bursting into tears when someone said, ‘The weather’s being a bit schizophrenic today.’ Of course, the idea that anyone could tell that woman she was over-reacting is ridiculous. I actually think that words for mental-health problems might function better as metaphors than as clinical diagnoses. Schizophrenia, OCD, autism – the kinds of words that have found their way into everyday conversation – are actually quite nebulous terms used to define disorders with wildly different symptoms. As a basic metaphor for behaviour, someone describing themselves as ‘a little bit autistic’ is probably a realistic way of opening up to their anal side or to their emotional blocks. It might well be helpful that people actually now identify themselves with those who have such disorders.

‘Autistic’ as a clinical definition of a person is quite dehumanising. It places a label on to a human being, one that can’t really describe them because it covers a whole spectrum of dysfunction. Of course, this has no place in our current discourse. It’s easier to be silent. Easier for whom? For some mythical normal majority? Clearly, making a word taboo unless it’s used with the utmost seriousness cannot be good for those people labelled with the disorder. Why does everyone think things will improve if their issue is viewed as ‘serious’? The public already probably views schizophrenia as more serious – and more negative – than it sometimes actually is. Lots of people with schizophrenia lead a perfectly normal life – even though there’s no such thing. Maybe people being more light-hearted about schizophrenia, autism, Down’s syndrome – whatever – would actually be better. Sure, these conditions might be part of who you are, but a schizophrenic’s biggest problem at the time you meet him might well be that his football team just got beat.

Jokes have various social functions. Sometimes they’re there to remind us of the hideous nature of reality, sometimes they help us to escape it. There was an interesting thing with the film
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!
It was an Aardman kids’ animation and somewhere in the trailer the pirates meet a ship of lepers. There were some childish jokes about bits of lepers falling off and this sparked a spot of outrage, with some people saying it was giving kids a stereotyped, untrue view of the disease.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
starts with a writer getting leprosy and going to a sanatorium to see some sufferers. He’s welcomed in to a patient’s bedroom, where a kind of living stump hisses to him, ‘Kill yourself! Better than this!’ It takes the whole thing appropriately seriously and gives a much more clinically accurate description of late-term leprosy, but also a more damaging impression of the disease. I know, because I read that as a kid and I actually dropped the book.

Nobody’s saying it’s particularly helpful for
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!
to knock out a couple of cheap gags, but in that film could they have reasonably come across a ship filled with realistic late-term lepers? It would harrow an entire generation. So what’s the implied alternative? Leave the lepers out. Ignore them. This is a big part of how groups are marginalised in society, right the way up to a whole sex.

My idea is that if things like leprosy are symbolically charged anyway, why not choose a way of charging them that might be more helpful? It’s not very helpful to portray people’s hands suddenly dropping off, but what about portraying leprosy as not a huge deal? About portraying Down’s syndrome as not a huge deal? Or physical disability as not something that defines someone? Ideas and words are just symbols, and you decide what they mean. Let’s go for some meanings that might actually be of some use, rather than just ignoring people. Let’s update this shit to a point where it works.

What will equality look like when we get there? It surely won’t look like a stultifying inability to talk to each other. It’s odd that people get so wound up about people joking about a serious subject. Nobody would ever say there shouldn’t be a song about rape. And rhyme is pretty trivial-ising in its own way. Two verses in, someone’s wearing a cape and the whole thing loses gravitas. Comedy, with its roots in the history of classical thought is shepherded towards uncontroversial areas, while there is no subject that people wouldn’t happily see dealt with in art’s lowest form, the ITV two-part drama.

• • •

So they reckon we should have two days off drinking each week. It’s common practice up here – the trick is to sink so much on Friday night that you don’t come round till Monday morning. Of course, drinking isn’t just bad for the liver. There are also the one-night stands. We’ve all woken up the next morning and glanced over at the other pillow, to see her lying there – the little knitted lady off the toilet roll.

Alcoholics and drug addicts are to be stripped of their dole money if they refuse rehabilitation orders. Because history has shown us that when addicts don’t have money in their pockets they simply quit. Experts say 200,000 people could die from alcohol-related diseases in England and Wales in the next twenty years. No figures were included from Scotland, as currently they come under ‘death from natural causes’.

A study has found that the north-east has twice the national average of teenagers with drink problems. It makes me angry that there are teenagers suffering like that when they could easily move somewhere better. Perhaps they could be enticed out of the north-east with some sort of drinks promotion? The survey also revealed pierced people drink more. Although I reckon that could have just been a misprint.

To combat this problem, David Cameron is putting the price of booze up. And they say Cameron is out of touch with the public. The only thing that will make people drink less alcohol is if someone suddenly un-invents it. Cameron thinks the price rise will reduce binge drinking. No, but it might make a tramp sit outside in the cold for half an hour longer to get that extra 40p. There are also calls to end two-for-one offers. Or, as drinkers know them, four-for-two offers. The drinks industry say it’s actually an issue of free choice. They’re right. The way these do-gooders go on you’d think the stuff was addictive.

Some counterfeit booze being sold in shops and pubs contains industrial cleaning products. People could go out on a Friday night and wake up in a kebab-shop doorway smelling better than before they threw up over themselves. Instead of the streets of Cardiff being covered in urine on a Sunday morning, they could end up looking like they’ve been power-washed.

But I’m being unfair. A lot of work has been done to give Cardiff a makeover. It’s actually quite an attractive city, with a river running through the middle of it. It’s just a shame it’s a river of urine, vomit, semen and tears.

Two-thirds of voters don’t want the nanny state telling them what to eat and drink. I agree. I’d much rather be free to make these decisions myself, based on the impartial advice to be found in the pan-media endorsements of mercenary celebrities and sportsmen.

A study revealed that people who are uninterested in food are more likely to take cocaine. Which explains why I’ve always had to be off my face to watch
The Great British Bake Off
. It makes sense, as when I’m snorting gak off a filthy toilet seat in a piss-stenched cubicle the last thing I’m thinking about is poaching a sea bass.

Half of all food in the world is now thrown away. The other half is stored and cooked using finite resources and then shat into the ocean. It’s surely better for the environment if you empty your shopping trolley directly into the sea and take a shit in a bin. When you think about how unhealthy the food is, throwing half of it away might be the only thing that’s keeping us alive. In an attempt to reconnect with what we eat I recently went out hunting moose. The fog came down and another hunter shot me by accident. It was just a flesh wound – good job I was carrying my lucky hat stand.

A study has revealed meat is to blame for one in thirty deaths. Of course, it’s not just meat eaters whose health is threatened by this report. Thousands of vegetarians risk literally bursting with smugness. There’s a lot of bad things said about your arteries clogging with cholesterol – but what with the Scottish climate, not being able to feel your legs can be a real bonus.