Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (30 page)

The guests are Butler, Martin Freeman and Amy Pond from
Dr Who
, who enter one after the other with a real frisson of tension, as if Butler had tried to finger everybody in the green room. This is quite a common set-up for the Graham Norton couch, where one alpha male flirts with an attractive woman, while a less potent man looks on, stricken.

What follows is a shifting and uneasy dreamscape that can be seen as a satire on the nature of celebrity, a chilling expressionist commentary on how we can never truly communicate, and even just a show that was knocked together with a kind of bored contempt for the human mind.

Butler lunges at an anecdote about a kilt but claims never to have worn one. A fan in the audience shouts out that he wore one to a première that Tuesday. Butler’s eyes swivel with the amazed wonder of a time traveller. He then attempts an anecdote about surfing that falls a little flat. Norton shrieks, ‘Not exactly comedy gold!’, idly dismissing this little tidbit of Butler’s life that’s offered up to him, like some mischievous sprite from a lost Shakespeare play.

There’s a heavy, musky sense of sexual threat throughout. Amy Pond looks both excited and frightened, and would clearly bolt if she were a horse. Martin Freeman wears a mask of acceptance that he’s to be overshadowed both professionally and sexually. It’s a mask that questions how appalling Butler would have to be to lose the admiration of the crowd or the girl, that says even a sudden shift into a spasmodically delivered murder confession might not be quite enough.

Then somewhere, somehow, a complex helmet that boosts the wearer’s psychic abilities must have been handed to the young William Burroughs, because it transpires that the little Jack Russell from the film
The Artist
is to make an appearance, re-enacting Butler’s surfing anecdote to thunderous applause.

We have to weave our own dramas around shows like this simply because to take them as they are meant would be too harrowing. This is the kind of imagination that our dead culture has forced on us. Like a kung fu monk, held by his enemies at the bottom of an old well, we use the power of our minds to create a paradise of rolling hills, peopled by imaginary families, having imaginary kung fu themed adventures in our starless prison.

So, we’re in a cultural desert. The great TV and cinema and public intellectuals that I grew up with have been blasted into sand. What qualities there are in our culture now are just the mirages we project on to great piles of nothing. But what’s culture, anyway? Culture is simply a machine designed to get you to think within certain fixed parameters. Culture isn’t your buddy. Your culture is a series of products designed to advance the status or wealth of a stranger, and anyone who it hasn’t caused to completely give in to despair by their late twenties is just shallow.

Everything produced in culture nowadays has a minimal impact because of the increasing speed of information. Let’s say you can write a TV drama and succeed in producing something interesting in the face of all the practical problems and restrictions. I don’t think you can, but let’s imagine that you do. Fewer people than ever before will watch it, and when they do they’ll be texting, tweeting, watching a five-second mpeg of someone masturbating onto a photograph of Vanessa Hudgens. It has taken me about an hour to write this paragraph because that sentence made me go and look at nude photos of Vanessa Hudgens. Modern life is really only about learning the bare minimum you need to know about a subject to have an argument. You can write a bestselling book but half the people who buy it won’t read it and the ones that do won’t finish it. A lot of your prospective audience is now on prescription medication. With an increasing demand for never-ending content, we all plagiarise and parody ourselves.

So give it up. Stop trying to do something for posterity, because posterity doesn’t exist anymore. Stop living for tomorrow, because there’s really no guarantee of that, either. Yes, you live in the discarded carapace of a dead civilisation, but you can turn it into the beautiful life of an apocalypse survivor. Enough good books and films have been made that you can watch or read something mind-blowing every day until you die. You can thrive like a jihadi in the desert of our culture. Show me the most intellectual nihilist and I’ll show you someone who’s simply ignoring a lot of really good reggae.

If you’re truly wise you’ll see ahead of you days of war and nights of love. Yes, you’re stalked by corporations, but they’re just monsters. Monsters are things you learn how to kill – they have weaknesses and obey the rules of stories. And, as you fight, put aside your differences. However much your comrade annoys you, rest assured that these beasts are going to have the same serial number for your world-view in their camps. Make a break from a world of hate crimes without returning to one where we let people die through sheer fucking indifference.

And the key to happiness? I don’t know. Meet someone beautiful who’s aroused by failure? Really, it’s to escape your own ego, not just on a personal but on a political level. We live in a society of elitism and exceptionalism, and it has seeped into all of us. Bombing civilians is an attempt to export democracy. Civilians fighting back are terrorists. What’s OK for us is not OK for you. Pussy Riot are the victims of tyranny, but not the people we jail for throwing a custard pie at Rupert Murdoch or swimming in front of the Boat Race? They were actually doing something selfless, however foolish, and we can’t have that. The self has to be before you at every turn, every sentence that’s spoken weighed up for its impact on your status, every person you meet reduced from incredible possibility to a very poor mirror.

The self is just an excuse to pour endlessly into a leaky bucket. Why not focus on your real mirror, your children? I was in the swimming pool the other day and as I floated listlessly in a corner I suddenly realised that I wouldn’t do comedy again, that the day I’d have needed to start warming up for a new tour had long gone and I hadn’t even noticed.

My boy was on one of his periodic anti-social highs. So, I’d grab him, imprison him in a hug and whisper this deliberately boring story in his ear in a low, doleful Irish voice that was a partial satire on his grandad. ‘The Story of the 100 Sheep,’ I began, listing all the different places a forsaken sheep would go looking for a friend. ‘He looked in the hills and he looked in the meadow and he looked down by the stream. And he didn’t see any sheep. Then he looked in a hedge and he saw a sheep. Then there were two sheep! The two sheep were lonely and decided to go looking for a friend . . . They looked in the hills . . .’

When it got to about five sheep, a few of them got lost in the fog and it was back to two sheep. Then one sheep sat down to begin telling the other ‘The Story of the Thousand Crabs’. As the laughter shook him, it rose through me like music.

*
Female heterosexuals and male homosexuals should here read ‘pussy’ as ‘cock’.

*
It feels great to write that phrase down. Try it!

ALSO BY FRANKIE BOYLE:

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‘Boyle has made his name with the kind of acerbic comedy that takes no prisoners and leaves those of a timid disposition gaping, slack-jawed.’

Independent

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First published by HarperCollins
Publishers
2013

FIRST EDITION

Frankie Boyle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This book contains material previously published elsewhere, including in Frankie Boyle’s
Sun
columns

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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