It has been commented on in the past, and will certainly be mentioned again in the present and future, that I can come across as being grumpy. To the casual observer, the furious and irrational reptile lump in my brain has too much control. In truth, I’m not as grumpy as occasional tweets and globules of stand up would suggest. My anger is quick, I hurl the glass jar at the wall then get the dustpan and brush. I have managed to cut down on many of the incitements that kicked my Komodo. I barely pick up a newspaper now, I don’t watch much TV, I avoid shopping centres, noisy pubs, nightclubs and the centre of ‘things’. Occasionally I am weak and find myself shouting at Question Time. Sometimes I open articles that have been tweeted to me by concerned individuals who think I should be aware of the fabricated opinion of a paid contrarian whose motivations for writing is self-satisfaction. Despite these few eczema itches (I gave up reading Melanie Phillips after I started scratching until I bled) I would have thought I am pretty content, frequently jolly, sometimes gleeful.

I have bumped into people who read my tweets and tell me “your Edinburgh sounded hideous” or “you didn’t like Kirkcaldy did you?” when out of many tweets written the “Fuck the Edinburgh fringe I’m leaving” were in the minority. I suppose they are just more noticeable than the “what a nice sandwich” and “it is sunny, good”.

Emotions are often exaggerated in 140 characters and can also be more vivid if you are spending a lot of time on your own with only the voices in your head for company. I write “only the voices in your head” , they are often very good company and come up with some pretty interesting scenarios, but sometimes, well, I don’t know where they get their ideas from.

Train journeys can seem as long as putting your hand on a hot kettle after a bad gig, or even an OK gig that you know wasn’t good enough. In midwinter you can arrive in a dark town that is cold enough to heat your paranoia, feeling like Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock but with two arms and without the ability to defend yourself against any local Lee Marvins. It is at times like these you need to remember how lucky you are. Whether it is a full house or low attendance the people in the auditorium have paid to see you and want to hear what you say. Whenever I think of the digestive ailments and skin conditions made more vivid by a life of stand up or mull over some spat with a critic or facebook page that might have been dedicated to why I am the tumour that will kill comedy (don’t think that one exists yet, why on earth have I inspired you to create it – “lazy self-loather asks us to do loathing for them”) I remember everything else I’ve got from it.

This Tuesday was one of those day where I saw how lucky I was, the komodo in my skull only popped up once and was assuaged before anything was shattered.

I started the day checking on an event I am doing with the author and wizard Alan Moore. Alan is a man whose work I have been reading since my age was in single figures and continues to create tales of the imagination that enthuse me. Whenever I talk to him a thing on my shoulder intermittently reminds me that my brain is a pecan nut to his walrus mind.

Once on the train I listen to songs that I might play at Scared to Dance, an evening of lo fi, post punk and alternative music where I am going to be paid to play music I like to people. I have 90 minutes, will this be long enough to create a playlist that is popular enough to have people overcoming their fear of dancing but reveal rarities that show off how clever I must to play certain rarities?

Once In London I go to the BBC to work with my producer Sasha (do say hello to her, she loves being mentioned in blogs, it’s her Hitchcock moment) on a documentary about Bertrand Russell, a man whose work I have loved since I was a teenager. I am being paid to listen to archive of Bertrand Russell and then hopefully not say anything too banal between the clips of The Brains Trust and his Reith lecture.

Just enough time for lunch with Tim Minchin, the barefooted, back-combed and eye-lined troubador whose cunning disguise for day to day existence is to put no effort in. We discuss a scientific venture and decide not to risk a revolving door while holding a bowl of hot stew (a pity, I think Stan Laurel would have made something of that).

Then, as a rainbow appeared over Kings Cross, I got in a cab to visit Terry Jones. He had agreed to appear on Utter Shambles, a podcast I do with Josie Long that allows us to sit and witter away with people we admire. Terry made us coffee and we talked about Nocobobinus, flat earth myths, the war with Iraq, Chaucer and very briefly about Monty Python. Time to swig a glass of wine before leaping into a cab to go and hyper-kinetically mumble at Steve Lamacq on 6music as I do most Tuesdays. This allows me to play Ivor Cutler to an audience too.

Not all days are like this and I hope this hasn’t just seemed like a catalogue of showing off. As I came to the end of Tuesday I just thought how fortunate I am to have such a professional life, I mean, this my job (I know job is not the correct term). The 14 year old me would look on with wide eyes and weak knees that such a future would occur. So for all my whining and fury, I know that in reality I am a fortunate man who, unlike many other people, lives a life where I have the opportunity to do things that I want to do. It would be easy to look on with envious eyes at those millionaire comedians that play the O2 and have their own panel shows, but it turned out that I reckon occasionally eating fried eggs with Alan Moore in one of Northampton’s leading American style diners is more than good enough for me.

FOOTNOTE

I imagine dramatic irony will kick in shortly after I post this blog – “shortly after writing this blog, Robin Ince died of total collapse of everything – the autopsy suggested the years of hauling luggaged filled with killer crabs novels and Mills and Boon arctic explorer novels across the UK had made his organs give up on themselves.

HAPPINESS THROUGH SCIENCE tour continues – Exeter, Glasgow, Dundee, Salisbury, Northampton coming up, plus 2012 dates now added to www.robinince.com

Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club is available from bookshops , websites and some Age UK charity shops

This is a reasonably ineffectual line I have occasionally opened with in the last month. These are times where it’s very easy to swipe at people who don’t possess furtive or ironic traditional group hate as “just being politically correct”, as if within us all is a burning desire to shout coon or dyke and we are only stopping ourselves due to a shallow liberalism. These are also time where irony can be draped over gags so that the audience and performer can pat themselves on the back for their sophistication while also enjoying a gypsy joke.

Comedy can be misconstrued in many ways and interpreted by individuals to suit their own ends and prejudices.

Another problem with gags can be forgetting that you are sometimes delivering them to many people. What can be an entertaining aside to a few friends who know each other well, can be disastrously misconstrued when told to many strangers.

Equally, it can be forgotten that not everyone knows the things you do an that can change meaning to. I once, and only once, had a joke about Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. It was a joke about language and bigotry, but if the audience didn’t know it was first published as Ten Little Niggers, it turned out it was just a racist joke in most people’s ears. It got a big laugh the one time I used it and I realized it was for all the wrong reasons. Part of the joke was about how language changes, and this week what a word means or doesn’t mean has become a major talking point on inky pages and across the internet.

Before I continue I should make it clear that I know a few of the people involved in this story. Ricky Gervais is a friend and someone who I supported on two tours and Richard Herring is a comedian I have been on good terms with for some years, and Nicky Clark is a disability campaigner I occasionally bother when I want to know things.

The word that has caused such vitriolic and vicious debates, as well as some individual houndings, is ‘mong’.

Ricky started using in tweets. Some people picked him up on that declaring it was an offensive word due its history of being used to bully and demean people with Down’s syndrome . Ricky then declared that such people were fools as the dictionary definition of ‘mong’ means idiot, then it really kicked off creating the kind of storm the media love; very little research to be done, many morally forthright opinions to be spouted. I felt Ricky was bullish and cocksure in his position, and as Bertrand Russell warned us, “the idiots are cocksure, the intelligent are full of doubt”. To make it worse, he received some tweets that hoped he got cancer. Sometimes cruel jibes can make you feell you are even more right and that perhaps you have the moral high ground. Then some of his followers decided it was their duty to the illustrious leader to be as uncouth and bullying to anyone who disagreed with his dictionary definition. Richard Herring, a comedian who has spoken out about bullying language in the past, took him to task with a tweet which Ricky then RTed and it all became rather unpleasant for Herring for 48 hours. I hadn’t spoken to Ricky for a few days and frankly, I thought he was being a right arrogant bastard. On Thursday night I was in a dressing room with Richard Herring and Francesca Martinez (who appeared in Extras and has cerebral palsy) and the general feeling was that Hollywood had gone to his head and anyone who disagreed with him was a ‘hater’ who must be crushed.

The next day I decided to email him two Guardian columns by disability campaigner Nicky Clark. In one she effusively praised the work of Stephen Merchant and him for creating disabled characters and what this had achieved. The second article, written this week, took him to task over the use of the word mong.

A few minutes after sending the email, we spoke. Rather than a bullish arrogant man on the end of the line, there was clearly someone who couldn’t quite understand what was going on. He didn’t even make the trademark screech that has dogged my life whenever I’ve been in his company. What had seemingly started as a petty feud over language with some of his traditional forthright pig-headedness had now opened up a very different debate. He was horrified to think that people in the street might really feel he looked on the disabled with disdain. I did explain that even I reckoned he’d come across like a bullish idiot.

I explained that though there might be a separate pitchfork mob awaiting him, but people like Nicky and Richard were not part of some Gervais hating campaign. They were people humanely concerned about the bullying of disabled people and the words that are thrown at them.

Unfortunately, the world of 140 characters, the easy access to celebrities and those who might criticize them, can lead to misunderstandings and stupidity traveling around the world faster and with less thought than anything with a stamp could.

On this occasion intention and outcome, as so often can happen on the internet, went their separate ways.

(It is important to remember that you should never follow an atheist unquestioningly.)

What this debacle seems to underline is that comfortable lives can sully empathy. If we live a nice life for long enough, it seems that imagining others less pleasant existence can become trickier.

I hope most people reading this have lives generally free from bullying apart from the occasional slights of drunks on a Friday train or if they tour with Golden globe winners. We can believe that the world is now free of homophobia, racism and misogyny because we don’t really see it where we live or perhaps we don’t notice. When AA Gill made some dyke jokes about Clare Balding and she took him upon it, she was characterized as ‘one of those humourless lesbians’ and Gill suggested that gays and lesbians are all happy now and live in the best of all possible worlds. It might be alright in our comfortable media enclave, you can even see some holding hands in public in London town nowadays, but that doesn’t mean that across the UK there are not people preaching against them, suggesting violence is the best option and thousands of people who may never come out and live agonizing existences in fear that the truth may ever out. Though quite a few people may know someone who is gay, far fewer of us know anyone who has cerebral palsy or downs syndrome or any other condition that marks them out outwardly and effects them inwardly. Most of us don’t know about the sort of staring, bullying and name calling that can blight their life. That is why Ricky was not stirring up hate, his position was one of ignorance and also informed by his being the cheeky shock comic who occasionally provokes the reaction of “ooh, should he say that?” I think he believed he was being contentious and a little edgy (god, how I hate ‘edgy’) by repeatedly tweeting mong. He is a man who likes to annoy and he will have probably enjoyed annoying people initially,  but I don’t think he realised how frequently this word was used to abuse the disabled people and just how powerful that word could still be. Unfortunately, some of his followers have demonstrated its thoroughly witless use across twitter. It is important to remember if you are someone with many followers and a powerful public profile, some of your flock may take your words unquestioningly and that’s a nice reason to try and use them wisely. Should he be crucified over this, only if ignorance becomes a nailing offence and then we’re going to need a bigger Golgotha. This also demonstrates the danger of utter certainty, already playing the arrogant showman card on many occasions, for some people this was the point too far. Public humility was never a strong point.  Since then, he has spoken to Nicky Clark and I believe heard a differing opinion on disability and abusive language. One thing that this debate has shown yet again is the incredible potency of language. Language took a long time to evolve, it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Hopefully, what may come out of this after all the tuppenny moral outrage  (mine isn’t tuppenny moral outrage, as I get no tuppenny for it) is a greater knowledge of the depth of bullying of the disabled and thoughtfulness over your choice of words while still saying what you mean.

Some commentators seem to feel this is a free speech issue, as if free use of the word mong is the most pressing issue Amnesty should be dealing with. I do not think any words should be banned, but I hope that a society can aspire to want more than a rapid response unit to defend playground taunts. When Frankie Boyle makes jokes about down’s syndrome I understand he has the right to say it, I just wonder why he wants to say it. If I look back at jokes I made nearly twenty years ago, I know there are some I would be appalled by, not just because they were awful , but because I was uncomfortable with their morality. That would be true of jokes I made five years ago, and will probably be true of jokes I make now. I do not mind offending people, I’d  just like to think that if they cornered me in the bar I could explain the reason I was offensive before the punched me.

Freedom of speech is important, it is so important that there are countries that ban it and where men and women are executed for what they have said or written. When you are fortunate enough to have freedom of speech it becomes your duty to mull over the power of the words you have at your disposal. We are the only animal that has such a rich and varied vocabulary. As a speaking animal we should make use of our language beyond grunts, arse scratches and screams, we are more than a Macaque.

FOOTNOTES

Here are Nicky Clark’s articles

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2011/sep/22/ricky-gervais-stephen-merchant-disability

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2011/oct/19/ricky-gervais-mong-twitter

Happiness Through Science tour continues into 2012 – Lancaster, Banbury, Dundee and Glasgow soon www.robinince.com

another footnote – some people seem to think I am suggesting Ricky Gervais had no idea that ‘mong’ has been used as a slur for people with downs syndrome. I am not. I do believe that he thought it was archaic and no longer such a frequently used word by people who bully the disabled (of course, I may be a patsy)

I’ve been lucky, though to an extent, I have made my luck. Most nights when I’m performing I am performing with people I like unless it is a solo show, then I just avoid mirrors so I don’t get too loose-lipped and tell me what I really think of me.

I love stand up, especially when I’m thinking about doing it as long as it is at least 5 hours before doing it. Nowadays I enjoy doing the Edinburgh fringe festival, though that’s helped by the fact that I do so many shows a day that my paranoia has to play catch up in September. I am lucky to have had opportunities to work with people I admire, just the As who have worked with Illustrator Oscar Zarate include Alan Moore and Alexei Sayle, I don’t know what would happen if we moved on to the Bs who worked with Raymond Briggs (Hmm, I could stretch this – I did meet David Bowie on a stairwell once and he sang the theme to When the Wind Blows. Melinda Gebbie also worked on When the Wind Blows, but her Bs are wrongly placed). I’ve also earned exactly the right amount of money to live the perfect life – to be able to buy a few books, go to the pub and then get a taxi home. Mind you, I never take the taxi as that can spent on more books and the reinforced foundations required to stop my house sinking. This is required as it will annoy my neighbours if I drag them with me, one of the disadvantages of living in a terraced house.

But it is time to realize that, taking into account my ability and the niche value of what I do, I really shouldn’t tour anymore. Despite four years of hard work (that’s hard work as in “entertainment” hard work, which is not like hospital worker or OAP home hard work) since I was last there, I am still no more of a draw in Kirkcaldy.

A couple of years ago, shortly after we performed as backing singers for Robyn Hitchcock, Stewart Lee told me I should be a curator. And it was then that I realized I am a better curator than a comedian. I remained in denial of course, but really I know it’s true. I’m not a bad comedian (if you like that sort of thing) and I can have my moments. I reckon my Now Show newspapers rant was pretty goodand I can shout about things with aplomb, but it’s really not for everyone and even then, the vast majority of everyone. People sometimes send messages saying “hey, why not come to our town, we all like you around here”. I then point out that the all is all the people at the table they are sitting around, the rest of the people in North Allerton couldn’t give a damn. I decided I wouldn’t do another big tour after my last one, but I thought I could handle sporadic dates around the place. The gut punch I felt on the train to Kirkcaldy when I was told the sales were 36 was as vanity destroying as ever. Why would the people of Kirkcaldy want to come to see me, some bloke who talks about science on Radio 4 and pops up on 6msuic on a Tuesday?

There are many things I like doing – Utter Shambles podcasts, Infinite Monkey Cage, documentaries where I drink with members of the clergy, putting together shows that mix particle physicists with trombone jazz – and I will keep doing those things. But I think it’s time to take a break from being a stand up and just be someone who puts odd stuff on hopefully in places where enough people like that sort of thing. I’ve got my dignity to think about (I know, I know, way too late for that – and that’s not even if you count my appearances on Strictly Come Dancing – It Takes 2)

FOOTNOTE: plus I’d really rather be talking to my son about spiders and monkeys than going to cold, dark towns filled with suspense.

and now that Malcolm Middleton you’ve been waiting for - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wurEBzyeBZg

For a few years now, “the new atheism” has been very handy for inspiring ill-thought out pieces filled with conjecture that masquerades as hard fact. Often the piece will start off with the author declaring their hatred of fundamentalist religion. They’ll then go on to say they only thing they hate more than female genital mutilation, sanctioned concealment of child abuse and the executions of homosexuals, more often than not based on flawed readings of texts, are some scientists or comedians saying they don’t believe in deities. This has created what I believe to be  a predominantly false war between atheists and the religious – some of best friends eat the body of Christ on a Sunday.

In an interview with Rowan Williams last week, Frank Skinner said, ‘Atheists we might see as people like those who deny global warming. You might celebrate their right, and defend their freedom of speech, to deny global warming – but if they’re wrong, and millions of other people have taken their view, then it could end in a terrible, terrible disaster for a lot of people.’  This annoyed a few atheists as rationalists and evidence fetishists (that I imagine is what Ann Coulter will one day call any empiricist) don’t like being compared to global warming deniers. My presumption of what he meant is that people like me will miss out on salvation and have a post death existence of infinite agony. I am not sure exactly what the Catholic stance is on non believers entry to heaven but I imagine we might not be in the priority queue. In some ways, Frank Skinner’s statement was made out of compassion. Frank once told me that he suggested a programme to a BBC exec where the two of us traveled around Europe looking at great religious sites and areas of scientific interest (one moment the Large Hadron Collider the next Chartres – they weren’t very interested apparently)

Cristina Odone decided to waste the word count given to her by the Telegraph to bang on about Skinner’s interview.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8774285/Subversive-believers-will-have-the-last-laugh.html

Apparently Frank Skinner has “taken on the establishment that loves him” and we must stop giving in to atheists in popular entertainment. As any Television viewer knows, it is nearly all atheist shows – Dancing on Ice, Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor, Red or Black, Midsomer Murders – you name the TV show, I’ll show you the unconcealed god denying agenda. Oh you might think that when someone thanks God on the X Factor they mean God, but no, they mean Great Old Dawkins.

Odone says that Skinner “by outing himself as a believer” has stuck two fingers up to the liberal establishment. The only problem is, if his fingers were up (place anal fingering joke here) then they went up many years ago. Skinner has openly spoken and written about his religion for many years. When he was away on location at weekends, the researchers would be asked to find the address of the nearest Catholic church so he could go and worship on a Sunday. Of course the researchers, who were all Communists and under direct command of an M like Christopher Hitchens who secretly runs all telly, told him to fuck off – except they didn’t. If, as Cristina Odone declares, the atheists are in charge of the media, why have they let her into it? Because she lives in a paranoid fiction where she takes the fashionable position of anyone who is anyway questioned “oh it’s so unfair, I’m the victim here, don’t you see”.

After rabbiting on about how the atheists are in charge, Cristina then declares that Skinner is not alone and names a few high profile Christians who just happen to have profile media jobs. In summary , it seems you are not allowed to be in the media nowadays if you are a Christian and to prove my point here are some high profile Christians who run some of the media.

Oh crikey, I’m so sorry, I am boring myself now.

If, as Odone seems to think, Christians are embarrassed to admit they are Christians, that is nothing to do with atheists. Milton Jones, one of the finest comedians working in this country as far as I’m concerned, is a Christian. I have had many interesting conversations with him on the subject and I don’t remember any coy, blushing moment where he wept in a dressing room as he revealed to me his secret shame. I don’t know of any comedian who behind Tim Vine’s back whispers with vitriol “those jokes are all well and good, but you know the idiot is one of them Abrahamics”.

This is another case of a newspaper article creating a false them and us situation in the desperate hope it will become true.

That’s not to say that some atheists , including myself, don’t get mouthy sometimes and that Richard Dawkins can seem very grouchy on occasion, though rarely as grouchy or hateful as the hate mail he receives from presumably old testament believers who haven’t heard the good news.

For vocal atheists it is important to remember that just because someone is religious, it doesn’t mean that they are a creationist homophobe waiting eagerly to be taken up during the rapture. Though it is not only atheists that can make this mistake. The Infinite Monkey Cage received a complaint from a Christian that by mocking creationism we were mocking all Christians. I believe this will be news to the Christians I know who have balanced their belief in a god with an understanding and acceptance of the theory of evolution. Sadly, falling viewing figures and fears of low circulation lead to each group being represented by the most extreme members. If you need a Muslim hook hands are preferred, if you need a Christian then call on Stephen Green who titles his gang Christian voice and creates the illusion to overworked researchers that he might actually be the voice of British Christians, something which greatly displeases the Christians I have spoken to.

Balls, I can’t be bothered to write about John Gray’s piece for Radio 4 about why Atheists must stop this attack on religion – if to question something is to attack it then let all future wars be fought using the medium of pub quiz.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14944470

THE PLUG – my Happiness through Science tour goes around UK (from Dundee to Exeter via Blackheath, Newport, Canterbury, Kirkcaldy, Glasgow and more from now until November the Ben Goldacre, Brian Cox, Simon Singh, me and some very special guests will be doing 6 all new shows together in December – see www.robinince.com for details)

An ape with self-consciousness is a ridiculous idea. What could have come up with such a thing?

There the problem lies. Nothing came up with it.

It relied on replication, mutation and natural selection, which is a frankly shoddy idea. This is not a manufacturing process that can be relied on, as you may have already observed in your infuriating life.

Many people have decided to refute the idea of evolution preferring to think the self-consciousness oddity and everything else was created by something all-powerful and all knowing. It is surely a mind with malevolent intent that would come up with the idea of being aware of yourself and your death. The only reason they came up with the deity hypothesis in the first place was because of that darned self-consciousness. Mindful of our own mortality, we refuse to believe that eventually we just stop being conscious and so stop existing. We are finite. Bullfrogs, Chaffinches and Gliss Gliss don’t need gods and explanations because they just dart around with their hard-wired survival instincts unaware of themselves as selves and unaware that one well-cleaned window around the corner can lead to a brain smashed death (that’s predominantly for the Chaffinch obviously, I have no idea if a Bullfrog or Gliss Gliss is likely to confuse glass for just another patch of thin air and propel itself into it with such gusto it would break its brain).

So it shouldn’t be surprising that after these billions of years of evolution, years that have led to humans being the only known creature in the universe to comprehend that they are in a universe and to have the wherewithal or misfortune to ponder on why and what the cosmos is, many people declare “oh, I just want to switch off”.

By switch off they do not mean a journey to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end their life, that’s the last stop in the unbearableness of being. This switch off is to immerse yourself in glossiness, emptiness and trash; to enjoy the thoughtless. Even to enjoy the thoughtless might be too much, perhaps it is to be joyless but also without any other emotion hampering you. Where once we were told that humans retreat into busyness to avoid thought, now we hide inside trashiness. The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe, which can only strengthen our hope that some other living thing is out there. Though if there is something else out there, as Rod Serling and 2000AD have warned us, it might put us in a zoo or have us for lunch.

I spend much of my life on trains. I like trains, I see them as a ‘bring your own’ library and pondering caboose. Three hours of sitting and reading while sipping tea, occasionally looking out of the window to be impressed by a lonely church or hectic scrapyard. On my journey from Exeter to Leeds (my tour booker does not have a great grasp of geography), a bespectacled woman sat opposite me and took out her copy of Closer magazine. An adult Bunty, it is filled with wizard japes about women who wed psychopaths, lose an eye and learn to live again, and soap actors who hide a secret sadness. After two hours of traveling, somewhere near Wolverhampton the woman put down her half-read magazine, removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes saying, “I need to give my brain a break”. I think I failed to conceal my wince. Even a magazine that had surely been created to ‘switch off’ from the day’s hubbub and pesky thoughts, has become something to switch off from. When even the switch off needs to be switched off it seems we are in trouble.

A crab may not have self-consciousness, but equally it never looks at its reflection in a rock pool and thinks “oh no, my claws look really dowdy, I better get some glitter spray and a shitty thong”. The trouble with self-consciousness is that it makes you so self-conscious.

When a supermodel such as Elle Macpherson tells her public that she might not like what she sees in the mirror or that some of her features are gnarled and twisted in her eyes, the people scoff or throw scorn upon a woman. She must be pretending she is aware of how very beautiful she is while secretly laughing at the true uglies such as you and I. But that is the wonder of self-consciousness, the majority can only see their imperfections save for the few occasions they might be so drunk as to think they are attractive or as interesting as everyone else. I still can’t listen to my own recorded voice making editing radio programmes a tricky business. I am not a child though, it is not the horror of hearing my voice, I am used to that garbled man-child mumble, it is now what it says that annoys me.

That is why ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is such a belligerent instruction. This would require most people to look at the man at number 17 with derision and sneer at their failure to become what they had dreamed of in their youth.

Self-consciousness is the brake that makes us mute and talk too much polite conversation. Have you ever wanted to break into a brief dance move while browsing in a bookshop? Have you ever wanted to start a discussion about cannibalism at a polite drinks evening? Have you ever wanted to stare in the face of a bureaucrat uncomprehendingly in their face as they tell you that you cannot do what you’d like to do, then plant a kiss on their forehead, smile and depart?

But you haven’t because you thought “but what will they think of me? I might get a reputation and find myself only able to wander the backstreets after midnight, hooded and surreptitious”. There’s a reason Stanley Milgram got 65% of people to apparently administer lethal electric shocks to an unknown man who had merely failed to correctly answer a few questions. “oh dear, what will this smartly dressed professional scientist think if I don’t kill this man upon his instruction?”

So should we all say to hell with self-consciousness an self-lobotomise with our trepanning tools?

Weighing it all up I think now I’ve got it I’d rather not lose it, even though I know one day I will. And after all those years of worrying about the day it goes, afterwards I won’t feel a thing.

Rather then switch it off, I think I am going to try and make sure it stays on, even if the inner monologue that does come with it can be a little grating and psychotic, at least it sometimes impersonates the voice of Herbert Lom or Carl Sagan.  Now I better get down to understanding the triune brain that might suggest that some of my decisions come about from my inner Veloceraptor bickering with my inner ground sloth. I certainly wouldn’t have punched that computer monitor hard in the screen if the ground sloth had its way, bloody dinosaur brain.

NOTE: this whole piece is a warning to avoid reading philosophy. It might not bring you joy realizing that you know nothing. Even if it brings the strange pride and superiority for knowing that you know nothing while the others, the more confident ones, stupidly believe they do know something.  Perhaps it is best to live like the consciousness despiser Schopenhauer, without people by with a poodle or two to comb. And even if he did find life defined by pain more than joy, he still went on with it, so we might as well, poodle or no poodle.

There is a reason I decided to focus on doing stand up about Schrodinger’s cat, benevolent suicidal urges and art hate. Being an observational comedian is fraught with dangers and impending shame. If you are not careful, you may find out that your normal existence is actually a twisted vision of the group’s comfortable reality.

So it’s gig number one, and you’re confident. You’ll slay these people with your wry examination of our shared experiences.

You stand on the stage and say, “hey folks, you know when you do that thing” and you lengthily dissect that thing we do.

An uneasy quiet.

They look back bemused. Some are little uncomfortable. One is already jamping the sharpened end of a match beneath a fingernail to distract them from their empathetic shame. It is clear is that each of them is thinking “no, I don’t know when I do that thing”. Briefly, each one feared that they would be the freak, but the lack of communal laughter has satisfied every individual that they are a happy mass.

At this point the observational comedian is on the back foot. He is quite certain that everyone shared his habit of dipping their hand in the toilet bowl after urinating just to see if the water was warmer. Now, within the first minute of his time on stage, the observer has discovered he may not be as other men.

A blip, that is all. He is certain of his next observation. Didn’t he laugh about it with his friend Neil all those years ago?

He talks animatedly about how when we are kids we all go to the graveyard and try and chip off the dress of an angel statue with a screwdriver in the hope of seeing its angelic genitals. This too turns out to be more eccentric than he thought. Surely Neil found it funny? There he is at the back, with another match under his fingernail. The comedian never knew that Neil just laughed along because it was only the two of them, without a group to go by, it was a 50/50 chance one of them was a weirdo. At 11 years old, Neil laughed in case everyone else had a screwdriver and stone angel lust. As the years went by, he had become increasingly certain it was wrong and feels a pang of guilt about their desecration of that mausoleum in Croxley Green. Maybe he should have told his friend that his impulses were wrong all those years ago rather than letting him find out as he stood on stage in Hanwell. There is a possibility he will never leave Hanwell now.

This is not a true story and yet, every night, it could become a real story. For those who believe in many worlds theory, it is probably a true story somewhere, but one that is unlikely to be empirically proved.

Johnny Vegas, a force of angry nature on stage, used to say “I am not going to say do you know what it’s like when, because none of you know what it’s like to be me”. Their followed a river of beautiful melancholy.

Observational comedy is a hugely successful business with a comforting message – “do not worry, we are not individuals”. We are one big mass with a very limited variety of reactions to most situations. We feel the same way about our partners. We react the same way when drunk or stoned. Apparently we are vaguely sophisticated ants scurrying in the same direction but with less fear of washing up liquid. Comedy is experiencing a boom at the moment, so you can sit in an arena with 15,000 people looking at each other and saying “hahaha I do that I do that”. This doesn’t mean everyone does that, but if you don’t do that do you want to be the lone person like a Victorian Punch cartoon shouting “but I don’t do that”.

The pressure of the crowd is great. Recent research into why suicide bombers went through with their acts suggested peer pressure was more important than religious or political fervour. The political/religious fervour gets you first of all, but it’s the sitting in front of a camera surrounded by your zealous friends saying into the lens why you will be committing your act that pushes you over the edge. The destruction of your life and others occurs because you think, “if I don’t blow everyone up what would my mates think. I’d never be able to look them in the eye. Not that I ever will be able to, as mine are about to explode from my skull”. I am not comparing laughing at Lee Evans to the actions of a suicide bomber though, but maybe the police should keep an eye on his more zealous fans.

I was recently in Oslo performing at their first alternative comedy festival. One night I was watching an event with my fellow Dodgem Logician Josie Long. All the acts were speaking in Norwegian, despite my childhood love of Roald Dahl it’s a language I have never attempted to grasp. Despite my lack of comprehension I felt compelled to laugh. I was worried about what were all those guffawing around me thinking as I stood smiling. What was wrong with this man who did not find Martin Beyer-Olsen hilarious?[1] He is not like us, why doesn’t he laugh? We must throw him harshly on the black ice. I avoided betraying myself by beaming.

Laughter can be very alienating. Sometimes a heckler is furious because others are laughing and he doesn’t get it. Their violent fury comes from the sense that your jokes are specifically designed to make him feel stupid. When someone says “you’re just not funny” it is difficult to get into a discussion about the difference between the objective and subjective (I have got over this by traveling with a Samoan who places any troublemakers in a leather trunk we later leave on waste ground).

An observation can be true, but too uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing for anyone in an audience to admit.

I was on my way to a gig in February feeling numerous aches and psychosomatic mystery lumps. I was trying to nail down which cancer or cancers I had. On that Monday night I decided it was probably bowel, lung and prostate. My ribs had ached after a particularly strenuous gig, so that was lung. I kept thinking I needed a wee every time I was nowhere near a toilet – so that was prostate. My colon has been spasmodic for many years (since I spent a year living of one cheese and onion sandwich and lots of beers per day) – so that’s bowel. I should make it clear that I am a fighter and have never let my hypochondria get in the way of my working life however ill I have imagined myself to be. I am hoping that my bouts of hypochondria will have helped built up my body’s immunity when I really get something (not that I’m not saying I don’t have something at the moment. I have stomach ache as I type this).  As I walked on the stage, I decided to jettison most of my carefully thought out comparative critique of Flashdance versus Black Swan. “carefully thought out” generally means I thought of it over an hour before the gig. Instead I decided to open with “so how many of you have ever thought you had cancer?”

Nothing.

Astonishingly it appeared that out of over one hundred people, I was the only person in the room who regularly noticed a lump or felt a vivacious nerve ending cough and thought, “which cancer this time?” I was not content with their response and felt it best to hector them. Nope, seemed I was the freak in the room. I opened it out by telling them that I had not always been plagued by thoughts of cancers. In the late eighties I mainly thought I must have AIDS because I had had sex a couple of times. Every stretchmark I happened to notice around my armpit must be a sarcoma of some type or other. This didn’t seem to lead to any increase in hands in the air or “YAYS!”

Fortunately at the bar I met a man who confirmed he had spent much of his worrying time in the eighties thinking he had AIDS and later I was sent a message by a woman who said her boyfriend often finds a new cancer on Monday morning, but he felt too embarrassed to put his hand up. So observational sometimes comedy doesn’t get a reaction because it is wrong, just that people in crowd imagine they are the only one and so remain silent. It seems it is more socially acceptable to caterwaul about your husband/wife being hateful than admit you might be unsure of yourself, health and sanity.

I used to ask the audience how many of them would talk to themselves when they were alone in their house or how many would sometimes do a little dance on their own. There would be some response. Certainly more response than when I told them how as a little boy I was so scared of rabies due to the horrific public information films that I would hold my breath in a not very successful suicide attempt. The moment that would gain the greatest response was when I asked “how many people here have stood on a train platform and looked at the person in front of them and thought ‘fuck it, I’m going to shove them in front of the train’”. It seemed the masses were keener to admit psychopathic tendencies than the joy of solitary dance moves.

So I have decided not to perform too much personal observational material. In the worst case scenario, it turns out everyone is like me, and that would never do.

It seems so long ago now. Physicists should study the slowing down of time in performer’s brains for the month of August. Einstein might have noticed the seeming difference in time when talking with a beautiful woman compared to accidentally placing your hand on a hot kettle, but even he would have been surprised by the near backwards path of time when placed in a bubble of fringe self-loathing and self-love – Vietnam with narcissism instead of napalm.

Attempting 4 shows a day was tougher than I thought, but if you can’t be creatively stupid during the fringe, when can you be creatively stupid? (well, most days you can be creatively stupid, but not just so many times within 24 hours).

The final show of the day, Struggle for Existence, was the one that I thought I might have to ditch but fortunately adrenalin kicked in and, with the occasional help of guests such as Nick Doody, Michael Legge, Grace Petrie and M J Hibbett, we had some very strange shows. The room was at the RAOB on West Register St, a social club with an idiosyncratic and very Christmassy juke box. RAOB stands for the royal antediluvian order of buffaloes. I am not sure what this pre flood beast has to do with looking after the community, but something or other that’s for sure. The room was frequently rammed with many of the audience sitting on stage or even behind me. It felt like an occupation. The backdrop was a historically inaccurate painting of the signing of the Magna Carta. On the last night I got Frank the bar manager to close the show with a rendition of My Way. This is what the free fringe has the chance to create, proper fringe events which mix anarchy and confusion, something harder in the mainstream fringe. Despite that, Karaoke Circus managed to take over the pleasance dome and manifest a glorious cacophony.  Tim Vine wore shiny vinyl that led to a two litre loss of sweat for his ’68 Elvis rendition of Fever. My hoarse voice ran roughshod over Two Little Boys while employees of a certain comedy management company (who had been smuggled in for free) talked loudly at the bar. It seemed typical that my first venturing into the “comedy festival” had arrogant media types losing control of their volume button. The next night’s Karaoke Circus led to a much messier version of The Mercy Seat (if I didn’t know martin White better I might even think they had forgotten to rehearse that number) so I fell into my usual survival technique of lying on the stage and screaming. Later lucky Michael Legge would receive a kiss from me as he sang Nothing Compares 2 U in his duck jumper.

Setlist, a night corralled by Matt Kirshen and Paul Provenza, was described by Phill Jupitus as catnip for comedians. The comic walks to the stage to be given a set list. This is supposedly their regular set list, they then have to perform routines based around that. No “oh I can’t think of anything for that one” because this is your set list. It was the most nervous I have been before an Edinburgh gig for a while – what if my brain didn’t work. My set list included Breakaway Sperm, New Hindenburg and a sexual position called ‘cancer biscuit’. Probably the greatest burst of adrenalin I  have had since I had that dream about a bungee jump.

So that’s roughly what happened. Though I may be up at the fringe for 5 days next year this was my last proper Edinburgh fringe for a few years (due to school summer holidays being in the equation from next year). Personally, if you do the fringe right I think there should be moments of agony, a strong desire to hop on a train home and frequent confusion when standing on stage being scrutinized, but that is all balanced by the tremendous sense of creative momentum, the fear that if you suddenly stop your body would lurch into the air and crash into a tree or a bus (or other object above ground level). This is the place to succeed and fail magnificently.

My sanity was maintained by avoiding the major venues of “The Comedy festival” where stimulant enhanced paranoia and hallucinogenic joie de vivre can stultify the air and water supply, and instead I hung around the more fringe-like fringe of The Stand and PBH’s Free Fringe. The first moments in Edinburgh in August can be the most discombobulating. The stink of the brewery is inviting, but then you see the first street of wire mesh crucified smiles where each comics gigantic face lures you and hopefully waits to have their features obscured by 4 and 5 stars from reviewers.

For the first couple of weeks Michael Legge and I were cat-sitting for Ian Rankin and his family. We killed neither cat, and thus we are proud (and if we did, we found such perfect doppelgangers Ian even your sleuthing brain will not see the difference).

With a day off before our show started the first night was spent drinking champagne and watching Witchfinder General, we know how to live well.

On the first few tremulous days of Pointless Anger Righteous Ire 2: Back in the Habit I worried that Michael and I shouldn’t have resurrected the show after a very successful 2010. The day I was topless screaming at people for not being from TV with blood dripping down my face, I knew we’d done the right thing. It was a strange thing to come directly from my midday show where I’d be expounding on ideas about the beauty of the universe to screaming at the terrified and trapped audience in Stand 5, but it allowed me to Jekyll and Hyde it within two hours. I felt like a youngish Brendan Burns with my range of happysadangry.

Cark Sagan is My God , Oh and Richard Feynman Too was as much fun as it is every year. I enjoy waking up by standing on stage and reading Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan. There were also wonderful guest appearances

-       Neil Gaiman told of the sexual potency of art via a fresh story of cak-handed barbershop singer ends up entwined with burlesque performer.

-       Dave  Gorman praised his mathematics teacher

-       Matt Kirshen told us of the perils of smiling and his trip to the museum of scientology

Nick Doody, Helen Arney, Mark Quinn, Charlotte Young, Helen Keen, Yianni and numerous others helped me out during the run.

I frequently forgot to explain why Star Corpse Apple Child (my solos science show) was called that and for my tour it isn’t called that, so I won’t have to, but I probably will, just to be more confusing. I start the fringe with works in progress (sometimes they haven’t even reached the point of progress but have to be pushed from a starting position) so the science show was far from perfect, but on its best days I was even quite pleased with it (arrogant I). On one day it seemed to be getting no reaction at all and I stopped twice to offer the audience a guiltless opportunity to leave (this was the free fringe, so it was the ticket price that made them stay) . Towards the end I stopped, looked into my coffee cup, sighed and then declaimed “so, the triune brain theory”…

To be continued

30th August
1 hour into the journey from Edinburgh fringe seems like 9 days. A regional youth theatre, drunk on a discontinued liqueur once manufactured by one of their dads, sing songs by Madonna forever. Staring out of the window the scenery moves so slowly you can see the particles it is made of. You will never do the Edinburgh fringe again.

3rd December
You have an idea for a fringe show; it will be about all the objects you bought at fetes when you were a child. It will be a touching, nostalgic view of childhood and the pain of leaving it.

31st January
You decide to call it My Fete In Your Hands after previously considering After Fete Mint, Fete O Clock and Fete accompli.

23rd February
You go back to your parents house and dig through all the things you bought at those fetes. There’s a Star Trek fotonovel, a toy garage, a Greek fisherman’s hat and a T shirt with a picture of Corfe Castle on it. You start fashioning your show – you’ll imagine yourself as a Greek fisherman with a satire on their economy involving a talking cod.

29th April
the Fringe brochure deadline is upon you. You say you are “star of BBC3’s Embarrassing Bodies” even though most of the bit about you having a large elbow was cut out in the final edit.

5th May
Wonder if you should have done a show about what it’s like having a quite large elbow.

1st June
The fete idea is a disaster, you decide that you’ll cobble a load of old stand up together and just start the show saying “I always think life is like a village fete isn’t it? My love life has certainly been a tombola…”

30th June
Go to Ramsgate for a preview at a club where the microphone activates the coloured tiles on the disco floor. Fortunately a man in the front row is alone. You make everyone laugh by talking about how his jumper must be the reason he is alone. When pace slackens you return to his loneliness. You never find out that he will attempt suicide later that night.

5th July
Spend £3000 on a PR person. Her eyes are threatening & wide so she must be worth it. She’s got you on 3 Counties radio & an interview with a new magazine called The Hot. Young journalist from The Hot says your PR promised you’d pay for his coffee. He has 3, & a muffin.

6th July
You find out The Hot won’t be coming out until 16th September. Your PR tells you hindsight publicity is very powerful in Edinburgh.

25th July
Come up with a brilliant ending for your show, a moving story about your Dad crying at his allotment over some disappointing vegetables. You will stop, look at the audience, then pull out a big cauliflower and say, “this is the first vegetable I grew with my dad. It never won a competition but it is a winner”

1st August
you decide you will be teetotal for the whole run and eat healthily.

2nd August
Realise you are shouting alone in a tunnel. That alcoholic ginger beer is stronger than you think.

3rd August
First night, 12 in but they are the perfect 12. You riff about the empty chairs, doing voices and imagining who didn’t come. Later on a man called Mike comes up and says he thought that was the best ‘chair bit’ he has seen. He has mate in telly and he is going to tell him all about it.

5th August
PR tells you there are press in. someone has stolen the cauliflower. You throw a hissy fit and catch your trousers on a nail. Later you are shouting alone in a tunnel, you do not realize this.

8th August
You blame poor sales on lack of posters. You have been around the venue counting all posters and see you have two less than Alan Carr.

9th August
Student Accomodation magazine gives you 3 stars. Spend day carefully replicating the design of the stars. Manage to turn it into a 4 star review. Change the title from Student Accomodation magazine to The Guardian.

12th August
You find yourself crying for no reason.

13th August
an audience member after tells you after the show that it wasn’t nearly as bad as he had been led to believe. You ask if he could tweet the sentiment so you can RT it.

17th August
You find yourself saying “but it read like a 4 star review” for the 54th time that day.

18th August
Realise you haven’t eaten for 18 days and buy some Coco Pops.

22nd August
PR is furious. Says she spent a week wining and dining The Guardian reviewer but he has seen a flyer and says they never review shows twice.

25th August
it is 3am and you spend the night trying to staple ham to all other comedian’s posters.

27th August
You work out you have lost approximately £5000 (later this figure will be trebled). You hate all other comedians apart from the ones that look lonelier than you.

29th August
Like every other comedian you wander around saying that you’ve been reliably informed that you were only one off being on the bae systems comedy award shortlist (the most prestigious prize on the fringe). Drunkenly return to your flat and somehow knock the radiator off the wall and bleed all over the living room (you will lose your deposit)

30th August
will this train ever reach London. A sketch trio loudly mimic anything that has ever been on telly. Never again. You bump into Tony Hadley at Kings Cross, that doesn’t improve anything.

5th September
you have an idea for a show, Sweet Spandau Ballet High, about how you once bumped into Tony Hadley.

“I may be a bitch, but I’ll never be a Butch” Taste of Honey

In my twenties, probably as a hangover of my John Waters fandom, I liked trashy drive in movies. The Psychotronic Video Guide and Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film would have been my castaway books (I know you’re only meant to have one, but I’d have snuck one extra one in by chaining it to my body at all times). Something Weird, named after Herschell Gordon Lewis’s LSD maniac film, was my video label of choice. This label would collect the very best of the worst drive in double bills. More than that, once DVD arrived it would have all manner of fabulous extras such as short films about how to kill rats and how to avoid being abused while babysitting. Space has run out, time has moved on, now I kust make shelf space for something less frivolous. So here are there Chapter ones.

DVD ONE – The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield plus Labyrinth of Sex

Cheap black and white footage of Jayne Mansfield smelling flowers in Rome and her excitement of her seeing the Trevi fountain -“this kind man gave me three coins”

Mixed in is some stock colour footage of Italian men chewing gum on steps and apparently thinking of Jayne Mansfield’s bottom.  A man pinches her bottom – “then I remember it is the Italian national pastime; pinching girls”. Jayne realizes this is why Italian men may not get too much done. Jayne finds peace looking at Rome from the hills and holding a Chihuahua. A clothed body double (perhaps played by Ed Wood’s chiropodist or was it chiropractor) apparently listens to an Italian man talk of Brutus.

Labyrinth of Sex

This is one of those sixties films which pretends it is a very important documentary about the nature of sex. This was an alibi to allow it to sneak some breasts and naturist camps in without experiencing the wrath of the censor.

It opens with a bloodied child fresh out of the womb and a brief mention of Sigmund Freud to clearly demonstrate it is a very important contribution to the science of sex.

Puberty is mentioned as the camera scrutinizes the spotty chins of youth.

Professor Emilio Servadio is our dubbed sex expert, looking more like a Jess Franco actor than a man with a phd (which perhaps he is)

“This woman is sick – in clinical terms she would be described as a nymphomaniac”

After the lone men in the auditorium have waited seven minutes, they become hopeful that the action is about to occur.

“a nymphomaniac’s skin responds to stimulation in a much stronger way than a normal person’s”

A woman looks unhappy in her nightdress. She looks unhappy for a while. She showers in her nightdress. Eventually she goes to a cinema where she asks a man to put his hand up her skirt. “Hurray” think the men, ”hurray”

The film cuts back to our Doctor. “boo’ think the men.

DVD 2

Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Wizard of Gore

A ham in a top hat conjures with water. Hmm, all may not be as it seems. A woman in a pretty summer dress goes to the stage to assist in a trick. She is chainsawed in two and the camera lovingly ogles the offal. She is repaired. All seems fine and she goes off to a restaurant. While waiting for service she dies with her guts out. Then the bad acting begins.

DVD 3

Blood Suckers plus Blood Thirst

Blood Suckers is an odd early seventies British film which has gone under any titles. Even the print on this DVD , described as Blood Suckers on the case, is called Freedom Seeker. It stars Patrick Macnee and Patrick Mower plus guest appearances from Peter Cushing and Edward Woodward. Cushing is such a coup that his name in the credits is surrounded by a yellow box. A red almost sports car speeds through Oxford almost running over students. The direction is diabolical. It appears each actor had little time so we cut from head to head even when everyone is meant to be in a room together. Then it’s time for a crazy baby crazy psychedelic sequence of drugs and orgies. Oh man, this is permissive. The jazz score gets free, really free. Some people are in masks, maybe someone is sacrificed. Mower is dazed. An old Greek lady finds her daughter naked and dead. Keep off the grass.

Blood Thirst

Manila – some men have been helping the manager of Club Barrio with the inventory (no idea why). The manager bids Maria goodnight suggesting she gets a taxi home even though it is a wonderful night. Maria thinks it is a wonderful night so she’ll walk alone through the deserted streets. The title – Blood Thirst – comes on screen, this doesn’t bode well. Something jumps out at her with a head that, in the half-light, appears to be part pine cone. Maria is found hanging upside down from a tree.

“do you know the name of Adam Rourke?”

“Every detective in the world has read his book on sex crime motivation and investigation” (I have never seen a line delivered with a s little as this one – no cating at all)

Adam will visit Manila, this is good, as it means they can have an American actor in as the nominal star to aid world sales. In this case it is Robert Winston (another Robert Winston) who had previously played ‘army corporal’ in Dr Kildare. Filmed in black and white , it looks as if it might have been made in 1953, actually it was 1971.