How I Escaped My Certain Fate (14 page)

BOOK: How I Escaped My Certain Fate

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I love comics, especially Marvel Comics, and I am not trying to be kitsch or clever when I say that buying a copy of Captain Marvel off a revolving rack full of True Detective magazines and porn in the newsagents opposite the doctors in Shirley in 1973 changed my life, got me reading and made me who I am today. Nor am I trying to be provocative or wilfully offensive when I say that Peter Parker’s mantra ‘With great power comes great responsibility’ means more to me than any religious creed.

When I was touring this show, 2004–5, I was still on top of the Hulk to the extent that I could answer pretty much any piece of Hulk trivia thrown at me, although in Melbourne in April 2005 I did get the issue number that Wolverine first appeared in wrong by one digit. I couldn’t do this now. Since I had a son there’s no time to read comics, and then Marvel restructured their continuity with the cross-title civil war plotline of 2006–7 and made it
impossible
for the casual reader and forty-something father to dip in and out of the stories, as everything was different now. It may not seem important to you that Elektra turned out to have been a Skrull secret agent, but depending on when exactly the substitution was made it would, for example, render rather hollow all the emotional investment I had made in her relationship with Matt Murdoch, aka Daredevil, in my teens and twenties.

But doing this routine had a lovely knock-on effect. When the DVD was shown on cable in the middle of the night in 2007, a comic-book artist called Gary Frank saw it, and subsequently drew me into the background of two frames of a fight between Doc Sampson and the She-Hulk in Hulk 106. He even sent me the
original
artwork for free. In his self-serving, egomaniacal and delightful blog, the comedian Richard Herring portrays his life as a continual succession of moments so superb that the young Richard Herring would not have believed they could ever have happened. Until fairly recently, my life was a succession of moments of which the young me would have been deeply ashamed or infuriated. But being in a Hulk comic would have been beyond my wildest dreams.

In the same month as I appeared in Hulk 106, I was asked to go on the radio show of Jonathan Ross, another split
personality
whose dark side leads him into destructive situations which destroy the lives of all around him. I did it gladly as it was always a great show. Ross is a high-profile comics nerd who once ran his own comics shop, and has made some great documentaries about comics’ creators where he lets the endearing enthusiast in him come to the fore. I took along Hulk 106 to show him. ‘Thanks for that,’ Ross said, having perused it, and then put it into a sports bag beneath his desk full of promo DVDs, games, books, CDs and other stuff given to him that day by people plugging things or just bribing him. But that was my only copy of Hulk 106, the issue with me in it, and I had tried to get spares already but it was sold out. How could I tell Jonathan Ross that when I offered it to him, it wasn’t for him, it was just to look at, without
highlighting
the embarrassing fact that a man of his status now just
naturally
assumes that anything put into his hands is for him to keep? He could have used some of his £18-million salary to buy his own Hulk 106. It’s £2.50 or something. I bit my lip and let it go, and subsequently the comics nerd and writer Ben Moor gave me his Hulk 106 in compensation. For me, this Ross incident is worse than Sachsgate.

So, so I was really excited to, to interview Ang Lee about the Hulk, and um … ’cause he’d made the film. But, but when I interview, I try to make a little joke to put them at ease, you know. So I rang him up. He was in New York, I was in, er, London. And I said to him, ‘Ang Lee, you have directed the Hulk film. You must be very excited and proud. But don’t make me anglee. You wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee.’
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I know this isn’t funny. It’s not especially meant to be. I can’t remember when or how I thought of this joke, but I knew
immediately
there was ten minutes in it. Over the years this has become a routine of mine people always shout out for, but the truth is I could only really perform it on this tour. It was so complicated, and crucial parts of it needed to be so precise in the exact nature of the replication of extremely similar but subtly and importantly
different
words and phrases, that once it was gone out of my mind it was gone, and I could never remember how I did it again.

I suppose this is a perfect example of killing the punchline of the actual joke stone dead in the opening section of the routine, so that no one’s waiting for the pay-off, and then trying to focus the audience on the pleasure of the language contained within it. It didn’t always work.

Every time I performed it I had to feel like I was doing it for the first time, like I was actually struggling through the argument in my head, in real time. I’d try to forget the exact words of any bits that didn’t need to be exact, to surprise myself, to try and keep it fresh. I saw the avant-garde guitarist Fred Frith doing a solo show at the ICA through the London Musicians’ Collective in about 1993, and someone was taking flash photos as he embarked on the
opening
salvos of an hour-long solo improvisation. In the end he asked them to stop, saying, ‘I’m trying to forget where I am, but you keep reminding me.’ In the end, I was no longer able to forget where I was in the Ang Lee routine. I knew every twist and turn and every blind alley, and there were no more new paths to explore and it died on the vine.

Then there was a long, embarrassed pause. And then Ang Lee said, ‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’

And I said, ‘I said, Ang Lee … you have … you’ve directed the Hulk film. You must be very excited and proud. But, erm, don’t make me anglee. You wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee.’

And there was another kind of silence. And then Ang Lee said, ‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that?’

And I said, ‘There’s no need, it was just a stupid joke.’

And he went, ‘No. What did you say?’

And I said … ‘I said, Ang Lee, you’ve directed the Hulk film. You must be very excited and proud. But, erm, don’t make me anglee. You wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee.’

And he, he didn’t say anything. And I said, ‘I expect loads of people have made that joke to you.’

And he said, ‘No. No one’s ever said it before. Why did you say it? Why?’
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This clearly echoes Monty Python’s Mr Smoketoomuch, who, when he gives his name, is informed, ‘You’d better cut down then,’ and then tells his embarrassed interlocutor that no one has ever told that joke to him before. I think I had this on the Live at Drury Lane record as a child, which I still probably know off by heart.

And I said, ‘Well, Ang … You know the Hulk film?’

And he went, ‘Yeah.’

I said, ‘Well, in that, Bruce Banner – he’s the Hulk – he says, “Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” And your name’s Ang Lee and you directed it. So I said, um, “Don’t make me anglee, you wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee,” um, because “Ang Lee” sounds a bit like “angry”.’

And Ang Lee said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’

And I said, ‘Come on, Ang, be fair. “Ang Lee” does sound a bit like “angry”.’

And Ang Lee said, ‘No, it doesn’t. “Ang Lee” is a
completely
different word to “anglee”.’

And I said, ‘I’m sorry. Can you repeat that?’

And Ang Lee said, ‘Yes. “Ang Lee” is a completely
different
word to “anglee”.’

And I said, ‘I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make, Ang Lee, because what I’m saying, if you listen, is that “angry” sounds a bit like “Ang Lee”, so if you swap them round, people can see there’s a slight change, there’s some sort of joke there. Ang Lee … what you’re saying is actually the same word as “anglee”. If you swap those two words round, no one would notice the difference. It wouldn’t work. But that’s not what you’re … What you appear to be saying is that “anglee” is a completely
different
word to “Ang Lee”, but it isn’t. They’re the same thing. I can’t understand … It’s very simple, the joke I made. I can’t understand how you’ve got into this kind of fix. I never …’

And then he went, ‘Oh, I get it,’ he said. ‘Is this a joke about me having a Taiwanese accent?’

And I was mortified. I went, ‘No, it never even occurred to me that you would think that. It’s just a simple thing about the words, the syllables “ry” and “lee”, sounding the same. My own surname is Lee, I’ve had thirty-six years of fun with that syllable. I know what I’m talking about. I can’t see why you would begin to think …’

And he went, ‘No! You’re anti-Taiwanese.’

And I went, ‘I’m not. I don’t even know where Taiwan is. I’ve got no interest in it.’ Which made it worse, to be honest.

And then he got, he got like a lawyer on from Universal, and I had to … Shouting at me, saying I was anti-Taiwan … I had to get my editor on from the paper to stick up for me … We ended up having this kind of four-way argument. It went on for ages. He was going, ‘You’re anti-Taiwanese,’ he was saying. My editor was going, ‘No, he isn’t, he has no history of anti-Taiwaneseness at all.’ And there was, like, this thing. And then Ang Lee started shouting at me about it. And I went, ‘Well, I can’t see what your problem is. Why don’t you just listen to the joke? It’s obvious.’

And then in the end he went, ‘Don’t make me anglee, you wouldn’t like me when I’m anglee!’

And I said, ‘You’ve proved my point, you fucking
Taiwanese
idiot!’

He said, ‘Don’t call me that!’ He got another bloke, an adviser. I had to get someone else on, the publisher. There’s like a six-way, two-hour debate going on. In the end, we argued for so long that Ang Lee missed his 2.30 dentist’s appointment.
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What time does the Chinese man go to the dentist? 2.30 (Tooth hurty). For me, the joke here is to dare to offer this seventies Beano joke up as the conclusion to all that has gone before.

That’s the time he goes to the dentist, Glasgow! Don’t let him tell you any different. He doesn’t even need to write it down. They offer him an appointment card, he rejects it. He says, ‘I’ll remember it by thinking about my own pain.’
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The subtext here is that the Chinese man in the 2.30 joke thinks the thoughts in his own head in English, in a bad Chinese accent, and that for him, this bad accent echoes the time of his
appointment.
I thought about elaborating on this live but it would, I think, have been adding insult to injury. That said, one of the things I love about proper jokes are mad assumptions of this nature: for
example
, the implication here that a Chinese man thinks in English in a Chinese accent and presumably because of that books his
appointment
at 2.30 as an aide-memoire.

I’m going to shout out some questions now. I need you to answer loudly to them. The answer to most of them is yes.
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OK, one, two, three. Who likes alcohol?

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The sudden lurch into this Ben Elton bit is clumsy and clanking, but I found if I approached it with enough verve and gusto no one would notice, and often the change of pace out of the Ang Lee epic was welcome and necessary. It’s also interesting to me, looking back at this now, that lurches between subject material like this aren’t present in any of the stand-up shows I’ve written since, which all have either a narrative or a conceptual through-line, or ideally both. Stand-Up Comedian was cobbled together from material run in clubs in the nineties, which I toyed with at the odd benefit during my retirement, and stuff I wrote specially for it. Since then I have always written stand-up with its position in a full-length show in mind. The flip side of this is I have almost nothing left that stands alone, that I can do in benefits or little ten-or twenty-minute slots. Everything I write now is tied into these epic shows full of callbacks and cross-references or supporting shifts of mood or emotional gambits that induce sympathy to justify me being a patronising horrible arse later on, and so I end up falling back on bits I wrote often over twenty years ago. The head of BBC2 recently asked me about hosting a stand-up show for the channel, doing little bits
in-between
other acts. But I am no longer fit for purpose.

AUDIENCE
: Yes!

Louder! Who likes sweets?

AUDIENCE
: Yes!

Who likes cream cakes?

AUDIENCE
: Yes!

Who likes their favourite food, whatever it is?

AUDIENCE
: Yes!

Who likes Ben Elton? Oh, it’s no one.

OK, here’s another one. Who likes, er, who likes, er,
The
Simpsons
?

AUDIENCE
: Yes!

Who likes Spider-Man?

AUDIENCE
: Yes!