Frankie Boyle - Work! Consume! Die!

Hey! Mongo! It’s evening. The bright ball of wonder has yet again left the sky, so take your hoof from out your pants and once more suckle at my TV teats.

Hey, friendless! Yes, you! Wipe the dribble from your fleece and once more feast on my distractions. Together we can get you half an hour closer to the dawn of another worthless day.

‘Ehhh …,’ starts Gerry.

‘We only need six or something,’ I interrupt. ‘It’s just intros, we can come back to it …’

We nod, both agreeing to different things.

The first clip we’re doing is of some hugely misguided children’s show from the 80s, teaching yoga to little kids. It’s set on a farm and hosted by a real sandpit haunter calling himself Yogie Okie Dokie. We see him bending the kids into various positions.

It’s amazing how flexible kids are when they’re drunk. Yogi Okie Dokie is only his first name. His surname is Pokey Chokey.

‘Now the lawyers are worried about that … we can’t actually imply that he’s a paedophile …’ Gerry havers.

‘The lawyers?’ I ask. ‘It’s a joke. I don’t think anyone would really think his surname was Pokey Chokey. Or that his first names are Yogie Okie Dokie …’

‘You can’t imply that he’s a paedophile.’

‘Fuck, look at the show. I mean … fuck!’

There’s a clip of that wee toddler that smokes in fucking Papua New Guinea or somewhere.

Of course, he doesn’t smoke any more. He’s dead now. His little brother uses his skull as an ashtray.

‘We can’t say that,’ murmurs Gerry.

‘Why not?’ I ask and open another Diet Coke because maybe this would be easier if my brain were dead.

‘He’s not dead.’ Gerry is getting exasperated. ‘So the lawyers say that we can’t say that he is.’

‘It’s a joke. They’re saying we can’t say anything that isn’t the literal truth? He’s going to sue? He’s out in the fucking jungle. He’s hardly … getting driven on a moped to a clearing where they all sit round and watch fucking clip shows.’

We keep hitting bits the lawyers have vetoed. They have suggested replacements, the lawyers have written jokes. I have met lawyers and these are the sort of jokes you would expect them to write. It’s not immediately obvious that they are jokes.

The final clip is a terrible video about how to use the techniques of a magician to pull women. We type the last joke up in a way that it can be altered if there’s a legal problem.

These are the techniques that Debbie McGee [an older magician’s assistant] warns [a] young magician’s assistant about, before heading home to another night of being sawn in half so Paul Daniels [a magician] can watch her [them] eat her [their] own arsehole.

I suggest that we start the show with me in an armchair, cradling a huge horn. I will explain that not all of the jokes are literally true and that when I say something not meant to be taken literally I will blow a note on my mighty horn. Perhaps we should change the title of the show to The Horn of Balathor.

‘Where is Balathor?’ says Gerry

‘I thought of it as more of a what – Balathor the Green. Balathor the Mighty.’

Another producer comes in and this idea sort of catches fire. Yes, we could call it The Horn of Balathor. It’s only a fucking clip show. Perhaps I could appear at the bottom of the screen when I blow the horn, like the guy on sign-language programmes. Maybe there could be different sizes of horn, depending on how offensive the joke is. There is a clip from the 70s that suggests black people can’t swim. I suggest we do the line:

Of course it’s a ridiculous racial stereotype to say black people can’t swim. How do you think AIDS got to Europe?

And then I come on with one of those huge Alpine horns that rest on the ground and give a blast so loud it would actually blow the speakers on people’s TVs. I’m thinking that will keep me in the papers long enough that my arse will remain un-raped. I maintain to the guys that it could work as a show. Fuck it, it could work as a show, or has my judgement just gone? Yes, my judgement has gone but perhaps I could be right by accident.

I look them both in the eye and beam, ‘Comedy is tragedy plus laughter!’

But I know the fucking thing is not going to happen.

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land,

In England there shall be dear bread – in Ireland, sword and brand;

And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand,

So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand,

Of the fine old English Tory days; Hail to the coming time!

Charles Dickens, The Fine Old English Gentleman

Chapter 2 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 What Next? Acknowledgements About the Author Credits Back Ad About the Publisher

Having travelled a wee bit, I’m convinced that Britain’s sense of humour – the sheer scope and breadth and complexity of our piss-taking – is unique. That’s what I hate about these various joke scandals. They have at their heart the idea that the public won’t be able to decode what was meant by the joke; that even if you understand, other people might not, when everyone here has a PhD in wind-ups.

People are struggling with the whole idea of comedy at the moment. I think comedy is probably a descendant of shamanism. The comic is some guy or gal covered in shit who’d live out in the desert and come roaring into the settlement every so often to tell everybody what was up with how they perceived life. Of course, this made them a pariah.

Comedy is a fictional space. Some of the things the shaman says are true, even heartfelt. Sometimes she says things she doesn’t mean; sometimes she says the opposite of what she means. And, admittedly, she isn’t always good, but nobody is. Sometimes you end up watching Peter Kay, but sometimes it’s Bill Hicks and sometimes it’s Loki.

There are a few problems. One, you get the soul-grinding mill of television, which sees that it can use a few laughs to keep people dumb and distracted. It likes to employ shamans with their eyes poked out. Two, you get some well-meaning types who would like the status of the shaman without the whole pariah bit. They could maybe skip the drugs and keep the status – or even just the cash? Sorry, those are all false paths. The shaman knows that the route to enlightenment is to lose the ego and, what with one thing and another, she’s going to get too much attention to get very far with that. So the joke is on her. The price the trickster pays for her existence is to be, ultimately, the butt of her own joke. Glad I managed to explain comedy to y’all before I died [tips hat]. *

*I don’t believe any of this. The idea of the comedian as shaman is simply a different way for a practitioner to gather status and feed the ego. In man’s original nomadic tribal state, the role of social critic would have been vital in deciding when to move on. Comedians are just the descendants of the guys and gals whose job it was to say, ‘It’s fucking shit here,’ and moan until everybody upped sticks and headed west, into an ambush prepared by a rival tribe, or a barren wasteland.**

**This is all bollocks. Comics are sort of the opposite of shamans really. Shamans, poets, priests are all people whose role is to power-up symbols. In our scientific reality tunnel a hallucination might be a manifestation of the unconscious mind. In a shamanic one it might be a fairie, in a religious one, an angel. The comedian is actually there to de-power the symbolic world. With Lenny Bruce, cancer goes from being this big demonic taboo to being, well, just cancer. The best comics are really trying to wake you up from the symbolic world; they’re desentimentalisers, pointing out that those First World War soldiers who had a truce to play football at Christmas probably killed each other the next day, and not even remorsefully but muttering, ‘That was never offside, you cunt.’***