Free How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee Page B

drip, feeling the cool saline fluid in my veins, suddenly losing and gaining and losing weight, feeling like a tube of screaming meat whose only purpose was to process the muck I ate and crap it out the other end, eating only potatoes, feeling the burn on my left side if I strayed to coffee or whisky or soft drinks, the mildly hallucinogenic vibe of my recovery period, the Scottish junkie I urinated on, the endless pressure on my weakened bladder through all those long car journeys on tour, and the wolfman’s weeping sores, had made me acutely aware of the physical world, the pungent world, the world of flesh. I was poised to make something of it.
    When the tour with Josie wound up, my good Edinburgh reviews wafted me away to four months of work in festivals and touring in Australia and New Zealand. In Melbourne no one really came to see me for a month, and I struggled to keep the set alive. But I did get to know the marvellous Mike Wilmot, whose show I went to see repeatedly because it moved me, and it shouldn’t have done, being an eveningof dirty jokes capped with a very long routine about licking someone’s anus. Just when you think you can’t stand hearing another middle-aged male comic moaning about his marriage and how he can’t please his wife any more, along comes this Falstaffian Canadian, who can invest an hour on these tired old subjects with unexpected levels of humanity, surprise and inventiveness entirely absent from the work of more self-consciously original comics. Mike’s act was knee-deep in filth, and every night he pretended to need an extra beer because the gig was going so well at exactly the same point, but all the time he was really talking, from the heart, with utter sincerity, about what it meant to be in love. On the bills of the pathetic Nasty Show, at the Montreal Comedy Festival, Mike, a great artist, is annually misfiled alongside the usual predictable American racists, homophobes and misogynists, and yet this good-natured honey-bear of a man seems not to mind at all, and just gets on quietly with the business of rendering their noisy whining irrelevant. *
    * Wilmot’s been touring the same hour for about a decade now, on and off, but it seems to me to be one of the all-time great routines. It’s not even on DVD anywhere, but anyone who thinks they love comedy as an art form needs to see it.
     
    In Auckland I played a full 150-seater venue every night for a month, The Classic, arguably a tie with The Stand in Edinburgh for the world’s most perfect stand-up room. Late at night the same space was used for a club gig, where, one evening, I was suddenly seized by the spirit of Phil Nicol, who was out front hosting the show to a room full of enthusiastically oiled punters. Phil is a total performer who thinks nothing of beginning his shows naked and screaming and then trying to move forward from there.He does not understand the notion of peaking too early. That night he was improvising wildly with the public, his shirt pulled up over his head so that he looked like a kind of stunted Weeble, swinging his arms, singing hillbilly folk songs, and gesturing repeatedly at his bottom. I forget why. Far away from home, cut adrift, if you like, I suddenly felt that every thing I did seemed tame and trite and safe, and that it was my duty to just walk out and try to do something I had never done before, without a safety net. I had nothing to lose. No one knew me here anyway. *
    * That same week I had jumped off the highest building in the southern hemisphere on a rope, a decision which has since caused me to develop vertigo at the slightest hint of a drop. I was behaving with uncharacteristic daring and have regretted it ever since. That’ll teach me.
     
    I tried to jam an old routine I wrote in my early twenties about coming home drunk and being sick at my mum’s house onto some kind of scatological encounter with Jesus, without any real planning. I don’t really know why I decided to do this.