Episode 1194 - Andy Zaltzman
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck Americans?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:What is happening, America?
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:What a relief that was yesterday.
Marc:I'm surprised I get so choked up about it, but I do anyways.
Marc:The ceremony, the pomp and circumstance.
Marc:The orderly transition of power in the middle of 30,000 National Guardsmen.
Marc:But look, it's done.
Marc:New management is here.
Marc:The conspiracy theories were wrong.
Marc:Not only wrong, but it seems like some of the creators of some of the bigger conspiracies were basically like, ah, we were just kidding.
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Pretty funny, right?
Marc:We used your gullibility to break the world.
Marc:You get it, right?
Marc:Hilarious, right?
Marc:The internet's amazing.
Marc:It's awesome.
Marc:All right, good luck.
Marc:It's still going to fascinate me for the rest of time how so many people just couldn't wrap their brain around how one of the biggest assholes that's ever lived publicly or privately was unpopular enough to lose the presidential election.
Marc:That a majority of people wanted new management, wanted stability, wanted the government to function again, wanted to be able to look at their neighbors again, to feel like they could believe in people again.
Marc:I'll tell you, one of the dark gifts of this last four years is we know who we all are.
Marc:I know who I am.
Marc:I know who my neighbors are.
Marc:I know who my parents are and friends of the family.
Marc:We know who everybody, everything's on the table.
Marc:All the garbage is floated to the top.
Marc:And some of the cream.
Marc:But what a celebration it was yesterday in terms of embracing diversity, embracing people of all types, and just bringing back some sort of stability, man.
Marc:It's really stability and the belief that something will be taken care of in a reasonable way, in a righteous way, in a respectful way.
Marc:And that the person at the helm is a guy who understands how to do the job, how to do the work, how it works.
Marc:And he's a humble dude, that Biden.
Marc:I'll tell you that that speech was one of the best inaugural speeches I've heard.
Marc:And I felt like he held the weight of the world on his shoulders in a respectable and decent way.
Marc:He's a guy with some real humility, some real wisdom.
Marc:He's got age on his side.
Marc:But, you know, he's a humble guy with a deep heart and understands grief.
Marc:And this fucking country is soaking in it, soaking in fucking grief.
Marc:He happens to be the right guy for the job at this time.
Marc:Kamala was great.
Marc:Everybody was great.
Marc:I even got nostalgic and in an angry way, seeing like W waddle down those stairs, that recognizable waddle.
Marc:It's interesting how well you get to know the people that you have the most resentment towards, especially public figures.
Marc:When you're given the opportunity to hate somebody deeply every day, you really understand them.
Marc:They really make a fucking scar in your brain.
Marc:They're really up there forever.
Marc:So are the people you love.
Marc:But it's interesting, the type of energy.
Marc:That is sort of re-grooved and re-lit when you see somebody you haven't seen in a while who you resent deeply, maybe even righteously.
Marc:But I thought the inauguration went great.
Marc:I really do.
Marc:The peaceful transition of power behind a wall of tens of thousands of National Guardsmen.
Marc:Before I get too far into whatever I'm going to be doing, my guest today is Andy Zaltzman.
Marc:I first met him in the UK back in 2007.
Marc:He's a comedian.
Marc:He just started up the podcast The Bugle with John Oliver, which he still hosts, along with the News Quiz on BBC Radio 4.
Marc:He was a good guy.
Marc:I was out of my mind with sadness and fucking chaos because...
Marc:I'd been left by my second wife and I went to Scotland.
Marc:Not a great time.
Marc:But that's coming up, man.
Marc:So it's relieving that we're not going to be kind of brutalized and terrorized on a daily basis.
Marc:By a autocratic.
Marc:Pig of a person by a mean sociopathic leader or.
Marc:That we're not going to have to deal with that every morning waking up.
Marc:Look, people love that guy.
Marc:Assholes, a lot of them.
Marc:Or just people who are so rich they don't give a fuck about people.
Marc:But the truth of the matter is he was an abusive piece of shit.
Marc:And he was throwing that shit at us every day.
Marc:And those of us who felt that deeply and those of us who he terrorized daily feel relieved because a majority of people are us.
Marc:A big majority of people are the people that saw that guy for the asshole that he was all the way through and could not understand or believe why he was president and then had to deal with that fear every day from day fucking one.
Marc:Just being abused and terrorized by a guy who enjoyed it.
Marc:He enjoyed being hated by people.
Marc:He enjoyed any kind of attention he got.
Marc:But he loved fucking making people hate him and making the people that didn't like him angry and scared.
Marc:He created a tome for this country that was just horrible.
Marc:The neediness of that evil fuck that we had to deal with for four years was debilitating, draining, dangerous, deadly.
Marc:The lack of responsibility, debilitating, draining, deadly.
Marc:And now that's over.
Marc:We get a little relief.
Marc:Look, man, I'm not saying that everything's okay or that the monsters are going to go away or that even things are resolved.
Marc:Got big fucking problems.
Marc:All I know is that one plague down, now we got to get rid of this other plague.
Marc:So now we move on and it's no less scary.
Marc:I want to get vaccinated.
Marc:I want to get through this.
Marc:I want people to bounce back.
Marc:I'm not optimistic.
Marc:I'm not even that hopeful necessarily.
Marc:I'm just relieved and I feel a little safer on a country level.
Marc:In terms of the possibility for stability and that we're all not just reacting to or becoming symbiotic with a malignant narcissistic autocrat who is able through charisma and propaganda and repetition to really brain fuck a lot of people.
Marc:into following him, but also into being terrified on a day-to-day basis of him and what he represented.
Marc:So now with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, president and vice president, maybe we can stabilize this fucking undertaking, get everybody vaccinated and try to rebuild a little bit.
Marc:I just, I don't know.
Marc:I'm relieved today.
Marc:I really am.
Marc:So Andy Zaltzman, he's in the UK or he was a couple of weeks ago.
Marc:This happened before the inauguration.
Marc:As I said earlier, I met him back in 2007.
Marc:He's got the podcast The Bugle and he's also on the news quiz on BBC Radio 4.
Marc:And this is a nice conversation I had with Andy Zaltzman.
Marc:What's up, pal?
Marc:Nice to see you.
Marc:It's been a while.
Marc:It's been a very long time.
Marc:The last time I saw you, could it be the only time I saw you?
Marc:Well, we did stuff together in Edinburgh that... Right, it was a terrible time.
Guest:2006, was it?
Guest:It was a long time ago.
Guest:Pre-podcasts, I think.
Marc:It was a terrible time for me, as I recall.
Marc:Yeah, it's not entirely my fault.
Marc:No, it had nothing to do with you.
Marc:You were very nice.
Marc:All right.
Marc:You gave me a spot on your show.
Marc:You were pleasant.
Marc:But it was my first time at the festival, and I vowed never to go back there again.
Marc:And I haven't.
Marc:You've kept that vow.
Marc:There's very few vows in this world that people keep these days, Mark.
Marc:So I'm having the courage to stick with that.
Marc:I just didn't understand the whole system.
Marc:It's a system that you guys live with over there and that you guys understand.
Marc:For me, it was just embarrassing and horrendous.
Marc:And it was desperate and sad.
Marc:And I'd just gotten separated from my wife.
Marc:And I was heartbroken.
Marc:And I was on a double bill.
Marc:And I didn't realize that was a shitty idea.
Guest:Well, yeah, I mean, those are certain sort of factors involved, and probably immediately post-breakup is not the ideal time to do an Edinburgh Festival, although people make award-winning shows out of breakups these days.
Guest:It's something I've never quite managed to create in my personal life.
Guest:Are you still married?
Guest:I'm still married, yeah, which has really held back my creative side a massive amount, sadly.
Marc:So the breakup show can still happen.
Marc:There's always time.
Marc:Maybe wait until the kids are left home.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Then it's got an extra added edge.
Marc:It's like, I can't believe I put up with it this long.
Marc:So...
Marc:But the whole Edinburgh process, I mean, you go back there every year, right?
Guest:Most years.
Guest:Obviously, 2020 was not a great year for Edinburgh for obvious reasons.
Guest:It's a bust for everybody.
Guest:Yeah, it was.
Guest:So you're one of my most profitable Edinburgh's financially, I think.
Guest:But...
Marc:The year you didn't go.
Marc:I was actually able to make money at home.
Guest:Yes, I went for the first time doing new act competitions in 1999.
Guest:I did a four-handed show in 2000 that was pretty catastrophic.
Guest:I learned a lot about...
Guest:Well, about the art of negotiating silence and hostility, which is a key part of stand-up.
Guest:And then I did my first solo show the following year in 2001.
Marc:But the other part of it you learn in Edinburgh is that, yeah, the silence and hostility, but no one being there.
Marc:I mean, the silence, it's not because your jokes aren't going well.
Marc:It's because you had to drag two people in off the street who don't know where they're going to sit there and validate your fucking job choice.
Guest:Well, it could be both of those things, Mark.
Guest:It could be two people not laughing.
Guest:So, you know, you can combine them.
Guest:But the first year I did a solo show, that ended up going reasonably well within the context of a show that averaged about 14 people.
Guest:The very first night, I had one ticket sale, and it later turned out that the person who'd bought the ticket was another comedian who I'd done a gig with a few months before.
Guest:Being a good guy, helping you out.
Guest:So it was...
Guest:Onwards and very, very slowly upwards.
Marc:But the whole process of it, I have some questions about Britain in general because I always assume that you guys have it all together and that you're ultimately a better culture than us and that somehow you think you're all smarter than we are.
Marc:But I don't know if that's true or not, but the system there is that
Marc:Ultimately, you have to build an audience at these festivals to make your yearly money, correct?
Marc:I mean, there's not a huge touring business there, is there?
Guest:I think that's changed over the years now.
Guest:And it was a sort of stand-up boom period.
Guest:I guess, early to midway through the first decade of this millennium, which isn't going great as millenniums go.
Guest:No, it might be the last one.
Marc:It could be.
Marc:We're not going to make it very far into this one.
Guest:I don't think we're going to... Yeah, that's a nice optimistic note to kick off with.
Guest:But I think it did change a bit.
Guest:So I started out, like I said, around about 99, 2000.
Guest:And then there were...
Guest:There was a TV boom in stand-up, and that's a TV boom that I managed to successfully avoid, but it did make... Good for you.
Guest:Good plan.
Guest:Individual solo touring more viable.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, so a lot of comedians will sort of go around.
Guest:There's not necessarily the most glamorous... It's not all stadium tours...
Marc:I know I know what the one nighter thing is, but I just I just I'd always seem to me that the slog of the festivals is you keep going back until somehow or another.
Marc:You know, the plan is to build enough of an audience that, you know, when you go back there, you're one of the big tickets and you can walk away with, you know, thousands of dollars.
Marc:You know, that's the big reward of slogging through that thing every year and going through the embarrassment and the struggle of a month in that tourist town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, there are positive sides to Edinburgh.
Guest:And I've always loved doing it for just the creative side of it.
Guest:And I've never been particularly good at the career side of things.
Guest:But, you know, it can clearly help you.
Guest:evolve as in terms of your your sales but I think creatively and certainly for the comedians of of my generation it was uh you know where we went to sort of learn the the art and the craft of of stand-up because you could go around the circuit doing your five minute ten minute 20 minute spots in some not always particularly uh helpful environments but in Edinburgh you could have your own hour and
Guest:And I think it's where you sort of work out what you want to be as a comedian.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:So in lieu of headlining, per se, on the road, that, you know, you go there for a month and you do the hour.
Guest:Yes, yeah.
Guest:So the first year I did it, 2001, I was struggling to get much paid work on the circuit.
Guest:What was your particular struggle, Andy?
Guest:Why didn't people want the Saltzman?
Guest:Well, back to that silence that we talked about before.
Guest:I think as a circuit comedian, Mark, I was hit and miss.
Guest:LAUGHTER
Guest:It was an inconsistency to my game.
Guest:I struck out a lot in baseball parlance and got the odd home run, but probably the stats weren't maybe good enough.
Guest:You want a reliable hitter in those kind of gigs.
Marc:I'm still inconsistent, and I pride myself on that.
Marc:I've spun that into a positive.
Marc:That's what makes me an artist is my inconsistency.
Guest:Yes, I guess that's a good way of looking at it.
Guest:But I think I learned fairly early on that it probably wasn't going to be my long-term career doing club stand-up.
Guest:It wasn't something I was particularly good at.
Guest:And the feeling was entirely mutual between me and the club circuit who didn't give me many bookings.
Guest:So going to Edinburgh...
Guest:Then you have this blank canvas and you can set it up how you want.
Guest:You're not following a different comedian who might be a lot better than you or a lot different to you.
Guest:And it was certainly where I, I guess, found out the type of comedy that I wanted to do.
Marc:Also, there's the idea that it's a theater piece now.
Marc:It's not managing a bunch of drunks at 1130 at night.
Marc:We're all going to sit here for an hour and this thing is going to come together somehow, perhaps.
Marc:May not be funny, but it'll be thoughtful.
Marc:And I bought myself a little time.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Ideally, it'll be both funny and thoughtful.
Guest:It was creatively inspiring in a lot of ways, going to see your peers and seeing how they were doing, expanding in the same way.
Marc:Who were the guys, when you were coming up, like...
Marc:Because I don't know a lot.
Marc:Who is your generation of British comics?
Marc:I know you worked with John Oliver forever, and you guys are pals, and I love John a lot, and he's kept me sane lately.
Marc:Do you guys talk often?
Marc:Does he keep you sane?
Guest:Well, we don't talk as often as we used to.
Guest:We used to talk every week and record it and put it out as a podcast.
Guest:But since John stopped doing that, which is four or five years ago now, I see him whenever I go to New York, which, again, the current global situation isn't looking like it's going to be very soon again.
Guest:And, yeah, we sort of chat every now and then.
Guest:He did The Bugle for the first time since he left the show just before Christmas.
Guest:So that was...
Guest:Yeah, we got the old band back together for one show.
Guest:How was that?
Guest:It was fun, right?
Guest:It was great, actually.
Guest:Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
Guest:We sort of met doing the live stand-up circuit, and he did little sketches in my first Edinburgh show.
Guest:I did some stuff in his first Edinburgh show the following year, 2002.
Guest:We toured on the student union circuit, which is, again, part of my generation of British comedians.
Guest:There was quite a thriving student union circuit where you could go and experiment, and it didn't matter so much.
Guest:But that was better than clubs, right?
Guest:It was better than clubs, partly because generally you were booked in to do a whole tour, so it wasn't like you had to succeed at every gig to get called back.
Guest:So we got to know each other pretty well.
Guest:Then we did some radio series together.
Guest:Then when John got the Daily Show job and left me doing an Edinburgh show alone instead of a two-hander in front of about 25 people a night, he went to the biggest...
Guest:comedy show in the world um how'd that go for you how'd you take that well i'll be honest it was it was a bit tricky at the time he got offered the daily show job just before it was about a month before edinburgh started and so what you know we had it was an exaggeration so we had to re i had to rewrite the show because we hadn't entirely got around to starting writing it at that point um that must have been a horrible horrible conversation um
Guest:Well, not really, because, you know, it was clearly a pretty big opportunity.
Guest:No, yeah, I know.
Guest:But still, you had to suck it up.
Guest:I guess so.
Guest:And we'd also had two BBC radio series cancelled around about the same time.
Guest:And I found out my wife was pregnant.
Guest:So it was a month of considerable upheaval for me.
Guest:Did you do a show about having a baby?
Guest:No, I did a routine.
Guest:My second child I delivered in the bathroom.
Guest:You did?
Guest:I did, yes.
Guest:On purpose?
Guest:No, definitely not on purpose.
Guest:I think it might have been an early prank by my zero-minute-old son.
Guest:But no, things happened a little too fast, and I ended up having a brief but very statistically successful midwifery career.
Guest:Did you know what you were doing?
Guest:Absolutely not.
Guest:I mean, I've managed to avoid picking up practical skills throughout my life.
Marc:But I don't think everyone has that practical skill.
Marc:It's not something you plan for.
Marc:It's not in the book of home repair.
Guest:It's a midwifery.
Guest:You've either got it or you haven't.
Guest:But it was terrifying.
Guest:But fortunately, it was fairly straightforward.
Guest:But I was on a phone call to the...
Guest:emergency services.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Did you have to cut the umbilical cord and everything?
Guest:Didn't have to cut the cord, sadly.
Guest:There was an ambulance on the way, so they sort of dealt with the... They stepped in?
Guest:They stepped in and, yeah, they did the...
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:They closed it out.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I went to a British private school where they're specifically designed to leave you with absolutely no practical life skills.
Guest:So when I found myself in that situation, there was nothing in my life that had given me what I needed.
Marc:Yeah, that's something that people take care of for you.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:You go to the place and they do it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Out of the view of others.
Marc:Exactly, yeah.
Guest:You grew up in London?
Guest:I grew up just south of London in a town called Tunbridge Wells, which is a sort of commuter belt, conservative town that's perfectly pleasant, but not wildly exciting.
Marc:And what did your parents do?
Guest:My father was a sculptor.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Like a successful sculptor?
Guest:It depends how you define success, Mark.
Guest:Artistically, I would say yes.
Guest:And commercially, not as successful.
Guest:Misunderstood?
Guest:Is he misunderstood?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:He set an example in terms of a career role model that it wasn't necessary to get what you might call a proper job.
Guest:So when I started thinking about doing stand-up, he couldn't turn around to me and say, what are you doing with your life?
Guest:Because he'd spent the last 25 years in a barn with a lot of wax and plaster.
Marc:Were they big pieces?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:They were a real mixture.
Guest:In fact, you can see on the zoo just up behind me there.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Oh, he did not abstract either.
Marc:Those are, you know, figures.
Guest:Yeah, figurative.
Guest:He went through all kinds of different styles.
Guest:And so he grew up surrounded by his sculptures.
Guest:And you got that in the basement?
Marc:Is that where you are?
Guest:I have a sort of office shed in the garden.
Guest:So that's where you hide the sculpture.
Guest:That's not something you put right in the living room.
Guest:No, we've got some in the living room as well.
Guest:Well, they just moved house and we had to clear out his studio.
Guest:And so there was rather... Is he not around anymore?
Guest:No, no, he's still around, but he's not really sculpting anymore.
Guest:But we were in sort of...
Guest:picked up a consignment of artworks.
Guest:So now our house has become something of a, of a, uh, Zach Zaltzman art gallery.
Marc:Zach Zaltzman.
Marc:So you grew up going to openings, uh, you know, looking at new pieces.
Guest:Um, there weren't that many openings, but we used to go, you know, go, go and see his, his studio and, you know, he, he would sort of disappear off every, every day.
Guest:And every now and again would bring home something.
Guest:Um,
Guest:But it, you know, it's, I guess, set a creative example.
Marc:Did your mother work for a living?
Guest:I mean, who was?
Guest:Well, she had been a radiographer and then.
Marc:Is that x-ray tech?
Marc:What's a radiographer?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And as I guess generally the way when she had three children, she just sort of looked after us and then subsequently became a teacher.
Guest:So mid to late 40s and taught for 15, 20 years.
Guest:So, yeah, so quite different people, really.
Guest:And you brought up Jewish?
Guest:Well, sort of.
Guest:My father was from a Jewish family, grew up in South Africa.
Guest:And his parents were Lithuanian Jews, essentially.
Marc:That ran away to South Africa?
Guest:Yeah, in the early 20th century.
Guest:I think my grandfather went to South Africa in about 1920.
Guest:My dad was born there, then moved to England, married my mother.
Guest:His...
Guest:Jewish parents were not entirely delighted that he'd married a Gentile.
Guest:My mother then converted and they remarried.
Guest:So they got married twice without getting divorced.
Guest:So then my mother became Jewish so that their children would be...
Guest:So we weren't really brought up strictly Jewish.
Guest:I guess the most Jewish I've probably ever felt was eight days old.
Guest:Yeah, that's when it happens.
Guest:Still got the receipt for that.
Guest:But we didn't grow up in a Jewish community or anything, and we didn't go to Jewish schools.
Guest:But my brother and I were bar mitzvahed, and we used to go and have Hebrew lessons.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:To teach us to read bits of the Torah that we were going to need for our bar mitzvahs.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:And not understand them.
Guest:No, absolutely not.
Guest:Didn't know what it meant, but we knew how technically to recite it.
Guest:How to sing them.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:To get the weird rhythm of the Haftorah and get through it.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:So that's interesting because, like, I was hoping to glean something about British Jewish culture because for some reason I have this weird obsessive fascination with British Jews.
Marc:I just wonder, you know, what they eat and, you know, how they communicate with each other in relation to, like, you know, kind of Ashkenazi American middle class Jews.
Marc:Like, is there a similarity?
Marc:You know, I don't talk to many British Jews.
Marc:I can't really help you with that.
Guest:I know, man.
Guest:Yeah, we've...
Guest:Well, did you have a bar mitzvah party?
Guest:I did have a bar mitzvah party.
Guest:It was the day after one of the largest hurricanes that's ever hit the British Isles.
Guest:And so we almost couldn't get to the synagogue.
Guest:We had to drive about 40 miles to the nearest synagogue.
Guest:But yeah, I ended up with one trumpet up and a big book about cricket.
Guest:That's largely what I remember about it.
Guest:And a few bonds, no bonds.
Guest:No, I don't think so.
Guest:No.
Guest:No cash?
Guest:A little bit of cash, but not a life-changing – I mean, I guess not a life-changing amount of cash.
Marc:You went to a private school?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Marc:And what is that?
Marc:Did you go to like – you went to one of the fancy colleges?
No.
Guest:Well, I guess it was sort of traditional English private school.
Guest:Most of the pupils were boarders.
Guest:It was an all-boys school, but I was a day pupil, so my father would drive me in every morning.
Marc:Oh, so some of them would sleep there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you had to wear the blazer?
Yeah.
Guest:Yes, a nice sort of tweedy jacket.
Guest:Very sort of traditional kind of British education.
Guest:And it was good in some ways, but less good in others, I suggested.
Guest:There were huge gaps.
Guest:Practical stuff.
Guest:I basically never met a girl when I left school, couldn't rewire a plug, didn't know how to change the tire on a car, but I could express all that in grammatically perfect Latin.
Guest:So there were good points and bad points, I guess.
Guest:You learned Latin?
Guest:Yes, yeah.
Guest:I did Latin and ancient Greek, just in case.
Guest:Things always make a comeback.
Guest:You had to?
Guest:I can't remember if it was compulsory, but I really liked it, and I ended up studying it at university, as did my wife, and that's how we met.
Guest:So Latin basically found me a life partner.
Guest:What was it about Latin, do you think?
Guest:Um...
Guest:I guess there's a sort of fascination in the civilization that grew and flourished and then faded.
Guest:And the same with the ancient Greeks.
Guest:I prefer the ancient Greek side of my studies.
Guest:And it was a fascinating... Studying a completed civilization.
Guest:When you think of...
Guest:The upheavals that America has been going through of late.
Guest:And there are certain patterns that obviously recur through history as civilizations rise and fall.
Guest:Is this where you're telling me I've got to leave?
Guest:I'm not sure exactly what point of the – I don't know if the Visigoths are at the gate yet.
Guest:Close.
Guest:They're at the capital.
Guest:They were yesterday.
Guest:The Visigoths are a bit more organized than that.
Marc:Thank God.
Marc:The one blessing is they had no idea what they were there.
Marc:Once they got in, they didn't know what to do other than take pictures and ruin things.
Marc:Yes, and try and steal a lectern.
Marc:That guy.
Marc:So you had a sort of fascination with the fading of empire.
Guest:Yes, which as a Brit growing up in the late 20th century was probably quite a useful thing to have.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And I also I studied ancient Greek comedy, which was absolutely fascinating.
Guest:Like Aeschylus?
Guest:Well, he was tragic.
Guest:It was Aristophanes was the main.
Marc:Aristophanes, right.
Marc:The clouds, right?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what did one of those open with like a farting contest?
Guest:There's a lot of farting in it.
Guest:And it's it's it's it's it was because it was performed to all layers of society.
Guest:it operates on a huge number of levels comedically.
Guest:There's fart jokes, there's sex jokes, and there's literary parody and political satire all kind of wadged into one.
Guest:And it was absolutely fascinating.
Guest:I was with my wife on holiday in Greece about 15 years ago, and there was a production of the Aristophanes' Frogs,
Guest:in the ancient Roman theatre on the side of the Acropolis in Athens.
Guest:In Greek?
Guest:In modern Greek.
Guest:But we happened to have a translation of it with us on holiday because I was doing a radio show about ancient Greece just after that and I was trying to read up on stuff that I'd forgotten from 15 years ago.
Guest:So we happened to have a translation.
Guest:We could sort of follow along with it.
Guest:And it was really amazing seeing...
Guest:jokes that were almost 2,500 years old, still making people laugh, basically a couple of hundred yards away from where they were first performed in about 400 BC.
Guest:It was one of the most inspirational comedy-watching moments that I've had.
Guest:It felt like time had ceased to exist as a concept.
Guest:People were still laughing at the same stuff.
Guest:You know, 2,400 years on.
Marc:It's inspiring to know that if you structure your act correctly, you never have to change it.
Marc:Well, there's that as well.
Marc:Is that if you rely on farts and subliminal sex jokes, you can go for centuries.
Guest:Centuries.
Guest:And they were not subliminal, a lot of those sex jokes.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But that is sort of fascinating because in this day and age, you'd be like, well, that's hacky.
Marc:It's hacky, but there are human truths that have remained embarrassingly funny since the beginning of humans.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I think it's something that is really missing from sci-fi set in the long distant future.
Guest:There's not enough people still laughing at flatulence.
Marc:Well, flatulence is always surprising on a couple of ways.
Marc:You've got the noise itself.
Marc:You've got the duration of the noise.
Marc:And then there's the third one, the smell.
Marc:So that's three levels right there.
Guest:Yeah, and I don't know how they operate in deep space.
Guest:Maybe the human body works differently, but you would think that that's something that's sci-fi moving forward.
Marc:I'm sure.
Marc:In the right stuff, you've got a guy peeing in a space suit.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I've not seen flatulence explored like the –
Marc:inability to get away from your own flatulence in the suit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, and maybe that causes deaths.
Marc:Maybe that's an entire ship of, of guys in suits get some food poisoning and they all die.
Marc:And it's a tremendous mystery for the floating around in space for centuries.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I mean, it sounds like we're workshopping a film picture, Mark.
Marc:We are.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And the punchline is, Oh my God, they, they shit in their suits.
Marc:There we go.
Marc:It's high culture.
Marc:So, okay, so you ended up with a degree in ancient Greece and Latin?
Marc:From what college?
Guest:Well, I was at University College in Oxford.
Guest:Is that the Oxford?
Guest:Yes, yeah.
Guest:So I left with this degree, but no real idea what I wanted to do in life.
Marc:But the education, right?
Marc:See, this is like I want to demystify.
Marc:Recently, as time goes on, Harvard is completely demystified.
Marc:They make monsters there.
Marc:And and they don't necessarily, you know, the they they they you know, it's careerism.
Marc:But there is some good things about it.
Marc:But there is a type of of ambition that is kind of nurtured there that I've seen in show business that is disconcerting now.
Marc:I'm not saying that you can't get a good education at Harvard.
Marc:I'm just saying that they've created fascists and very popular comedy writers.
Marc:But, I mean, the question about Oxford is, I guess, who did I talk to?
Marc:Was it Sacha Baron Cohen?
Marc:Was he an Oxford graduate?
Marc:I can't remember if he was Oxford or Cambridge.
Guest:I can't remember either.
Guest:John Oliver went to Cambridge.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:And the difference between the two is what?
Guest:They're in different towns?
Guest:Nothing much.
Guest:One's light blue, one's dark blue.
Guest:I don't know if that's the color of people's blood or what, but there's not a great deal of difference.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:And the structure of the education, were you well-rounded intellectually?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know if well-rounded is the right description.
Guest:I mean, it's a fascinating place, but particularly doing the type of study I did, again, it's not got huge applications to the real world, but I had a great time there.
Marc:Yeah, but what is the real world?
Marc:I mean, the real world is like, I mean, you like to think.
Marc:You're a thinker.
Marc:You're a guy who looks at the world and processes it politically and philosophically and socially, and you comment on it.
Marc:I would imagine that the education you got was perfect for that.
Guest:I guess so, yes.
Guest:Like I said, I ended up doing comedy, which I slightly studied as part of my ancient Greek side of things.
Marc:What was the other option?
Marc:I mean, how did you arrive at that?
Guest:Well, that was part of the literature course.
Guest:The ancient Greek literature was the tragedies and epic poetry, Homer.
Guest:So studying the sort of foundations of European civilisation.
Guest:But how did you decide to do comedy?
Guest:I think just because I was just interested by it.
Guest:And I'd done a little bit of it at school.
Guest:And it just struck me as being an interesting thing to study.
Guest:How did comedy work in a completely different ancient dead civilization?
Guest:And I think it shows a lot.
Guest:A society's comedy tells you a lot about...
Guest:That society in a way that, say, studying the tragedies, which were sort of less topical and more sort of universal, didn't necessarily give you an idea of what it would have been like to be an ancient Athenian.
Guest:Whereas when you think comedy is aiming at making the people watching it...
Guest:at the time, laugh.
Guest:And so you can then start to understand people's sense of humor, and therefore you can almost build up a picture of what life would have been like, how people would have talked to each other, how they would have tried to make each other laugh.
Guest:So I guess there's certain timeless universalities about that that were rather fascinating.
Marc:But what comic, when did you realize, like, I can do that?
Marc:Did you see a stand-up?
Guest:Um...
Guest:Well, my first ever gig was, well, A, very drunk, and B, it was a comedy night while I was a student at Oxford in our college, and a friend had organised it, and the headline act...
Guest:rang up half an hour before saying he couldn't make it and I was just going to introduce it and do a couple of bits in between and so I had to try and fill a bit more time and the support act did a longer set and I had about half an hour's
Guest:notice of this and I got very drunk and can't remember anything that I said, but I remember the surge of adrenaline of doing it, which was one of the addictive things about, about standup.
Guest:And so you remember for 30 seconds, I didn't feel as drunk as I was.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And I didn't, I've never been a particular drinker, but it was, you know, I guess the nerves and the tension.
Guest:Uh, so, uh, that was, I get in my first attempt at, uh,
Guest:at stand-up.
Guest:I then had a few gigs when I left university that went so badly that I gave up for about a year and a half.
Marc:Well, what was the other option for work for you?
Marc:Like, you know, if it wasn't stand-up, what were you headed towards?
Marc:Teaching?
Guest:Well, I don't know.
Guest:I sort of had a vague idea that I wanted to be a journalist, and particularly a sports journalist.
Guest:And left university, applied for about 80 jobs, ended up getting a job sub-editing articles about European finance.
Guest:which was slightly less exciting than it sounds, Mark.
Guest:It sounds riveting.
Guest:I'm surprised.
Guest:It lasted about a year, then just gave up and started doing the open mic circuit in London.
Marc:And who was around?
Marc:Who are the guys that you started with that are still around?
Guest:Well, I mean, John was starting out around about the same time.
Guest:Russell Howard was starting around then.
Guest:Jimmy Carr, people who've been very successful here.
Guest:Daniel Kitson was sort of the big, the most successful comedian of my generation creatively here.
Guest:And he was...
Guest:I think someone that everyone of my generation on the circuit looked up to.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I heard about Kitson for years, and I think I saw one big show of his in London.
Marc:I know he's a unique person.
Marc:He doesn't do the podcast or talk or function necessarily in a...
Marc:It's sociable way.
Marc:But I've met him a few times and I know that he's revered.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So he was of your generation or a little ahead of you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, he'd started a bit a bit before before me.
Guest:In terms of the gigs that were kind of landmarks in my early career.
Guest:stand-up career.
Guest:There was one in particular, I went to see Robert Newman, who'd been a huge TV star in his early 90s, various shows, but he'd become a kind of crusading, almost journalistic stand-up, and he did an hour and a half in Edinburgh.
Guest:largely about the perils of capitalism and globalization.
Guest:And it was just hugely eye-opening that someone had the courage to do that and the skills to make it interesting, the charisma to carry off.
Guest:And that was while I was up doing that package show.
Guest:I mentioned Edinburgh, my first sort of full Edinburgh, when I was really struggling to do a late-night gig and I didn't really have the skills for it.
Guest:I'd only been going...
Guest:18 months or so on the circuit and you know there's a you know a lot of things that I couldn't do and I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the material I was doing and seeing Robert Newman do such a you know fearless uncompromising show made me think well maybe I need to not not keep worrying about what is going to make the audience laugh and think more what you know what why am I doing this and what do I want to and that is the moment that we of inconsistent means yeah
Marc:all have that powerful moment of enlightenment that dictates our struggle for the rest of our lives.
Marc:I don't need to make them laugh as long as I'm smart and blow their mind.
Guest:And that's why I'm sitting in a shed in South London as we speak.
Marc:Yeah, that's it, man.
Marc:So what about Stuart Lee?
Guest:That was another important gig for me.
Guest:I supported him at a charity night.
Guest:I'd seen him on television.
Guest:I'd never seen him
Guest:uh doing live stand-up and uh yeah it was uh the lineup was uh stewart lee headlining me as a support act and after us was uh dj randy groover uh who was a dj in a spangly jacket playing some absolutely and please tell me most people were there to see him i think i
Guest:I can't really remember.
Guest:Stuart Lee wasn't – I mean, he was quite well-known, but he hadn't become the – Was this before he quit and then come back?
Guest:I think he was just on the way back at that point from memory.
Guest:And then I did a few gigs supporting him on tour when he was briefly on a diet where he ate nothing but cabbage soup and had –
Guest:I remember that diet.
Guest:Was he fat?
Guest:Well, I think he had been.
Guest:I don't know how much good it did him, but he didn't seem to be enjoying it very much.
Guest:But it was a new stand-up, getting to support him at a few gigs and travel around with him.
Guest:Was he able to integrate flatulence into the show?
Guest:He's always had that club in his bag.
Guest:LAUGHTER
Guest:And also, the year I did my first solo show in Edinburgh in 2001, I ended up doing three gigs supporting Joan Rivers.
Guest:That was really eye-opening.
Guest:I don't know quite how she ended up with me as her support act.
Guest:But to see someone... I can't remember how old she was.
Guest:She must have been about 70 at the time.
Guest:Must have been great.
Guest:The enthusiasm and energy that she had and just the love for performing, she was incredible.
Guest:How did she do?
Guest:Well, she had quite a big fan base in... I can't remember.
Guest:It was just a 1,500-seat theatre.
Guest:And they were very...
Guest:Me doing seven minutes at the start to 1,500 Joan Rivers fans was not necessarily a recipe for success.
Guest:But she was incredible physical energy and the speed of her mind as well.
Guest:That was really great to see as a new stand-up to see someone who'd been doing it since literally before I was born.
Marc:And were you, like, I don't know how old you are compared to me.
Marc:How old are you?
Marc:I'm 46.
Marc:Oh, you're younger than me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So do you don't remember necessarily or you were not comedically cognizant when when Bill Hicks landed in your country?
Guest:No, I missed that.
Guest:And I yes, that's.
Guest:I think if I'd been, I think, more into comedy than I was as a student, I could have seen him.
Guest:Nick Doody, who was another comedian, I don't know if you know Nick from the British Circuit.
Guest:I don't.
Guest:I think he ended up supporting Bill Hicks at a gig as a student in Oxford.
Marc:Well, it seems to me that for some comics, and certainly maybe for somebody like you, his arrival was sort of like Hendrix to the musicians of London when he came over.
Guest:There seemed to be an impact being made.
Guest:Well, that was a bit before my time, sadly, so I sort of missed out on that.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But I think there's a legacy of talking about.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, like when I saw Stuart Lee, like I've been hearing about him for a long time.
Marc:And I just like I don't know a lot about British comedy.
Marc:But, you know, when I went to Edinburgh and I saw him.
Marc:you know, that he's one of those guys that decides the pace.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:You know, I've always admired people that sort of like, this is going to be difficult for a lot of you, but this is what's going to happen.
Marc:And this is the speed at which it will happen.
Marc:And this is the tone of it.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So make your decision.
Marc:Are you in or out?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And, you know, it's a rare thing.
Marc:It's a great thing.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And it's, I guess, at some point, all comedians have to decide...
Guest:if, how, and where they will or will not compromise.
Marc:I know, and it's a weird thing.
Marc:You're gifted if you have no choice in a weird way.
Marc:Like, if this is all you got, this is me, I got no other gear.
Marc:You know, there's no, like, I better do this to make this work better.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That's a gift.
Marc:It's a painful gift, but it's a gift.
Guest:Yeah, but it's a liberating realization, isn't it?
Guest:So, again, in one of my first editors, I went to see Tim Vine, who does nothing but puns.
Guest:Yeah, I remember that guy.
Guest:But he has...
Guest:Absolutely no plan B, and clearly not everyone likes plan A, but he is, in his own way, totally uncompromising as well.
Guest:I think that's what I got out of most in my first two or three years doing Edinburgh, was seeing other...
Guest:Comedians who are sort of further on in the process and how they were choosing to to to do their comedy dug into their character Yeah, I'm gonna do something.
Marc:I haven't done before but I think it'll make the conversation better I'm gonna you can excuse me for a second.
Marc:I can go the restroom.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Don't go away Okay
Marc:It's very interesting to me because I'm talking to you and you're British that I actually excused myself.
Marc:I mean, generally, it would be like I got to pee, hang out a minute.
Marc:But no, I'd like to be excused for a second.
Marc:I have to use the restroom.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:What the fuck is wrong with me?
Guest:That's the effect.
Guest:You might have jumped ship in 1776, but you can never fully get rid of us.
Guest:With Brexit, we're open for business again.
Guest:Come back to the mothership, America.
Marc:Get me up to speed.
Marc:So you're in lockdown right now.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Big time, right?
Guest:Big time lockdown.
Marc:Because there's a new exciting strain that permeates walls.
Guest:It permeates everything.
Guest:It's a British strain, therefore it's easily the best.
Guest:It's a world-leading virus strain once again.
Guest:We're ahead of the world.
Marc:Finally.
Marc:Back.
Marc:They're back.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:So, yeah, we're sitting at home.
Marc:Were you able to go out for a little while?
Marc:I mean, I don't know what you guys are going through.
Marc:It's pretty, like, it's...
Marc:It's so scary here.
Marc:Do you know people that have gotten it?
Guest:I know a few people who've had it, and luckily no one close to me has been severely ill with it.
Guest:But it's been a massive disruption on my children's schooling, 14 and 12.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's tough having to sit at home just basically working off computers, which is a huge scar on a whole generation's childhood.
Guest:I'm not sure we know the full repercussions.
Guest:We've got a nice...
Guest:housing a bit of space and parks nearby and um yeah uh so you know it's much better and you guys going crazy are you getting closer do you learning things about each other you never wanted to so we've got on pretty well um yeah considering um watched a lot of television uh and uh
Guest:And during the summer last year, in my sort of parallel life to comedy, I'm a cricket statistician and I do cricket stats on the radio for the BBC cricket coverage.
Guest:So I got to go and spend six weeks watching international sports during the middle of lockdown, which was one of the weirdest, most surreal experiences of my life.
Marc:But it's nice that you are grateful to be working.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:You know, I mean, the one thing about doing what we do and figuring out how to adapt is that, I mean, you do a weekly radio show now, correct?
Guest:Yeah, I do a radio show for BBC Radio 4 called The News Quiz, which is a sort of topical show.
Guest:That's on sort of half, sort of 24 weeks a year, and I still do The Bugle.
Guest:podcast with a sort of rotating cast of co-hosts since John left.
Guest:Is that every week?
Guest:That's every week.
Guest:So it's nice to be working.
Guest:Imagine if we weren't working.
Guest:Be crazy.
Guest:So for people whose main...
Guest:line of work and income is stand-up this has been completely catastrophic so i've been very fortunate from from that point but the last performance i did in front of live actual physical human beings was i think in end of almost a year ago now it's the end of january
Guest:And, you know, I do think quite a lot about, you know, will I still be able to do it?
Guest:I don't know if you think that, you know, when you were last on stage with a crowd.
Marc:Sadly, my thoughts are, do I still want to?
Marc:I think I'm good.
Guest:Well, that's another side of it, isn't it?
Guest:There's been times that I've thought I really miss it.
Guest:And there's other times I thought, well...
Guest:Do I have the strength to go back to it and almost relearn those skills?
Marc:I think the skills will probably come back and it will probably be exciting.
Marc:I have to assume that things will have to be different after all this shit.
Marc:I mean, after Brexit, after we become an authoritarian country.
Marc:That how we approach life again has to be different.
Marc:I mean, I don't believe that there's some sort of return to something.
Marc:We don't know what the fuck is ahead on any level.
Guest:No, which is, I guess, simultaneously exciting and terrifying.
Marc:Terrifying.
Marc:It's terrifying some days.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I had trouble sleeping last night.
Marc:But I don't understand...
Marc:Brexit at all, because I can barely keep up with the news here.
Marc:But I know that people in the UK look to us as like, you know, what the fuck is happening there?
Marc:But I have that same thing.
Marc:I'm like, what is really happening there?
Guest:Well, I think...
Guest:Most people in Britain are thinking that, probably on both sides of the Brexit divide.
Guest:The strange thing with Brexit is Britain's membership of the European Union has been slightly controversial for most of the four and a half decades that we were part of the EU.
Guest:But it was never a massive...
Guest:political issue and all the sort of polls you know said it was in the you know it was a major issue for about five percent of the people and then it because for you know essentially party political reasons uh david cameron then prime minister you know called this this referendum and it suddenly became the completely defining totemic political issue of our times and it's created
Guest:Divisions, I think of a similar type to the divisions that Trump has created.
Guest:Well, it's a mixture of sort of creating and revealing, I guess.
Marc:Oh, disenfranchised, working class, anti-immigration nationalism on one side?
Guest:Well, yes.
Guest:And there's various degrees of that.
Guest:But I think it's created divisions that are not obviously bridgeable or curable.
Guest:whatever happens.
Guest:So in terms of the long-term prospects, obviously the difference with Brexit and Trump is that Trump was only going to be president for four or eight years, whereas Brexit is for...
Guest:The foreseeable future, whether it's forever or not, I don't know, it's impossible to say.
Guest:But it's not something that can be forced back into the box in the way that Trump has, albeit that there is now debris all around the box and the box may pop open again.
Guest:before collapsing like an overstretched metaphor.
Guest:So it's become – it's defined politics.
Guest:And now we're stuck with it.
Guest:And it's going to be one of those things.
Guest:Philosophically, I was a huge fan of the European Union and Britain being part –
Guest:part of it and you know I will always think that and I always hope that Britain returns to being part of either the European Union or whatever may emerge from from if it collapses or whatever and in the same way that people who were opposed to it remained opposed to it throughout the four decades which were largely successful for both Europe and Britain that Britain was a member so there's no real middle ground and I
Guest:COVID has almost been a distraction from Brexit and the past year when we might have been sort of really kind of introvertedly examining what Brexit meant for Britain as a country and for the people who live in it.
Guest:We've been completely distracted.
Guest:So I don't know when we're going to get around to that reckoning and working out exactly who we are and what we want to be.
Marc:Right.
Marc:All this work has been done.
Marc:The Brexit deal is finalized, but now no one can go outside.
Marc:Yes.
Yeah.
Marc:So that's all put on hold is how, you know, culture and British society will function under the new game.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It's all on.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I mean, we've essentially hibernated as a nation.
Guest:And in fact, I mean, I think there is something to be said, I think, for hibernation.
Guest:I think it's something that humans as a species would might consider.
Guest:We should consider taking a three month or two a year break.
Guest:Yeah, I think, you know, if there is a positive to come out of COVID, I guess lockdown is as close to hibernation as we're generally allowed to get.
Guest:And, you know, it's something that I would like to see formally instituted three months every year.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I mean, it's sort of like the midday nap in Italy, in Spain.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:It's just like you'll have a three month a year nap.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's one of my main reasons for being in favour of Britain staying in the EU is I've always hoped that Britain would adopt the siesta for the proper afternoon nap, which is always something that we've been a bit too hardworking as a society.
Guest:Despite my best efforts to balance that out.
Marc:But isn't there certain pub rules?
Marc:I mean, I don't isn't there an instituted like don't you isn't there a midday drink you're supposed to have?
Guest:Yes, that was I mean, yeah, again, that's always been part.
Guest:We've drunk through a lot of things in our history.
Guest:as a society.
Guest:And in fact, with COVID, so much of the debate was about when and how the pubs would open.
Guest:For a while, that seemed to be the most important thing that the government had to deal with, was managing the reopening of British pubs, which had not even shut down during the Blitz, I think.
Guest:So that shows what COVID has done.
Guest:It made British pubs close.
Guest:They are closed, huh?
Guest:They are currently closed.
Guest:They were open.
Guest:They've been sort of intermittently open.
Guest:They're now, I think, currently all closed.
Guest:For a while, you could get takeaway beer from pubs, which slightly defeats the object.
Guest:I don't know if they're doing takeaway quizzes as well, but...
Marc:Are the ICU units like busting like here?
Marc:I mean, is the death rates spiraling?
Guest:It's got very bad quite quickly in the last few weeks.
Guest:And I think that the numbers are up back beyond beyond what they were during the first the first wave.
Marc:It's so horrible because we're so insulated here in our own panic that I fail to realize sometimes you guys are really in the same thing.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:It's terrifying and people are dying every day.
Guest:It is.
Guest:And with the various vaccinations that have been approved, there's hope.
Guest:There's a bit of optimism.
Guest:There's some sense that it might end in the vaguely foreseeable situation.
Guest:But again, it's something that we – I'm not sure we'll be able to process exactly what it's done to Britain, exactly the massive failures that have come along with it.
Guest:It's – yeah, I think it's going to take years to – as you talk about, what kind of society is going to emerge –
Guest:From this, you know, from the sort of selfish point of view of a working comedian, are people going to want to go and sit in crowded rooms again?
Guest:I think there's going to be a desire to do stuff that isn't sitting at home.
Guest:But when will people feel comfortable being crowded into a confined space?
Marc:And also people have become very adept at tuning in to these things.
Marc:You know, like I'll do a live IG in the morning just to keep my brain sharp and engage with an audience in real time, which has helped.
Marc:But I think, like, what you're saying, if I think about it like this idea that our brains want to know, it's sort of like, well, how are we going to reflect on this?
Marc:And that's really the question a comic has to answer in terms of, you know, presenting it.
Marc:So, I mean, that might give us both a little hope.
Marc:Because, like, in my brain, my biggest fear is that we're all going to see this as some sort of collective trauma.
Marc:And because of PTSD, we're just going to, you know, sort of...
Marc:And compartmentalize it into this haze that's like kind of a smear of a memory that a year or a year and a half and kind of want to move past it.
Marc:That's my fear is like is that we move past it and just sort of suppress it as a traumatic time without really contextualizing the impact, you know.
Guest:Yes, and particularly for having children who are at school age, it's the sort of defining, it'll probably be the defining time of their entire lives, really.
Guest:It's going to shape their outlook, how they interact with life.
Guest:And comedically, also, I don't know what you think about this.
Guest:Are people going to laugh at different things when stand-up restarts?
Guest:How different is it going to be?
Guest:The impact that this has had, this huge kind of defining issue.
Guest:But at the same time, it's probably going to be something that people don't want to think about, don't want to be told about when they go somewhere for escape.
Guest:So I don't know how it's going to impact on that.
Marc:Well, I think we've established that we can start with farts no matter what.
Marc:There's always that.
Marc:There's the timelessness of flatulence and sex.
Marc:And certainly flatulence and sex, reflecting on flatulence and sex during the pandemic will be rich with laughter.
Marc:There's going to be family flatulence like never before.
Marc:Difficulties in having sex, both with families not being able to leave the house and also dating.
Marc:Rich material with both of the timeless classics.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think that that like that kind of thing will be will be interesting, like the honesty around that, because I do think that people are I don't think that we're going to totally adapt to the intimacy of what you and I are doing here, that people are going to become so symbiotic with screens that, you know, the necessity to congregate will be will diminish.
Marc:I don't I don't think that's true.
Marc:I think that.
Marc:People lose a great deal of themselves when they isolate, even if they're talking to people on screens.
Marc:So I think that if it ever becomes safe again, people will want to congregate.
Guest:Yes, definitely.
Guest:But I wonder, you know, I guess it'll be a process of almost kind of relaxing back into it.
Guest:And yeah, I don't know how you relax.
Marc:I did a movie.
Marc:I did a movie for 12 days.
Marc:Everybody's wearing masks with covid protocol.
Marc:But I got to be honest with you.
Marc:Once I surrendered to the idea that like this is as safe as it's going to be, you know, we're getting tested every other day and everyone's wearing masks all the time, except when we have to act.
Marc:And I was fucking thrilled to be, you know, in a collaborative effort in real time with living people.
Marc:I mean, it was like it was like, thank God, you know, I'm saying again for a minute.
Guest:Is there going to be an eruption of sort of communal activities of artistic expression, kind of post-war booms of people just wanting to do anything?
Marc:I would hope so.
Marc:That would be encouraging.
Marc:I want to think that a lot of people...
Marc:especially visual artists and stuff who generally work in an isolated way anyways, like your father might have, are really kind of doing exciting things now.
Marc:But I think people are so freaked out that most people are just paralyzed and not doing anything but watching television in their sweatpants.
Guest:I've done a lot.
Guest:I've got through a lot of pairs of sweatpants in the last year and a bit.
Marc:But I don't know.
Marc:But given that you spent your early life studying this sort of arc of civilizations, I mean, and even with Brexit or whatever is happening with COVID, how do you frame this in your head?
Marc:I mean, are you like somebody who's like, well, this is going to pass and the species will probably persist?
Marc:Or how are you?
Marc:You don't seem like an existentially fraught person to me.
Guest:No, probably not.
Guest:It clearly is going to pass in the way that plagues have passed.
Guest:Plagues in the ancient world that were fairly traumatic and shaping experiences.
Guest:But, yeah...
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I veer between wild pessimism and wild optimism.
Guest:And I guess a lot of it is thinking about the world that my kids are going to grow up in and the kind of lives they'll be able to lead, the education they'll be able to have.
Guest:And, you know, what kind of jobs are going to... With all these different impacts on life, whether, you know, Brexit, COVID, the environment, just the general changings of the world.
Guest:It's... The sort of picture that I had of the world that they would...
Marc:enter when they depart childhood uh it's it's it's changed i don't really i can't really imagine even in 10 years time what they will be dealing with yeah i think that's the most difficult thing for anybody i don't have kids so i i'm mine's in the realm of selfishness like i make my head i'm like i'm 57 i've done okay all right maybe i'm done yeah
Marc:So but like when you have children, as many of my friends do, I think that, you know, is challenging for you as a person, as a father and, you know, somebody who wants the best for their children.
Marc:But but also just no matter who you are, there's there's no personal status quo anymore.
Marc:Everything has been sort of blown up.
Marc:You know, everything has been, you know, shattered.
Marc:So we're all looking into this darkness without any real footing.
Marc:And I think that the anxiety of that is overwhelming.
Marc:But I do think, like you're saying, I think that's the most honest way to look at it is that we just don't know.
Marc:And it's really difficult that you can't even rely on like, well, I can always go to the place.
Marc:No, you can't because it's closed.
Marc:It's gone.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah, I think it's...
Guest:I mean, this is the time of greatest human ignorance of my lifetime in terms of people kind of knowing what's going on currently and what is going to emerge.
Guest:So it's, as you say, cosmically...
Guest:unsettling and you know things i guess some things might emerge largely unchanged other things will be vastly different and uh some things will just end so uh yeah but again but again not not farting and fucking farting and fucking yes are going to persist yeah death taxes farting and fucking those are the big four never go away
Marc:Is your wife in politics?
Guest:She's not.
Guest:She was a criminal lawyer, a criminal advocate, and is currently – she's got a doctorate studying how young people are dealt with by the judicial system and is currently writing a book about it.
Guest:So, yeah, she has a slightly more serious existence than I do, talking nonsense and thinking about cricket.
Marc:Yeah, but that's good.
Marc:That's the other hard thing about, and when I talk to creative people who are in the middle of working on things, they're like, does this even matter?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Are we just animating the death throes of a civilization?
Yes.
Marc:Well, possibly.
Guest:But, you know, death throes are always fascinating, aren't they?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But when I started out in stand-up, we've been together since university, as I said, and she was starting out around about the same time on the legal circuit.
Guest:And, you know, it's a different type of performing.
Guest:There were certain similarities of being a criminal advocate in Britain.
Marc:Oh, so she was a trial lawyer, basically?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So she was...
Guest:Yeah, it's similar.
Guest:You're sort of self-employed.
Guest:You go from gig to gig.
Guest:And the difference would be that I'd be delighted if I'd written an amusing pun about fruit.
Guest:And she was doing cases involving, frankly, horrific crimes.
Guest:So it was similar but different.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I could see your sort of enthusiasm at the end of the day when you're discussing your days kind of fading in light of her achievements.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But wait, this punchline, this tag is great.
Marc:You just got to like...
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And if I had a bad day at work, then I'd be slightly humiliated and embarrassed.
Guest:If she had a bad day at work, someone would go to jail, I guess.
Marc:You've got to decide whether or not you're going to stick with that bit or if it needs something else.
Marc:And she's got to live with the fact that somehow or another someone's going to spend their life in prison.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, these are the lives we've chosen.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't think I was cut out for real life, to be honest.
Marc:But sports, I mean, I don't know.
Marc:I'm not a sports guy.
Marc:And it seems that people who like sports, at least that gives you.
Marc:I mean, that is something to live for, you know.
Guest:yes and it's you know everyone you know finds their escapism in different in different forms i've been i did love sport from when i was about six years old and it's uh it's you know something that's that's throughout my life been something where i can you know just escape from whatever i'm doing and uh yeah playing it at a very low level or or or watching it and i started um writing about cricket via the bugle actually i've talked about
Guest:cricket on the bugle because we always had quite a big american audience so you know try and do as much cricket stuff as possible to goad america for not having taken the greatest honor that uh that that uh that original uh zaltzman manifesto of alienating as many of the audience as possible yeah yeah without getting any real foothold in success yeah that's good why change a losing formula and um
Guest:So I ended up getting to write about cricket for a cricket website and then being part of the BBC's radio coverage.
Guest:And particularly last year, it was this incredible escape from everything else.
Guest:Thank God they kept playing, I guess.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the players were all in bubbles, staying in hotels on the...
Guest:on the grounds and the media were staying in different parts of the... Are they still doing it?
Guest:Yeah, around the world there's cricket bubbles going on.
Guest:England's just gone out to Sri Lanka, Australia and India are playing.
Guest:It's a sport that... The longest form of cricket, the games last up to five days and it becomes almost meditative when you sit and watch an entire...
Guest:five-day match and you know quite a lot of them end in a end in a draw and it's it's almost it puts you on a it's almost a sort of spiritual escapism from uh oh that's great from everything i would heartily recommend it mark yeah i i mean i i don't have i don't have many good escapes yeah i'm painfully stuck
Marc:My imagination is just fueled by dread and occasional glimmers of hope and fantasy.
Marc:I'm not a science fiction guy.
Marc:I like music, but are you a science fiction guy as well?
Guest:not really my daughter who's who's just about to turn 14 she's uh she's got really into and she right she's now started writing so i'll just go up to her bedroom and i'll say oh what are you doing so i'm just writing this this uh the science fiction story so um so i've yeah i've started to try and you know get a bit more uh more more into uh into that but um what's his son up to what's his interest
Guest:Well, he's quite into sports and maths.
Guest:So, yeah, they're doing – they're coping pretty – I can't quite imagine how I'd have dealt with this as a – I guess children are quite flexible, aren't they?
Guest:They do adapt to what is presented to them.
Guest:Yeah, they'll take it.
Guest:They'll take it.
Guest:Yeah, and they'll adapt.
Guest:They're their own little people, I guess, after a certain point.
Guest:My daughter was seven when she turned to me at dinner and said, Daddy, I think I'm getting too old for your jokes now.
Guest:And that was a real moment.
Guest:Those landmarks in parenting when you realize your children are becoming more independent.
Marc:Seven years old.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Outside of the bugle, which is topical,
Marc:And the cricket, it has to is sort of up to date.
Marc:You got to stay on top of that.
Marc:But you're not really.
Marc:I mean, I can't even begin to frame a future set at this juncture.
Marc:But, you know, for somebody who thinks in terms of, you know, hour long presentations, have you begun to think about that?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, not really.
Guest:The last four years before, so from 2016 to 2019, I did an end-of-year review show, just sort of my main stand-up of the year when I'd try and put the world of that year into an hour of stand-up.
Guest:But I didn't do that this year, and so it's been a long time since I really sat down and tried to plan out
Guest:a stand-up show and I was thinking about it a couple of weeks ago because I realised that basically I'd done four gigs in 2020 and they were all in January and I thought what would I do if I had to do a gig
Guest:Now, I couldn't remember even how I used to start a stand-up set.
Guest:I couldn't remember.
Guest:I've got them all written down.
Guest:But because I write stuff every week for The Bugle, and most of the stuff, as you say, that I do is topical, it's for The Bugle or radio shows, I'm constantly churning over material, but not necessarily honing it into...
Guest:lasting stand-up.
Guest:And I just, I got a slight panic.
Guest:I thought, I've got no idea how I would do a stand-up gig now.
Guest:And having been doing it for over 20 years, that was slightly frightening.
Guest:I do podcasts and radio and cricket, so stand-up is not what I rely on.
Guest:But
Guest:You can't, but you always got that muscle working.
Marc:I was doing three sets, four sets a week, no matter what, just to stay frosty.
Marc:And yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Marc:There's definitely going to be, does pre-COVID material matter anymore?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And, you know, we don't know what post covid is going to look like, but we all know what the fuck we're living with.
Marc:And the one thing about it is there there is a certain this is one of the few times in history where we all have something very specific and very fucking prominent in common.
Marc:You know, like we can all talk about like, you know, how we handled this, how much cooking we did, how much eating we did, how much jerking off we did, how much yelling at our kids we did.
Marc:I mean, there are going to be diaries of COVID.
Marc:But I sadly, you know, from day to day, I would imagine the patterns reveal itself.
Marc:And it's one long story.
Marc:One long day.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And also doing political topical comedy, a lot of what I've done in the last four years has been about Brexit and its impact on British politics and globally on Trump and America and what Trumpism is.
Guest:stands for around the world and you know those two things are going as well so so what what i've no idea what i would you know if someone said oh you've got to do a an hour-long stand-up show in a month's time i i think i would uh i would really struggle i think to to know what to
Marc:what to do and i guess you know a deadline a genuine deadline is always a great motivator mark so i guess we'll have to wait until you know that does yeah i think i think we'll snap into shape pretty good i mean one thing i've been noticing about trumpism and fascism in general is that uh you know people who can't leave their houses or are unemployed um are generally uh gonna fuel that movement you know that
Marc:There's economic desperation and there's a lack of work and a lot of time to go down whatever rabbit hole your brain is going to go down to make your anger feel better.
Marc:And sadly, a lot of times that ends with excluding people and possibly genocide.
Guest:So...
Guest:And also, I mean, the Internet is there are infinite rabbit holes on the Internet.
Guest:The worst.
Guest:You can find your people.
Guest:You can.
Guest:Or in my case, you can find black and white early footage of sport from the 1920s.
Guest:But there's rabbit holes for everyone.
Guest:There's a universe of rabbit holes.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:We're finding that.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:We're finding that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Nobody needs to have the same experience ever again.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, I guess we'll find out, Andy.
Marc:Oddly, I think that if we do get a reprieve and we do get the ability to once again enter the world, that we will be so excited we will find plenty of things to say.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And will you come back to Edinburgh?
Guest:The emotional Mark Maron return to Edinburgh.
Guest:I will not.
Guest:If there's one good to come out of COVID, Mark, surely it can be that.
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:Come back to the fringe.
Marc:I will come back to London.
Marc:I will never go to the gilded balloon again.
Marc:I just have no idea about that world.
Marc:But I did have I before the I did do a couple of dates in London over the last few years and Birmingham and what else?
Marc:Where else did I go?
Marc:I did three dates, but I had I had a nice time.
Marc:Manchester, I think in London, Birmingham, Manchester.
Marc:Does that make sense?
Guest:Yeah, that does make sense.
Guest:I remember speaking to you that year in Edinburgh, because I was doing my political animal show that you did in a room in sort of an old kind of underground passageway.
Guest:Right, it was a long, thin, narrow room with bricks.
Guest:A lot of bricks.
Guest:And yeah, it was a kind of classic Edinburgh room.
Guest:It was completely not designed for stand-up, but it had a certain atmosphere.
Guest:I think it was damp.
Guest:Very damp.
Guest:Yeah, the humidity in that room was...
Guest:um yeah it's the kind of room you felt that someone probably died in it about 200 years ago or there was or there was butchering done yeah there was like you know real work on anvils or with knives those walls would have stories to tell but oh yes um i can't what year was that must have been 2006 maybe
Marc:yeah so well that was the year that john went to do the the daily show so i think i was then again we were supposed to be co-hosting that show oh we were both shattered then we're both like struggling yeah all right well i i i will say this i i maybe i will come and we'll hang out in edinburgh again if not let's uh let's hang out next time i come to london if that's ever possible yeah yeah that would be great good talking to you man you too
Marc:Okay, that's it.
Marc:Andy Zaltzman, as I said earlier, he's got the podcast, The Bugle, where you can get wherever you get podcasts.
Marc:You can hear him on the news quiz on BBC Radio 4.
Marc:Enjoy the relief while we can.
Marc:And I'll try to muster up a little hope.
Marc:You know, I've been meditating and I've been yoga-ing.
Marc:And I've been working out and I've been trying to keep my sanity.
Marc:I've been hiking up COVID Hill.
Marc:But relief and, okay, hope.
Marc:Hope that we stabilize this fucking thing and hope that we get everybody vaccinated and some structure and organization begins to occur on a federal level.
Marc:And also that, yeah, I'd like to be proud of my country.
Marc:I really would.
Marc:I'll play some guitar for you now.
guitar solo
Thank you.
guitar solo
Guest:Boomer lives.
Guest:Monkey.
Guest:LaFonda.
Guest:Cat angels everywhere.
Guest:Thank God for new management.