LAST NIGHT MY HOTEL ROOM OFFERED ME A MOVIE, MOST GLAMOROUS BLOW JOBS OF THE WORLD, BUT IT WAS A LITTLE THIN ON PLOT, SO I WENT FOR THE BASEBALL. AS I’M ON MY WAY OUT OF THE HOTEL, IZZIE THE DOORMAN tips me twenty dollars. I’ll repeat that. Izzie the doorman tips me twenty dollars. He slips the money into my hands with a big thank-you card, and he won’t hear of me taking it back. I explain to him it’s supposed to be the other way round but he won’t listen. You’re my favorite man in the world, he says, “after Jackie Mason.” Oh my God. Has he seen through my disguise of being a Greedy Bastard? Is my secret identity revealed? Has he seen that I am really Super Nice Guy? Izzie has always been very kind and helpful to me, but to have doormen around North America tipping me is a bit much. Well, this is Canada, and they are much nicer in Canada, you know.
I need medication now because I am definitely Sir Limpalot. Don’t mistake the limp in that word. I’m referring only to my silly walk. The Viagra prescription is not yet necessary, as I could tell from my few moments with the movie. After this many days away from the wife even baseball looks erotic. It has been determined that I do not have gout, but there are certain species of faux gout that have not been ruled out. Ersatz or pseudonymous gout? I guess that’s like mock turtle. My doctor says there is a particularly painful test to determine this. Fuck off. I’m not going to submit to a particularly painful bone marrow test just so we can give it a name! It’s a real drag being gimpy, and I’ve had to send for my bloody irritating surgical boot, which is being shipped to Burlington. I think my ballet days are over. I promised my daughter that I would dance at her wedding. It was going to be an interpretive dance as well….
Jennifer Mather, a radio interviewer in Vancouver, asked me whether we were all whacked out of our skulls when we wrote Monty Python. This is a persistent myth about Python among Canadians, who seem to have been whacked out of their skulls when they watched it. As a matter of fact it is almost impossible to write good comedy when you are whacked out of your skull, as I discovered when I worked on Saturday Night Live in the seventies, a show that was written by people whacked out of their skulls and, at times, showed it. (“What’s the difference between life and a Saturday Night Live skit?” “Life doesn’t go on forever.”) Talking of radio interviews, there’s a legendary story of one of the Monty Python boys being interviewed on a tape recorder by a pretty Canadian journalist while actually in flagrante, but wild horses would not drag the name of the recipient of this in-depth interview from my lips. To talk seriously on the radio about comedy while porking the questioner is still something of a high spot in the history of irony. Speaking of irony, it is a cliché of British journalism that Americans have no sense of irony. I have never bought into this British myth, and wonder how it arose. Does it go back to Dickens, who was very bitter after his tour of America? Is it something Oscar Wilde said? He was, after all, superbly ironic. Indeed his whole life was irony. Whatever the truth about American irony in the nineteenth century, and surely you can’t ignore Mark Twain, it seems to me that a country that has produced Lenny Bruce, Nichols and May, Gary Shandling, Larry David, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Jack Benny, all masters of the form, can hardly be accused of lacking irony. Perhaps the Brits are just being ironic?
Peter Crabbe, in an e-mail rant he expects me to post on PythOnline, raises the bathroom issue. Let me broach this sensitive subject in Peter’s own ranting words.
“Look, do you really want to know what’s going on here? The bottom line: We have two 1.3-million-dollar tour buses with digital TVs, huge showers, kitchens, PlayStations, master bedroom suites, and two toilets—yes, we have TWO bathrooms on each bus—and yet we aren’t allowed to take a shit in any of them! Four thrones—no sitting! Oh, we can pick up groupies of the foulest nature imaginable and have them perform the sickest, most twisted things that would make Cirque du Soleil performers wince,6 but basic human functions on the bus? Not on this tour, mate! No, not on these million-dollar buses. What? Do we need to get the 1.8-million-dollar buses for the bowel movement package?”7
Well, he has a point. We were asked at the beginning of the tour to avoid number twos on the road. I was going to address this issue in a slightly more circumspect way than a Crabbe rant, but I think it best he gets his bile out in some form. Ordinarily it’s not a problem, as we have hotel rooms and theaters to take care of our needs, but now, as we are living on the bus, it is an issue. Skip, our tour manager, explains that while the waste disposal system on these buses would be adequate for one or two people living in the master bedroom, six adults producing poop makes the whole thing smell, well, like a toilet. It is basically an airplane system, but one that does not dispose of the waste outside in the form of blue ice. (Wait, I thought that was a myth?) We can indeed use the toilets for poopery (which my spell-check just autocorrected to popery) but we would have to stop immediately and evacuate the tank onto the roadside. I’m not sure the good citizens of the U.S. and Canada ought to be exposed to this. Bad enough they have to watch our shit onstage.
Last night’s second show in Toronto was another smash. The audience was with us from the start, singing along and cheering happily. I felt really tired going in and was worried I had been interviewed-out, but the moment I felt the enthusiasm of the audience, I perked right up. It is a strange drug and no mistake, this support and comfort of strangers, and it really lifts you as powerfully as a jolt of caffeine. I wonder if there is some survival use in it, the approbation of the tribe in moments of stress? I can understand the necessity of encouraging great performances under arduous conditions, in hunting or in warfare, but in comedy? Nah. Perhaps people just like comedy. But people just like sex, and there is an obvious benefit for DNA to encourage them in all that messy business. Is comedy connected to sex? It always makes me laugh….
Why do gays want to get married, by the way? Are they tired of sex?
Whatever the reason, the encouragement of the audience was highly effective. Toronto was our best reaction so far. Richard of York, my entertaining old codger of a publicist, said that while the previous night was a ten, this night was a nine and a half. The bastard. I thought he was going to say ten and a half. He has a dry wit and no mistake, and sends me e-mails with pithy quotes from obscure Lancashire comedians like this from Manchester poet Les Barker: “Always borrow from pessimists: they don’t expect it back.”
I feel relieved that we have finally nailed the show and can now play it anywhere with confidence.