An evening of intimacy with the lodger

The bigger the lie, the likelier it’ll be believed

Today, my lodger and I did something together that we had never done before together, so, it being a bit of a red letter day, I thought I’d write about it. Not in every last detail, but it’s important that we crossed this crucial red line in the landlord/lodger relationship. You may well say to yourself, if not to me, “What is so red letter about this activity engaged in under a blanket of togetherness?” Perhaps you see in it no redness and even no letter. But a bit of a red letter it was anyway. What was this activity? It was watching recorded entertainment on a mobile device.

In the old days, watching telly was all that was needed in order to convey the cosy, convivial activity of being on a sofa ignoring the guy next to you and having a whale of a time being entertained by a box of electronics, but that is all now so passé, so we two tonight did some watching (on Kurt’s mobile device, which, after some experimentation, was persuaded to adopt and also maintain a vertical viewing position) of some comedy by Michael McIntyre and Fred Kleff, who, it turns out, is called Fred Klett, though I assured Kurt his mispronunciation of double tt as double ff was forgivable, especially as I’d never heard of the man anyway. But heard of him I now have and, what’s more, I have heard him, and we both thought he was very funny, which is more discussion than we would have ever had if we’d’ve been watching telly, now, isn’t it? I remind Kurt of Klett, Kurt said, and he also reminds me of Elton John, though he hums aimlessly rather than singing Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, so the glasses are where the similarity really sort of stops. Me and Klett are, seemingly, like two peas in a pod, on the other hand.

We later switched to a few moments of Jo Brand, who is a veteran of the Apollo, wherever it actually is … I had swithered in musing fashion between London – always a good bet for bullshitting about theatre locations – and Manchester – which is always a good location for bullshitting about anything, with me venturing that it must be a small, intimate theatre with 500 seats because stand-up performances work best in small, intimate theatres, though the Apollo’s probably bigger than Wembley and a died-in-the-audience stand-up will still be able to get 2,500 people to eat out of their hand, no problem – Freddie Mercury did, after all, and he wasn’t even noted for his stand-up routines, though he held his microphone the same way as Fred Klett, which is interesting. Bullshitting about theatre locations is sort-of the antithesis of Hitler’s “the bigger the lie, the likelier it’ll be believed” because, if you pitch a bullshit low enough, even though no one will be that impressed if you’re right (it simply burnishes more “added shine” on top of an impression already of “general brilliance” and, what’s more, you might actually, on a balance of probabilities, be right - unless you’ve made up the name of the city in question, of course), they will in the end not much care if you’re wrong, and perhaps not even notice the absence of “added shine”, which is disappointing, or can be if you’re a “shine”-oriented sort of person.

But, here’s the rub: when you recommend something to someone else because it’s “really, really funny”, which is 50% more funny than “really funny” and miles ahead of just “funny”, you can already write in tablets of stone what their reaction’ll be when they finally deign to have a look at what you found so bloody RRF: it will not raise so much as a smirk; especially from the “smirk-rationed” lodger (of which more anon). It’s partly because of the nature of the beast: “funny” is actually (bit of BS science here) what comes out of left field. Tell anyone it’s coming out of left field – no surprise, no RF, or even F. You must, instead, contrive for them to happen upon Ms Brand, in a cleverly engineered coincidence that even God would be proud of, and then, when they rave about this fantastic RRF fairground attraction, agree with them with gung-ho spirit whilst you inwardly think, “Damn, I knew before they did, as well,” even though you arranged the ploy in the first place. Shakespeare said something about petards, I think.

The other part of it not being funny, however, is perhaps the fact that it isn’t all that funny. “Doubly galling” is when an ideal engineering concept comes to you in a flash, unfolds before your very eyes and then turns out to be a squib yet worse than the “fairground attraction” line. Yes, “fairground attraction”: let me explain.

I’ve quoted Jo Brand’s dead-pan, expletive-laced, dismissive observational humour as “brilliant” for several weeks and cited the hilarious (I thought so, and still think, so) remark she made when doing a travelogue on Blackpool and sitting on the beach with her fish and chips, turning to the camera to confide to the BBC audience that she only normally has one chip – which is all I ever have as well, I must say – and I finally got Kurt, who was mildly surprised to find that “Jo” is a girls’ name (which it is in Dutch, so, whatever) to actually indulge me and watch a bit of this really so stupendously funny person, isn’t it just typical of the idiotic funny person to just not be that funny in the one snippet selected for a “test giggle” and that her “funniest” line is to describe her dress as making her look like a fairground attraction; which it didn’t, not one bit. It was more like a circus tent, anyone could see that; clearly she is trying to keep to her “one chip diet”, not, I’m sorry, always with overwhelming success. And it’s the simple fact that she did look like a circus tent that made the self-deprecatory crack about only ever having one chip so hilariously funny in the first place  – if only she’d told that one instead: Jo Brand and one chip is just funny, whatever. Anyway, I found Kurt’s Fred Kleff/tt funny and said so, and he didn’t find Jo Brand so alluringly funny as all that, even if I spelled her name right and he couldn’t spell “Klett”, so that I ended up spitting nails at his mobile device, metaphorically, that is, and just feel that, in the viewing stakes, it’s as if we played football and I scored an own goal.

Anyway, the most not-funniest thing we actually laughed at was finding out that my very own, all mine, exclusive to me original funny story about wiping away spiders’ webs from outside the kitchen and then opening the kitchen door for quarter of a second and being invaded by a squadron of gnats, who, as invaders, are even worse than the Russian army, because they come in in a flash and just sit there until you calmly pick them off one by one, even if they don’t actually shoot back like the Ruskis do, had been stolen, or Fred Klett at the very least made it look as if I’d stolen my own exclusive material and, more to the point, my funny story includes a moral twist about disturbing microsystems and not unbalancing nature, which Fred Kleff, or Klett, or whoever he is didn’t even have the WIT to so much as ALLUDE to, so clearly not a thinker. Fred Klett, who I’ve got a good mind to soon also be referring to as Fred Kleff, if I even refer to him at all, only told a story that was deviously and courtroom-defence-securely virtually the same, because his was about mosquitoes, as if that’ll wash. I’d just like to know whether that’s unoriginal, arrant plagiarism or a happy coincidence. I’m thinking that, the way damages claims are going these days, it could be worth a writ of summons, except I don’t have any money-laundering to do right now, so bit of a waste of time, really.

Apart from that, Kurt remarked that McIntyre made praiseworthy use of the stage space, which was astute and in fact did come out of left field in the moment (Kurt does, it must be said, occasionally smirk, not much but it does happen, although you need to be prepared to read that like Norman Wisdom cracking up uncontrollably on the floor, even though you do have to be fast, while discreetly checking your fly isn’t undone), which I suppose is pretty funny in a way, especially since the object of critique was on a follow cam the whole time; but I did magnanimously refrain from bringing up the question I’d put to the director when I played the eponymous hero in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, when I’d said, “I’ll move down left at this part of the scene, shall I? I mean, we’ve paid for the whole stage, so we may as well use it – get our money’s worth?” Which all goes to show what a night not sat in front of the telly can’t lead to: down stage left.