Stewart Lee: Carpet Remnant World

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('70s GERMAN ROCK MUSIC PLAYING)

ANNOUNCER:
Ladies and

gentlemen, it's time to enter

the Carpet Remnant World

of Stewart Lee!

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)

That was a bit heavy metal,

rock and roll that.

Can we have some funny music

at the start of the second half? Yup.

Thanks for coming.

(LAUGHTER)

Okay. What news do you know about?

Leveson Inquiry. That's ongoing.

News of the World went down.

I was sorry to see

The News of the World go down.

I think it was a great

campaigning newspaper.

Not everything I say

is sarcastic, Sheffield.

Who can forget

the News of the World's

high-profile campaign

against child sex offenders

which led, didn't it,

to News of the World readers

burning down the home

of a paediatrician.

(LAUGHTER)

Throwing rocks at a pedalo.

(LAUGHTER)

And stamping on a centipede.

(LAUGHTER)

Top-of-the-show pedophile jokes

going down well.

Good to have been on television

and finally managed to attract

so much of Jimmy Carr's audience.

The show's not aimed at you,

don't come again.

(LAUGHTER)

I'm trying to find out

what news you know about

so I can weave stories into a seamless

two-hour narrative-driven whole.

A seamless narrative-driven whole.

You have to do that, I

think...

If you're a name comic

out doing a long theatre show,

you just can't go out and do

90-minutes of unrelated little gags

that you can subsequently

chop up into smaller parcels

and resell to Mock the Week

and Live at the Apollo.

Oh, yeah. You can do that, can't you?

(LAUGHTER)

So what news do you know about?

I think the funniest news story

at the moment

is the trial of the Norwegian Neo-Nazi

mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.

You're going, "Hang on, there's

nothing funny about that, Stew."

But there is and, erm,

(LAUGHTER) it's this.

That on his website,

Anders Behring Brievik,

the Norwegian Neo-Nazi mass murderer,

has written this genuine sentence.

"Jeremy Clarkson's Top Gear

(LAUGHTER)

"Is one of the few programmes

worth watching on the BBC."

(LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE)

I know.

Now very rarely

do you see a better example

of what philosophers call

the banality of evil.

And remember all that's required

for Jeremy Clarkson to triumph

is that Richard Hammond do

nothing.

(LAUGHTER)

Remember when Jeremy Clarkson

made those jokes

about shooting strikers

and everyone complained?

There was a guy

from the Daily Telegraph

went on the Channel 4 News

to defend him and he said,

"Come on," he said,

"it was just a joke," he said.

"It's not as if a Jeremy Clarkson fan

has ever gone out and shot anyone."

(LAUGHTER)

I thought,

"Well, there was that one guy,

"the mass murderer."

Poor old Colonel Gaddafi

had a bad year last year, didn't he?

The Libyans got fed up

of their leader,

pulled him out of a sewer,

shot him in the face,

mutilated the anus of his corpse

with a knife

and chucked him

in a meat refrigeration unit,

but they did that off their own backs,

didn't they, the Libyans.

No one made them do it.

They did it entirely voluntarily

of their own initiative.

What better example is there

of the big society in action?

(LAUGHTER)

Will the big society work?

Whether we think so depends on

our immediate experience

of society around us.

Now of course, David Cameron

thinks a big society will work

because he lives in a nice little

village in Oxfordshire, Witney,

and all of four times a year,

all the local people in Witney,

that's David Cameron,

Jeremy Clarkson, Rebekah Brooks,

and the cheese bloke from Blur,

(LAUGHTER)

They all get together voluntarily.

They go out and they clear out

the waste ground in the village,

big society in action.

Now I know that big society will work

because where I live in Hackney,

in East London, last August,

all the local Turkish shopkeepers

went out onto Dalston high road

and attacked the rioters

with kebab knives.

(LAUGHTER)

Now this show is called,

Carpet Remnant World.

Now since I've been on the telly,

I'm picking up a lot of stragglers,

people who don't normally

come and see me.

This is twice as many people

as I've played to in Sheffield

before here tonight

and the kind of people that come

and see people just off the telly,

the kind of shows you go and see

by comics,

they're normally called

things like "Laughtime"

aren't they, or "Joke-A-Rama 6".

Something like that.

Now if you've seen me before,

and I hope you have,

I don't like new people coming.

(LAUGHTER)

Er...

You'll know... What... My shows,

they tend to be a relationship

between the title and the content.

That's the bare minimum

of what you should offer, I think.

Not so much this year, though.

It's not really come together

very well, this show.

It was supposed to be

about idealised notions of society

and how we behave

as collective groups and...

But I've been a bit busy

with one thing or another.

It's not really worked.

So, but what I will do is

about five minutes from the end,

I, at about 10:
00, I will...

I will repeat the phrase

"Carpet Remnant World" over some music

and that will give

the illusion of structure.

(LAUGHTER)

And big laughs down here,

for that, people down here.

The people who bought tickets first,

they've seen me before.

They're going, "Of course

there'll be content and structure.

"We've seen him before. This is

a comedic double bluff. Ha-ha", right?

But up there, there's a lot of people

they don't really know

what they've come to. They've come...

Friends have brought them,

the very worst...

Couple of people that like me,

they've gone, "Let's get

Gene and Chris to come as well."

And they've not... They've come

and they don't know who I am

and they've been whispering

all through it up there,

in the top bit there.

Like, "Is this who you wanted to see?"

(LAUGHTER)

"It seems like an aggressive lecture."

(LAUGHTER)

It's very strong,

we'll grant you that.

That whispering doubt,

that will spread all around

the top balcony up there.

And there will be no one

laughing up there by the end

because of people

bringing their friends.

I was quite happy with one night

in Sheffield, to be honest,

because when you've

brought friends along

and you can feel

it's not as good as it was last time,

which is a shame

because we're filming it tonight.

So thanks.

(LAUGHTER)

You know, being on...

I won some awards

but that doesn't help,

British Comedy Awards.

Because people go, "Oh, he's won

an award, we'll enjoy that."

You won't.

(LAUGHTER)

Winning a British Comedy Award

is like having a big sign

put over your head saying

"Hey, d*cks, come to this."

(LAUGHTER)

What can you do, though?

You can't stop people coming.

(LAUGHTER)

It'll be all right.

It's strong down here.

I'll just...

I won't even look up there.

(LAUGHTER)

So we'll press on into the void.

(LAUGHTER)

I thought I'd record this here

because last time I was in

this theatre it was really fantastic

but the audience is...

We got two nights now.

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