Stewart Lee: Carpet Remnant World Page #2

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More people come, but you can see

it's a worse kind of person, isn't it?

(LAUGHTER)

Shame.

(LAUGHTER)

To have gone to all this trouble

with all these cameras.

"Oh, come to Sheffield,

it was brilliant last time."

You know, it was, but...

it's all right, innit? It's not...

(LAUGHTER)

Going well down here, innit?

But up there.

These people down here are thinking,

"Oh, that's the kind of thing he does.

"Mucks about like this.

It'll be all right."

And up there there's people going,

"I've not seen him before.

"He doesn't seem to be able

to do standup."

(LAUGHTER)

I can. I can do it really well,

actually. I'm really good at it.

I'm so good at it

that one of the things I do,

is I make it look like I can't do it,

but I can.

And if you're sitting there

having been brought by friends

thinking, "Oh, he can't do it."

The question you have to...

I've been on stage

thousands of times literally.

The question you have to ask

yourselves up there, people's friends,

is how many times

have you been to standup

and what kind of acts

have you seen?

It's maybe four or five times.

You haven't seen the right sorts of

people. You've got no context for me.

So you're not in any position

to have an opinion about it.

(LAUGHTER)

Good, that's warmed the room up.

(LAUGHTER)

It'll be all right,

don't worry about it. Okay.

So on May the second, last year,

I was driving along the M4,

that's what I mainly do now.

I mainly drive around on motorways

or look after my kids,

that's why I have not had really

enough time to make this show good.

So I was driving on the M4,

it was the day Bin Laden was shot

by the Americans

and there were all different Americans

coming on the radio

talking about what they thought about

it and it made me think: What we like,

collective groups of people,

here in society.

Here's four real quotes

by real Americans

on May the second,

the day Bin Laden was shot.

This first guy, he's called Thomas

Cox, he's a construction worker,

talking in Times Square

on Radio 4, and he said,

"I made Photoshop pictures

of the Statue of Liberty

"holding Osama's bloody severed head

"and handed them out to the crowd.

It's payback."

(LAUGHTER)

It's not, is it?

The payback for Osama surely was being

shot in the face at pointblank range.

Thomas Cox's offensive collage...

(LAUGHTER)

It merely adds insult to injury.

(LAUGHTER)

Bin Laden was buried at sea,

you'll remember.

This Thomas Cox goes on, he says,

"We should have mounted

his head on a spike.

"I am hoping that the fish

and the crabs are having a good..."

(LAUGHTER)

That's never got a laugh before.

I'm glad we came to Sheffield.

After all, people found

the combination of fish and crab

amusing here

in a way that no other

British city has.

(LAUGHTER)

Erm...

It was worth it... But only down here.

The people up there...

People there,

"Fish and crab, who cares?"

He said... There isn't time

to improvise tonight,

unfortunately, we're filming it,

so I just move on.

Otherwise, I could have got 10 minutes

out of that fish and crab bit.

(LAUGHTER)

Hello, Michael? Yes.

Are you bringing the Roadshow

here to Sheffield?

Yeah, fish and crab stuff,

they love it.

(LAUGHTER)

I basically go everywhere first

and I sound it out for him.

He ignores what I say.

(LAUGHING) He, erm...

"We should have mounted

his head on a spike."

He said, "I'm hoping that the fish

and the crabs are having..."

No. See, second time...

(LAUGHTER)

Yeah, only once, though, only once.

Don't milk it.

Paul Tonkinson will sort it out

for you, all right.

Erm...

"We should have mounted

his head on a spike.

"I'm hoping the fish and the crabs are

having a good meal on his eyeballs."

Now, it's a very apposite quote that

because as you all know,

under Sharia law,

if a Muslim man is buried at sea,

it is required that their body be

protected from the attentions of fish,

and I think it was that that this

Thomas Cox was alluding to there.

(LAUGHTER)

If you've not seen me before,

I don't think that,

I think the opposite of that.

(LAUGHTER)

Okay?

That's one of the things I do, I...

I make a very bold statement

about something,

but the implication is

actually the opposite of...

I'm gonna do that

about six times tonight,

and then later on, about 9:45,

I'll go on about something

for too long.

(LAUGHTER)

That will be later, all right.

Now, this next quote

from an American

called Steven Reginella,

again on Radio 4 in Times Square,

and he said,

"They should have brought

Bin Laden's body here

"and hung it from the lamppost.

"In fact, they should have roasted

him here like a chicken,

(LAUGHTER)

"So he would have seen

what it felt like."

(LAUGHTER)

It's all over the place now, innit?

"They should have brought Bin Laden's

body here," alive, presumably,

"and hung it from the lamppost."

What lamppost is that?

The New York City designated

corpse-roasting lamppost.

Who should have done that?

They should. Who are they?

The New York City designated

corpse-roasting team.

They don't do a lot

of corpse roasting.

Their duties mainly entail

maintenance of

the corpse-roasting lamppost.

"Roast him like a chicken, so

he would have seen what it felt like."

(LAUGHTER)

"There you are, Bin Laden,

on the lamppost, roasting, yeah.

'Can you see what that feels like?"

(LAUGHTER)

(LAUGHTER)

"I can f... I can f...

I can feel what it feels like."

(LAUGHTER)

"That wasn't the question. What...

"What if we hold this mirror up,

a full-length mirror?

(LAUGHTER)

"Can you see what it feels like now?"

(LAUGHTER)

"I can see what it looks like?"

(LAUGHTER)

"This is exactly the kind of unhelpful

behaviour we would expect..."

Roasted like a chicken. Why?

We've all roasted a chicken at

some point in our lives, haven't we?

No need for this kind of

frontier justice, is there?

He didn't have any issues

with chickens, did he? Bin Laden?

It was the West that he hated,

wasn't it?

And our values, not chicken.

Imagine if he had hated chickens,

Bin Laden.

And he deployed the same level

of firepower

over a 10-year period

to the eradication of poultry

that he had to

Western Democratic systems.

I'm not an expert

but I think we'd be looking at a very

different global geopolitical setup.

(LAUGHTER)

Again, the laughs are down here

for that, aren't they?

Up there, the people down here.

People up there going, "What are

they laughing at down there?"

I'll tell you. I said,

(LAUGHTER)

If he'd hated chickens,

we'd be looking at a very different

global geopolitical setup.

And the people down here, I think,

they just thought for a second

about what that would be like.

(LAUGHTER)

They imagined it in their own heads.

I don't know what they imagined.

Chickens on fire, I don't know.

But the important thing, people's

friends who've come by mistake,

is they put in

an extra bit of effort

and they got more laughs out of that

in their own heads,

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