TO Edinburgh’s Stand Comedy Club to see the scabrous and very funny Jay Lafferty, who I think is one of Scotland’s top stand-up artists. Lafferty is compering tonight’s show and works her audience expertly between each act, gently mocking accents, jobs, clothes, countries of origin and relationship status.
She is also credited with the funniest joke – in a very crowded field – about Brexit. It was picked up by the New York Times in 2019 which used it on its front page as a means of trying to explain to its audience the madness of that time.
Lafferty is a regular panellist on the BBC’s comedy quiz show Breaking The News and her sharp, 38-second Brexit apercu was used to front up that week’s programme. I make no apologies for republishing it here in full and introducing it to a much wider audience (inset winking emoji here).
“So the way I understand it is that Parliament have said no to Theresa’s deal. And they’ve said no to no deal, but some of them said yes to no deal but no to Theresa’s deal, but not as many that said no to no deal and no to Theresa’s deal, but they don’t actually have a deal of their own, which is a big deal because without a deal then no deal is more likely to be the deal that’s dealt, and the people who want the deal can’t be dealing with that.”
I’m moved to confess, though, that this is a somewhat elaborate way of trailing my full interview with Lafferty in next week’s paper. And besides, if I reprint her joke this week it will free up an extra 100 words or so for the interview.
Auntie’s just not relative
I FIRST met Lafferty during a recording of Breaking The News and at a time well before the BBC first began getting wide about some of my politics and my criticism of some of the mince we pay it for.
I hadn’t been familiar with the programme and had mistakenly assumed it was another political panel discussion.
A producer had kindly sent notes on what to expect, advising that it might be a good idea to do some prep on content. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” thought I. My haughty carelessness was almost to be my undoing.
On reaching the venue in Edinburgh, I found that the other guests were all professional stand-up artists and sharper than the devil’s jodhpurs.
Worse, when I peeked beyond the curtain, I found a live audience of about 200 people. I was in way above my head and miles out of my comfort zone. Plus, I was a total fud for not prepping. And so it was now fight or flight.
Somehow I struggled through to the end without making too much of a horse’s fundament of myself … and with the kindness and generosity of Jay Lafferty, her professional pals and Des Clarke, the show’s splendid host.
I think I was invited back for Breaking The News a couple of times.
And then it moved onto television. And so the invites have dried up, probably on entirely reasonable aesthetic grounds.
Pressing political matters
SOCIAL media has many quotidien delights
and some occasional edifications. Many of these occur when a big-ticket news event is unfolding, such as this week’s resignation of Theresa May. Or whoever it was.
Thus, we’ve all been entertained by the Daily Star’s lettuce saga in which the tabloid predicted (rightly) that the stalwart salad accoutrement would last longer than, ah yes, Liz Truss at 10 Downing Street.
The tabs are far more artful at commandeering comestibles and animals for their fell purposes.
About 20 years ago, this paper ran an advertising campaign featuring rats running all over the mighty Herald crest.
I also once mocked up the crest of the Scottish Rugby Union with maggots crawling about its escutcheon.
Not perhaps what our poor readers were expecting when they read their paper with their bacon and eggs on a Sunday morning.
The flipside of such jollity is when Scotland’s assorted poundland savants vie with each other to be all witty and eloquent about these occasions. At these times they don their imaginary togas and take to their fantasy forums to hand down their micro-sermons.
All of them affect to be emotionally scarred for the rest of their
middle-class, well-recompensed lives about the Liz Truss micro-era.
They proclaim and declaim all over the shop with terrifying certainty of one who thinks he’s happened upon the key to all philosophical truths. It leaves me quite knackered.
A trippy week at Westminster
AT The Stand on Friday night, Jay Lafferty was showing she had lost none of the fleetness of thought that produced her Brexit joke.
Addressing a young Canadian couple in the front row who had disclosed they were backpacking around Scotland, she said: “You’re holiday’s lasted longer than Liz Truss.”
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