The Mailbag: I’m Not Chris. I’m Christopher MacArthur-Boyd!

Here Comes the Guillotine contains offensive language, mature content, and adult themes.

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This is Producer Andy, and you're listening to Here Comes the Guillotine: The Mailbag with Frankie Boyle, Susan McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, issue, or a dire need just to be heard, then email hctg at global.com.

Enjoy the episode.

Okay.

Hi Fricky Susie and Chris.

Love the podcast.

As a Yorkshireman, I've got to admit, you are 100% right about us.

Do you remember what you said about them?

No.

Not at all.

Me neither.

Mate.

What could that have been?

Were you just someone who talked about internecine rivalries between bits of Yorkshire and we were like well I'm from Leeds and he's from Bradford and he doesn't really respect where I'm from because you know what's that and it was like we don't know.

I think we basically took the angle just knowing what we're like people in Yorkshire should all pull together because you're all cunts.

Yeah.

Well we're 100% right about that.

Here is the problem.

I have a colleague who's something of a comedy absolutist.

He thinks that the humour in a joke is not dependent on the context that the joke is told in.

In other words, if something has the form of a joke, then it should be funny no matter the time or the place that the joke is told.

I think that humour is highly subjective and depends a lot on context.

Given that we work in jobs in which we deal a lot with people, should I chill out or should my colleague cut back on the jokes?

Cheers for your help.

Another guy named Chris.

You're not called Chris.

You're quite a militant anti-Chris.

I'm not Chris.

I'm Christopher.

I was actually called Chris in it.

I let it slide out of a sense of bon homie,

but now

I'm not Chris.

I'm Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

Our mailbag is quite big on very vague questions that people seem to be invested in.

So they've not really told us what he's doing or what he's saying.

What do you think?

What joke do you think his

co-workers telling?

I think

I think it's

inappropriate humour, possibly in a public facing context.

Yeah.

In Yorkshire.

So I'd imagine that there's some kind of tour gate.

Yeah.

And

they're like, you know what the Vikings did when they got a hold of you around here?

Oh, yeah.

They raped you.

Yeah, that's right.

Rap.

Weren't all pillage.

You were lucky if you got pillaged.

Oh.

A lot of stuff like that, I'd imagine.

Yeah.

Do you reckon there was one guy on every boat who never pillaged anything?

And you're like, Eric,

pillage something will you

you're not right that boy never pillaged anything he's only here for one thing

rape

yeah I think it was

really bad humor like that

um but he's a comedy absolutist who's like oh if it's funny it's funny even if it's to an elderly American tourist.

Well, this is part of the thing, isn't it, of why years ago you would get so many scandals about jokes

because it was like they were taking stuff.

Do you have any personal experience with that?

Not really.

But it was like they would take stuff that's intended for one audience and then like the tabloids or whoever would go and deliver it to another audience.

So a joke that you'd performed in Newcastle at 10pm

to a crowd of drunk bodies, drunk fucking maniacs,

presented to some daily mail readers in the home home counties at 9 a.m.

over their cornflakes.

And they go, this is completely unacceptable.

They're like, why would anyone say that?

And you're like, well, yeah, because there's a context and there's a time and a place.

And that's a concept.

It's called author by relocation.

So the idea is, you know, if you tell someone something,

you become the author.

So I had this thing.

The guy who did the speaking clock, I've ever told you this one.

Guy did the speaking clock died and added some joking column somewhere going, it was hopefully after a series of small strokes.

And this journalist from Deletaruga got in touch and went, it actually was after a series of small strokes.

And I'm going to phone his family and tell them about this joke.

Do you venice and you and

you're like, don't tell his family because you're then the author.

This is something they would never have heard.

Also, partly they want the thrill of telling the joke.

They didn't write the joke.

That is thrilling.

And they're able to disown the creative risk of the joke by saying oh this is terrible but they also get to do it you know um i find a lot of older dudes who kind of speaking comedians jokes that don't do comedy do you know what i mean

it's it's a sad life that these people do i don't really do

jokes i probably have like one or two jokes a show which isn't it doesn't sound that good for a comedian but it's mostly kind of observational and storytelling stuff and then i'll maybe do some kind of short gags at the start to kind of get into it you know so i just feel like sometimes when people want that style of like shocking joke and they come see me they're just kind of like what is this and i think they're kind of spot on

but it is a thing it's just not um end of the blackpool pew style pattern as he's not giving us any examples to work with so really any we could have worked the stuff we could you know we could have toned it down a little bit we could have punched it up we could could have punched it up we could have punched it up gave the really good version to you and then you could outshine your presumably racist rapist co-worker

rapist co-worker is a horrible phrase it sounds like you're both

you both rape him but also

under some contract situation

um

I had a I've got a pal who who's doing stand up he took a wee break for about

he's kind of started two years after me, but he took about six years off.

He's just getting back into it.

And he's having a great time.

But I put a private Instagram story up the other day saying during a Christmas night out with my work colleagues, and someone brought up that I did stand up and said, do your bit.

And these are people that he gets on with, and it's working, they're all drunk.

So I think, okay, I'll do a bit.

And he does.

He said it's the worst death he's ever had.

Nobody even reacted to that a punchline had been said.

And he said, This has worked a hundred times in the context of a comedy club, but you do it at a table, and it's like, What?

You know what I mean?

Who on earth would go all do a bet?

Like, that's the worst decision I've ever heard.

Well, what can you say?

And what you know,

come and see me, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, come see me at the fringe.

Yeah, it's my night off.

You know, you know, I'm talking about a plumber.

You know, there is a lot of lines that now,

but that's

experience that we've we've we've been asked this stuff a few times and now you just refuse to do it in a kind of jokey way.

He

he did time off, you know, he re-civilianized maybe this guy and now

he really he's considering leaving his job and like doing something else because he's like the way that they looked at him, they'll never

really respect him or

nobody at work respects anyone anyway.

That's true, yeah, you know.

So the the the way you feel about someone who's died at a Christmas dinner or something like that is the way that everybody feels about everybody in a job.

So you should take comfort from that.

Yeah, they wanted you to feel.

Of course they wanted you to work with you.

They wanted to see you fall into fucking machinery and come out as fucking sausages.

They wanted you to be threshed.

I mean, I just tell you, I thought about that time I'd done stand up at a job interview.

No.

For TGI Fridays.

Oh, wow.

They had a group.

I don't know why.

My mum said, you know, my mum's got so much bad advice for job interviews and stuff.

She'd always be like, have you handed in a C V at McDonald's?

I'd be like, oh, you know, they don't do C V's in person anymore, it's all online.

They go, but if you go down to McDonald's and you hand in a C V and you explain that you are actually a positive-minded person, they will accept that and they'll hire you because you haven't done what they've told you to do.

And you're just like, Mum, I don't I don't think that's how I'm going to be be.

Anyway,

I've been doing stand up for like a year and a half.

Wasn't very good.

I was struggling financially.

I had some debt from going to university briefly and moving back on my mum and dad

and making really terrible financial decisions.

So I was, I had to apply for a job at TJ Fridays.

They said, we're doing a group job interview at the Houghton next to the central station.

Oh, wow.

So the hundred people are there.

They split into groups.

And they get out, they have everybody.

Let's all have a dance.

They make everybody dance.

My mum told me it would be a good idea, even though TJ Fred is a fun place.

If you're doing a job interview, wear a suit.

So everybody else is dressed fun for the fun job interview.

I'm wearing a black suit like Johnny Cash.

And everybody's dancing.

And let's do some stretches.

And basically, a kind of Zumba class breaks out.

And we break into smaller groups and go, so let's go one by one, introduce each other.

We're looking for personable people.

And everybody's like, hi, my name's James.

I'm from Woodysbury.

I guess I like to watch football and go into town and have a few too many drinks.

And then it comes to me and they're like, Are you sending you an application here that you're a stand-up?

Would you like to do a stand-up for the rest of the class?

And it's like, you know, you're at work with these people.

They see you every day.

They kind of like you as much as you can, like a co-worker, but they're not actively gaining employment the worst that you do.

They're not pitted against you.

And this, this the audience and the managers who were like the hunger games hunger games and i done

like six minutes six minutes of stand-up to presumably the crispest silence that will be heard until the world ends you could just hear people dancing in the different groups

You just hear the slight shift of carpet underneath Trina as

Dan from Mugai.

Well, you know,

I guess I used to skateboard, and I'm not a much famous, but yeah, I used to skateboard, I guess, and I like monster energy drinks.

And I'm just fucking going.

So that's the thing about Scottish Independence, you know, it's like

in a suit, in a black suit at a TGI Fridays group.

I mean, that was really cool.

And what did they do?

Did they pay attention?

Did they?

Everybody just,

you know, watched me and like smiled but frowned because you know that i mean

what i'm trying to say is context counts you know you know the only thing you can do in those situations when you're in some terrible

thing

is you can keep going yeah and you can make it as uncomfortable for them as it is for you yeah and sometimes if you do that for a bit and then you explain to them yeah it's going to keep going unless they liven up yeah they actually come on board and it sounds like bullshit.

It sounds like if you're doing a tough like corporate room for example and you go, there's going to be

10 minutes of this if you start laughing and it's going to be 20 minutes if you don't.

If they believe you, sometimes they just go, fuck it.

Let's just go with this.

If you're raw.

And if they don't, you've not lost anything.

Yeah.

It was

unbelievably.

I forgot about it.

I think I excised it until I started doing it right career-wise.

And then my brain was like, Maybe you should think about this again, actually.

Here's this painful memory.

Are you trying to get to sleep?

I have a little present for you.

But Con, I mean,

I think about Stand Up is

pardon me.

A, not much of stand-up is telling jokes.

Like, you were saying that when we went to, you were like, there's not many people doing short form.

Almost none.

There's like

me, Milton Jones,

Jimmy Carr.

There's a new guy called Mark Simmons who does one-liners and he also does kind of improv one-liners and stuff.

And that's like kind of short form.

There's not many people doing it.

Listeners probably don't know, but comics, we think of it often in terms of short form and long form, which is a bit of a kind of

true because like short form people do have to build a bridge occasionally and put some stuff together and long form people do have sometimes where they just think of a joke about something well put that i'll get that in somewhere yeah you know but generally those are the two kind of camps yeah you could say observational versus one-liners but it's a bit more complicated than that isn't it yeah and like

so much of stand-up is based like i seen somebody at the fringe who was doing a great show about wanting to kill themself um and it would have maybe benefited a wee bit more from embracing the form of stand-up and like having stand-up like lighting instead of more dramatic lighting, or having a microphone, like holding a microphone just does so much.

For

this is a performance that we all recognize.

And if you take away all those things to where you're the talking stick of the shaman, exactly.

Or if you dress a certain way, I mean, like when I started doing stand-up, I was bad, but I was a wee-specky guy, and people were like, We know that, you know, we've seen Wood Dallin, we've seen whoever else we understand that archetype.

And if you're just a guy who works in a Viking Viking

tourism

tour cave.

We've built a whole life for this fucking guy.

They didn't give a cent to work with.

This fucking another guy named Chris.

I mean, come on.

It's almost certainly tourist information.

Tourist information.

Public face and job deals with a lot of people.

Your colleagues making inappropriate jokes.

I mean, come on.

Humour is dependent on the context of the joke is told.

Obviously.

There's like a real contradiction at the heart of it all, isn't there?

Of people getting shocked by jokes, of like, well, why are you fucking telling anyone about it?

If you think this is something no one should say, then don't fucking sit and like, and he said these very words,

and they are something no one should say.

And you're like, you know, it's like the fucking policeman taking your evidence about a flasher getting his fucking cocket.

People like to hear stuff you're not supposed to say.

That's kind of the fun of it.

And sometimes that's a very gentle thing, like, good boy else, some of my kids, they really annoy me.

And that's like a slight taboo pushing that people, some like kind of, you know, people will be like, oh, I can't believe you said that.

Or it's like, you know, more

transgressive stuff.

I guess the kind of line is like, when it's on your timeline, you know.

Like,

I remember someone saying that, like, dude, stand up.

There was a question about like censorship.

Have you ever been censored when you're on a TV show?

And he was like, well, you are being a guest in someone's house when they put the TV on, so you do kind of have to be respectful to a certain degree.

And I think when you're on someone's timeline and the algorithms offering up stand-up, and you know,

it's basically a cyberpunk extension of your mind at some point in your timeline on a social media website.

Do you know what I mean?

Someone's just putting in this, but all this, like you're a guest in someone's house, yeah.

But remember all the boring guests that came around, like your fucking

your mum's cousin and stuff, and you'd have to get the fucking cake out and blah, blah, and hear about who died and all that.

But occasionally,

a guest came in a house and like your mum's pal had brought her husband, in our case, a guy called John Dixon, who liked a baby, right?

Do you know what I mean?

And there's a guest in the house, and suddenly the atmosphere changes in the house.

And he's a funny guy, and you know, and it's great that someone has come in and disrespected the rules.

I remember this guy came around, and like, Margaret Thatcher was in getting her varicus veins taken out and he was like,

I wish I was the surgeon, Adam and like, where's your varicus veins, Maggie?

They're up there, I'll fucking get them.

But the benefit of the listener up there was her throat.

You know, so a guest in someone's house also has a fucking responsibility to be entertaining.

Yeah.

You know, life isn't all decorum.

I think there's also that thing of like, you know, Maria Bamford's thing where she goes, it's never just a joke.

which I don't, I think it's kind of putting it too strongly.

It's often not a joke,

it's but it's got to come from somewhere, yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

So, if people are the people who are up on stage or on television making jokes in the first place, please take into account the kind of psyche that you might be dealing with and make the allowances you would make for any other fucking crazy person.

Yeah, yeah,

should you chill out or should my colleague cut back on the jokes?

I mean, I would say engineer it away from me, be fired, and solve all your problems.

I can't have every response to every question be kill someone, bloodstained dildo in the locker,

bloodstained dildo, so not silicon-based

a wooden like almost like a policeman's trenching, but with a steak that you'd kill a vampire with

vampire steak, your co-worker's ass.

Say you thought he was a vampire,

You thought it was a vampire's mouth.

No, you're you're you're incriminating him.

You're not actually

sodomizing him.

That would be fucked up.

Yeah, it would be fucked up.

Okay, give him a vampire steak and you eat loads of beetroots.

Just pick all the people in your town who look most likely to go missing.

So don't do anything yourself, but just get to know everybody that's a bit on the edge and get a memento from them.

I just like a handkerchief.

Can you cough into this?

And then one day one of them will go missing.

You get the relevant stuff from your file.

Your swab.

You look through your lockup and you go, there are her tights.

And you wrap them around a steak, stick it in his locker, bubble unco.

It's as easy as that.

It's as easy as that.

Most of the stuff that we say on this podcast would be completely unacceptable in any other context.

Luckily, we've created a lot of things.

It's completely unacceptable in about six months.

i should imagine legally things are going to tighten up you think so

yeah well not six months like five years like at the end of this labour government we'll get a super right wing

authoritarian yeah kind of thing the you can't say anything mob will be lethally enforcing the fact that you can't say anything not that this government isn't authoritarian but it will go absolutely mental

anyway i hope that answers the question and again chris uh i hope that your job as a tour guide in the the where there's presumably only about four people in that job.

It's presumably like the TGI Fridays of Yorkshire getting into that.

Maybe just leave this episode on a loop on a Bluetooth speaker in your staff room, and you'll hear it at some point and go, Oh, that sounds like me.

I guess I'll listen to these two fucking mental Scottish people

and cut back on the rusque gags.

Thank you for listening to Here Comes the Guillotine Mailbag with Frankie Boyle, Susie McCabe, and Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

If you have a problem, dilemma, or issue that you think Frankie, Susie, and Christopher can fix, email hctg at global.com.

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