Weird Turkish Barber Shops (with Stewart Lee)

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Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language. It's Amanda Unucci here.

Speaker 1 Helen is off for a few weeks, so we have a guest, Helen. It's

Speaker 1 probably writer, comedian, journalist, Stuart Lee.

Speaker 1 Thanks for I'm not really a journalist.

Speaker 1 Just having work published in newspapers doesn't make you a journalist. A bit like if you put a pig in a stable, it's not a horse, you know.
Oh, yeah, we've been down this argument before, actually.

Speaker 1 Really? Yes, the whole stable argument. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 It normally ends up in a bad place, that argument. But yeah, I mean, it's just, it was interesting writing funny columns for newspapers because

Speaker 1 you get held to journalistic standards, which is not necessarily how we work.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, we'll be talking about this in a moment because the phrase of the week we're going to look at is weird Turkish barbers.

Speaker 1 We'll explain the context and why it might have happened in a moment. Normally at this point, Helen says, but before we do that, what have you been up to this week, Armando?

Speaker 1 And my answer to the imaginary Helen is, I've been reading about the Nazis. I've been reading about the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany.
It's a book called Hitler's People by Richard J.

Speaker 1 Evans, who's

Speaker 1 been a lifelong expert on the Nazis, the rise of the Nazis and the culture. He's very good on exploring how it was an entire nation could be taken on this weird, appalling journey.
Yeah, imagine that.

Speaker 1 But I happened to be reading a passage at the time Donald Trump was talking about making American showers great again,

Speaker 1 signing in some legislation. I happened to be reading a passage where Hitler was talking about not just the people's car, but the people's fridge.

Speaker 1 The Nazis launched the people's fridge. I have no idea what made it different from anyone else's fridge or any political party's fridge, but it struck me that there was a correlation there between

Speaker 1 politicians trying to identify with the people through household domestic lives.

Speaker 1 It's really hard teaching history at the moment because whenever you look at things like that about the Nazis and the 30s, the parallels to what's happening in the States, what's happening on the far right here, what's happening in lots of bits of Europe are so obvious, right?

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 if you make that explicit, then it must be really hard to teach it without

Speaker 1 going, you know, like what's happening now.

Speaker 1 It must be really hard. Definitely kind of

Speaker 1 when talking about the past, I mean, some people say he did a bad thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, you know, because I remember when we were in Russia doing a bit of prep for the death of Stalin and asking people in their sort of 20s and 30s, what are you taught about Stalin?

Speaker 1 And they said, it's very much left to you to decide. So it's some people say, you know, he was responsible for the death of millions.

Speaker 1 Other people say he brought the Soviet Union into the 20th century. It's a great reason for that.

Speaker 1 You know, from working for the BBC that balance is very important. It is very important.

Speaker 1 If something's true, it's really important to get something that isn't true to balance it it out.

Speaker 1 Which takes us to comedy, because you were talking about the imprecision.

Speaker 1 Well, it's actually, no, it's a deliberate imprecision in comedy, which is you exaggerate, you extend the truth, or you undercut the truth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Being held to account by journalistic standards.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, the example I was thinking of is: I mean, I stopped writing to The Observer about a month ago, and I realised that I can't, initially I thought, oh, I'll operate as an independent maverick satirist and do my own things.

Speaker 1 In other words, you can't do that because you need the legal support of something like the BBC or the Observer to get you out of the messes you get in.

Speaker 1 And so one of the messes I got in last year was I'd done a bit about Mumsnet, some stuff that they'd said, that had been said on Mumsnet. And they complained about it.

Speaker 1 And as it happened, the things that I'd said they'd said were broadly true. So that kind of went.
But what they objected to was that I'd called it the school's advice, recipes, and hate site, Mumsnet.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 And they said, well, it's not, it's not just, it's really patronising to say that because it obviously there's all sorts of things you could have chosen yeah other than schools advice recipes and hate right but to put what's funny about that is putting trivial things yes next to a really serious sounding and there is a lot of hate on mum's net there's a lot of hate on the guest book of any website so they they

Speaker 1 why couldn't you have said you know legal advice um things about medical things for children and and like that would have been a terrible punch really i know really all the really great things that are on it and obviously it's because i'm trying to go da-da-da-da da da bang right

Speaker 1 it has to even rhythmically make sense and hate has got one syllable so you know the the kind of law for comedy in print and and for when I have to do stand up on when it finally gets cleared by lawyers for telly is the setups have to be accurate but then you can exaggerate in the punchline but where we seem to go wrong now is even the exaggerated punchline is queried as being factually inaccurate itself right yeah because I was gonna say you you're punchline there there was an element to it of you knowing you assuming that the readers would know you are are being willfully inaccurate.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course, yeah, because I'm, because the character of the writer of me is this person who's got a grudge or whatever, you know, so it's sort of you have to come to, I mean, you do get into some really weird rabbit holes where, you know, I used to write really much more in a deliberately incomprehensible, mad way, almost like a stream of consciousness.

Speaker 1 When I went through a phase of writing about Andrew Neal every week, and I would try and think of different things that his hair could have been made of, normally forms of cereal crop or whatever.

Speaker 1 And like people,

Speaker 1 in the end, like the subjects were going,

Speaker 1 is his hair made of that? And I was going, no.

Speaker 1 Have you got a specific example then?

Speaker 1 I guess they thought, did you know something that you hadn't let on about? Well, did it, like, I saw I had to say, Stuart, you say his hair is made of wheater bits. No, yeah.

Speaker 1 Have you got proof of that?

Speaker 1 Have you got a second source? No, you haven't got a second source.

Speaker 1 But it was really good in that way. It made you think really carefully about what you were doing, which was good.
But it's a relief to not not have to do it, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, you're here now. I know.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm here.
We're actually looking. I mean, I want to say that.
Well,

Speaker 1 did you ever get that where you were queried about something that's clearly a ludicrously exaggerated thing for comic effects?

Speaker 1 The only time I think I have been in the thick of it, the only time I got a note from the lawyers was

Speaker 1 in the script, Malcolm says, that's inevitable. It's as inevitable as what they'll find in Jimmy Saville's basement after he's died yeah

Speaker 1 and they said you can't say that and we were saying but we haven't specified what would be found he's a very litigious i mean obviously he's dead um uh it's a very litigious yeah but we haven't i mean it could just be concrete it could be old vinyl records that he's forgotten about you know we haven't said anything that's funny i mean that's obviously what the thinking is behind that joke is he's this character that people thought oh he's a bit strange he's the kind of bloke that will have awful things in his cellar when he's died guess what he was right and um believe it or not lots of people didn't know but there would still be discussions higher up about this conversation i'm sure oh yeah for all these reasons yes i mean this this conversation probably won't make it into the show and if you hear it what it's this what i'm saying now has probably been this is ai probably doing this yes i can confirm that I'm speaking to AI.

Speaker 1 What I cannot confirm or deny is whether this voice of mine is actually AI.

Speaker 1 So there's no way of knowing whether either of us are real. Well, we may not be.

Speaker 1 We may be AI is just talking to each other, which of course is what 90% of the internet's going to be in two years' time. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 It's funny that what can you I remember when again when I was in the double act with Rich, we did this little sketch where I was dressed as Richard Madeley and I had a shopping trolley and in the shopping trolley was loads of alcohol.

Speaker 1 Because if you remember, he's been accused of shoplifting.

Speaker 1 alcohol for I think he had done by accident something and the lawyer for the BBC went you can't say that and i went well why and she said well you just can't and i went well look he did do it and in the end she she conceded that i could be seen as richard madely with a shopping trolley full of alcohol which i didn't refer to at any point that was part of the joke it's just there but then she said well you can do it legally but why do you have to make fun of people she said

Speaker 1 And yet, weirdly, your argument there is it is actually journalistically accurate what you're doing.

Speaker 1 It's not an exaggeration yeah but it was she just thought it wasn't very nice you know but that's not their job is it yeah

Speaker 1 comedy usually isn't very nice yeah um he did me he did meet me once though and he said he was a bit upset about that then he told me an anecdote you'll have to cut this

Speaker 1 apropos of nothing richard madeley went yeah you had a da da

Speaker 1 whatever he was doing

Speaker 1 so uh what stuart that the story stewart told me, as recounted to him by Richard Midley, obviously has been cut. I mean, it's awful.

Speaker 1 Certainly, it's not going to go out on Radio 4.

Speaker 1 I've got a little monitor up here that shows me everyone in the other side of the screen, and they've all left the room. Right, yeah, that bad is that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Before I get a call from Helen saying, I go away, and already you've descended into Jimmy Saville. And shall we bring it back to stuff happening this week? So, weird Turkish barbers.

Speaker 1 Why am I bringing this up?

Speaker 1 Okay, so Robert Jenrick did a video of him accosting people dodging fares on the tube shouting oh do you think you should be doing that should you be doing that it's annoying watching people do this and and he was dressed in he wasn't wearing his politicians costume he was wearing his sort of normal bloke costume so no tie just a shirt and you know slacks and then he put it up on tick tock And then he said, it's annoying to watch people break the law and get away with it.

Speaker 1 Bike theft, phone theft, tool theft, shoplifting, drugs and tone centres, weird Turkish barber shops. It's all chipping away at society.

Speaker 1 Well, first of all, I mean 2020 when he was housing secretary, I think, he fast-tracked to housing development by Richard Desmond, who was the express guy, the Tory donor,

Speaker 1 used to make pornography in order to avoid this housing levy. He got him off £45 million.

Speaker 1 There are not enough tube fares in the world. So he's absolutely not got a leg to stand on.

Speaker 1 He should be standing at the ticket barriers, giving people money to make up for what he has helped to rob out of the economy.

Speaker 1 Forever, for penance,

Speaker 1 just handing people a ticket going, shame,

Speaker 1 shame.

Speaker 1 It's absolutely outrageous. We have to point out that Generic later reversed that decision to allow that.

Speaker 1 But the quote is: he said it was unlawful by reason of apparent bias, which is one of those absolute non-apologies, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Like when you say to your wife, I'm sorry that you are upset, as if it's their fault still.

Speaker 1 Yes, I want to discuss this week the use of the media by politicians, the use of entertainment formats by politicians. We've had Generic putting up his thing.

Speaker 1 Liz Truss was advertising whiskey on TikTok. She was at an event in Scunthorpe.
It's a terrible risk for the whiskey industry. I mean,

Speaker 1 do they need to lose money for some reason? Is it like the producers? Well, it was a new brand of whiskey.

Speaker 1 It's a brand that's been invented as a a tax loss right

Speaker 1 and they thought how are we going to make sure this fails we'll get liz truss to endorse it it was a new whiskey brand founded by a bare knuckle fighter months after he was released from prison right douglas joyce um

Speaker 1 and he's standing next to liz truss at an event in scunthorpe saying uh just remember dougie joyce loves you and liz truss says liz truss loves you as well it's difficult i mean people must say this to you all the time and i'm going to say it to you now again but it's like something out of the thick of it, in it.

Speaker 1 Liz Truss is staying next to a bare-knuckle fighter who's just been released from prison, who's invented a whiskey brand.

Speaker 1 In the thick of it, the focus group of the SPADS would be trying to work out whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Well, she's actually replied because she came under a lot of sticks.

Speaker 1 She says, it's understood Mrs. Truss was not paid to attend the event.
Liz attended the Scunthorpe event to support the people working to regenerate the town and Scunthorpe FC.

Speaker 1 I thought the government believed in the rehabilitation of offenders,

Speaker 1 which shows a terrific self-awareness on her part. Normally, you know, the media was seen as the observer and the reporter of politics, but now that distinction is worn down.

Speaker 1 We have politicians being media savvy and also becoming TV presenters. They have their own channel, GB News, which a lot of MPs or former MPs are presenting.

Speaker 1 So that kind of distinction of being held to account has been slightly different.

Speaker 1 They've seen it work for Trump in the States to go from being a TV personality to,

Speaker 1 I mean, you know, I'm not the first person to say this, but his ambushes of foreign leaders in the Oval Office are like the confrontations you would get on a Jerry Springer show on reality television, where they're stage managed, the clips are ready to roll, you know, and the surprise gets.

Speaker 1 Turn the lights down, show them the videos. That's sort of trial by reality television.

Speaker 1 That's right, and you're not allowed because he is the president of the United States and you're in the Oval Office and this is Great Outlive, you're not allowed to say things like, that clip you're showing there, have you verified that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. What's the source of that? But people should start doing that.
That's the thing.

Speaker 1 I mean, Keir Starmer, for all his faults, did have a bit of pushback about that when Vance started talking about freedom of speech in the UK. And

Speaker 1 because Vance has got this idea that you're not allowed to pray in your own home, which is a deliberate or perhaps genuine misunderstanding of the laws about protest outside abortion clinics.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 from that, he'll extrapolate that the American tech barons should be able to push any social media platforms into this country entirely unregulated because we can't be trusted with freedom of speech.

Speaker 1 It's a deliberate strategy strategy for all that.

Speaker 1 I mean, Helen actually, who's Helen who's not here, wrote a very good thing recently about how when the right-wing philosopher Douglas Murray went on Joe Rogan's podcast, it was very strange because previously all those guys were on the same team.

Speaker 1 They're on team anti-woke. Wokeness is rubbish.

Speaker 1 But Douglas Murray, for all of his faults, Helen points out, comes from a journalistic tradition on some level, whereas Joe Rogan comes from a tradition of reading things on websites about the Bigfoot right and like so even though they both want to see wokeness destroyed

Speaker 1 and must be delighted about the Trump victory and Rogan partly engineered that there's a clash of approaches where Douglas Murray at least researches things and goes to places he may draw conclusions that people find objectionable, but he's

Speaker 1 got some basis in

Speaker 1 whereas Rogan's just a man like in a pub kind of talking to some guy about things who then reaches billions of people.

Speaker 1 So it's interesting seeing that the anti-woke right starting to unravel as these, this unlikely alliance of idiocy and far-right fact-checked journalism kind of collide.

Speaker 1 It's not going to work in the end.

Speaker 1 Well, this is what Jon Stewart was saying last week, which is like he's astonished by the number of people who approach him saying, we come to you for the news, when in fact he is a comedian.

Speaker 1 No, he's a comedian who's renowned for his like forensic approach to politics in America. And he's very funny about it.
But I was asking him, you know, should that be a responsibility that you have?

Speaker 1 Shouldn't this be with someone else? Shouldn't this be with the news journalists rather than comedians? It's a strange... Well, you know,

Speaker 1 sometimes it is left to us.

Speaker 1 I mean, for all the time that I was at The Observer, one thing that a rabbit hole that I went down with was how fake grassroots organisations that were associated with Tufton Street think tanks were trying to undermine the national trust, presumably to get their own people onto the board, which is is protected due to a historical quirk of fate.

Speaker 1 If you can get people onto the board, you can free up the land usage. You can, you can get, you know, there's all sorts of things.
And I kept writing funny stuff about that every couple of months.

Speaker 1 And I think it actually may have made a difference because certainly people said to me, I didn't know about that.

Speaker 1 And I voted in the AGM because of that, to try to protect the land from whatever agenda it is. So that was a thing.

Speaker 1 And people do come up to me in the street and say that material I've done has helped them to think about things or feel less less alone, which is weirdly an odd kind of responsibility that you suddenly really have.

Speaker 1 It's quite overwhelming.

Speaker 1 This is a weird, like, if you look at, this is my, my, it's not really a theory, it's an observation about the cycle, because if you think if we have journalists, politicians, entertainers,

Speaker 1 what's happened is a lot of journalists have gone into politics, like Boris Johnson, Michael Govie, they're from the

Speaker 1 a lot of politicians have become entertainers. Well, you know what?

Speaker 1 And therefore the entertainers have had to become journalists. You know, the community.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 Steve Bannon said politics is downstream of culture, right? He figured this out ages ago.

Speaker 1 If you can get a Joe Rogan upstream of where people's opinions are formed, Joe Rogan can relieve himself into the river of the discourse

Speaker 1 with his idiocy. And that will flow down to the point at which opinions are formed and it affects how votes are cast.
And Steve Bannon said that.

Speaker 1 The politicians have realized that culture is upstream of politics, they're trying to get out of politics into culture and then back into politics through the back door of culture. It is weird, right?

Speaker 1 When we were doing the comedy vehicle, which I worked on with you for the first two seasons, just makes this seem like exactly the kind of nepotistic programme people hate about the BBC.

Speaker 1 Although, can I just point out this is only about the fifth time I've been on the BBC in a decade. But anyway,

Speaker 1 you'd have to apologize for being on or were you pleading for more appearances neither? Neither.

Speaker 1 I already regret doing this.

Speaker 1 By the way, it's nothing nepotistic about us too being here, having done something like this five years ago. But it's not like

Speaker 1 it's our nephews that are doing this. Oh, no, yeah.
It's still us. Well, I am your nephew in many ways.

Speaker 1 But what I noticed on Comedy Vehicle was I'd have some sort of joke about something like Boris Johnson had said, and it would be relentlessly fact-checked by lawyers.

Speaker 1 In a way that his own speeches never were, right? Yes. They never, and they're full of, and Trump's speech about transgender mice

Speaker 1 falls apart. Transgender mice.
He did a speech on transgender mice. Trump said that Americans were funding billions of pounds of research into transgender mice, right?

Speaker 1 And of course, this inflamed his base. They're trying to make mice change their gender.
But actually, it was transgenic, right? And the word trans means.

Speaker 1 The word trans doesn't mean what he thinks it means. He thinks trans means to do with transgender.
But trans means to change.

Speaker 1 And the word transgenic is about introducing foreign DNA into a mouse's DNA to see could be used for curing cancer, all sorts of things. So, it was funding transgenic research, right?

Speaker 1 And then this was fact-checked by comedians, and then the White House issued a statement which itself about the loser media are saying this isn't true, and just got a load of scientific information they didn't understand and bodged it all together to try and make out that he was right.

Speaker 1 But it wasn't there, there's no experiments to make mice transgender, there should be, because mice should

Speaker 1 If mice

Speaker 1 think they're in, they should be allowed to change. We don't know what they're thinking.

Speaker 1 We don't know what they're thinking. We need to find out.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 We need to fund it.

Speaker 1 But either way, it's not happening, right?

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Speaker 1 And what about politicians telling jokes? Because they do hire speech writers now. Yeah, it's really

Speaker 1 more human

Speaker 1 by being able to kind of deliver a lie. Yeah, but they're really bad at it, aren't they?

Speaker 1 I mean, on the whole, I mean, it's a shame because, you know, she's not in government anymore, so it's ridiculous to pick on her.

Speaker 1 But Penny Morden, I always felt particularly sorry for the spad that was writing Penny Morden stuff was clearly a fan of stand-up and had some understanding of how it worked I have no recollection of her doing jokes

Speaker 1 actually she did but they but she managed to kill them all because okay when I was working at when I was working at the Royal Shakespeare Company last year I was um

Speaker 1 it was marvellous I was asked I was so drunk that I ran over a dog in Stratford that's not true it's not true

Speaker 1 no I got asked to um and there are just for balance there are other animals there's times I've helped

Speaker 1 actually yesterday I fed a bee some some sugar water right in the garden because it looked like it was having a bad time a little tip yesterday i had to bury the carcass of a bird that had been dropped by a kestrel did you

Speaker 1 really yes did you that's a great yesterday i had to bury the carcass of a bird that had been dropped by a kestrel that's a really great sentence but it's also something that a metropolitan liberal elitist would do isn't it you live where there are kestrels don't you yeah yeah see

Speaker 1 and that's what's wrong that's the countryside isn't it yeah it's got metropolitan Anyway, I'm just saying I helped to be. I'm suggesting the cash was commute.
Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 1 They're commute into London. They commute into London.

Speaker 1 And they bring the dead bird

Speaker 1 fly tip

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 create a route.

Speaker 1 And then take the next train back out to the country. Anyway,

Speaker 1 was it the RSC?

Speaker 1 I got asked to write the

Speaker 1 rewrite by the director Wills Wilson. I got asked to rewrite the Porter speech from Macbeth to update it, right? And this was...
To make it better.

Speaker 1 Well, to make it better, yeah, but actually, what it was was, you know, Macbeth is set in the dark ages. All the jokes are about the politics of 1600.
So obviously, that's what was happening.

Speaker 1 So I kept all the same rhythms, sentence structures, and subject material, but made it about people from now. It was very popular in the room.

Speaker 1 If you read the Daily Telegraph and the Mail, you'd think that the whole world had been destroyed by it and the culture was over forever.

Speaker 1 But what was interesting, the actress that did it, Alison Peebles, was brilliant.

Speaker 1 But initially, I realized that actors, they feel they have to act out the lines and deliver them and try and give them meaning. And what we do in stand-up is you sort of,

Speaker 1 you have to say things as if they mean nothing, as if they've just casually occurred to you.

Speaker 1 In fact, I spend my life, I spend 250 nights every 18 months trying to make a thing sound as if it's just occurred to me.

Speaker 1 And the way I do that is by drinking heavily so that I'm normally in the verge of forgetting it. But not really.
I don't, okay, for balance. Don't do that.

Speaker 1 I drink sugar water like a bee on the whole to give me energy. But we had to go through the process of forgetting to make it sound casual.

Speaker 1 And Penny Morden used to try to give everything weight and meaning. And so you could feel it dying away.

Speaker 1 And it reminded me of when Lenny Bruce was on trial, you know, the police would do his routines obviously really badly

Speaker 1 in court. And he went, you're busting me for his act, which I thought is really great because they were doing his lines really just in a factual sort of way.

Speaker 1 You're busting me for his activities for his act.

Speaker 1 And so, whoever had written, whoever was writing her stuff, it must have been

Speaker 1 joke, don't you?

Speaker 1 Well, it's things like you know, Bloomberg UK politics is listened to by people that own the country, political thinking is listened to by people who run the country, the rest is politics, is produced by people who failed at running the country, women with balls is listened to by people who really should be running the country, and Chopper's podcast is listened to by people who think the country should have a royal yacht, right?

Speaker 1 She didn't much, I know,

Speaker 1 I know, yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but imagine if you could save that. She had to make it sound as if it had just occurred to her in the moment, and then it would be passable.
But it was when it was sort of

Speaker 1 drawn out. It's also quite overwritten, isn't it?

Speaker 1 It's kind of too deliberate.

Speaker 1 You have to write it and then forget it and underwrite it. This is like.
I know you did a brilliant thing on that. I remember.
Oh, this is 30 years ago.

Speaker 1 It was towards the nine leading up to 1997. We bring the benefit of history.

Speaker 1 This is a warning from history um a lot of politicians were making jokes in their speeches in the lead up to the 1997 election i was doing a show that friday night armistice and we decided to take those jokes that politicians had used and put them into a stand-up comedy routine and then go out into live venues go on stage and do that material as if it were our own and film the audience reaction.

Speaker 1 So we had, I mean, it was awful because I had to go up and be introduced as a manager unit she, you've seen him with Tale.

Speaker 1 He is, he's trying out some new material give a big wall so there was an air of kind of oh this should be good yeah exactly and I had to go out and tell jokes like what's the difference between the Conservative Party and a lada one's a clapped out embarrassment from the 1980s and the other one's a Russian car right yeah I mean that's from Paddy Ashton yeah

Speaker 1 I noticed that Tony Blair pulled out of a debate and the Tories sent a chicken round I don't know about you but turkeys may not vote for Christmas but I don't think chickens are going to turn up for television broadcasts

Speaker 1 What's really great about that is I don't know about you. Yeah, yes.
Like as if, as if that presupposes that the audience have had that thought.

Speaker 1 And they not only have they not had that thought, but even when the thought's been said to them, they still don't understand what it means. Oh, but this one then.
The Labour Party are terrible.

Speaker 1 They're into privatisation now. Yeah, real privatisation.
You know what we should do with real privatization? Stop it dead in its tracks.

Speaker 1 Yeah. One last one.
The Labour Party, I mean, they're a bit odd, aren't they? Because if you look at their expenditure policy, you see it's in such disarray right now.

Speaker 1 I reckon that if Labour get in, the taxpayer will be carried over more thresholds than Zazagabor or Elizabeth Taylor. That's from David Meller.

Speaker 1 And what I like about how bad that is is he has to give two names at the end. There's something clumsy about.
Yeah, you have to decide. Well, you have to have three.

Speaker 1 You either have one, which goes bang. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Or you have three. There's a sort of

Speaker 1 go with Zazagabo, but then some people might not know who Zaza Gabor is yeah so I'll go slightly younger yeah with Elizabeth Taylor yeah yeah yeah actually that that's really fundamentally wrong for structural level to have don't have two yeah you have one or three or loads right but two is nothing to there's nothing of which two are funny right there you are you can you can have that if anyone listening to this knows which two things together are funny uh so

Speaker 1 we haven't actually explored weird turkish barbers why has genrik picked up on weird turkish barbers i read that it was because several turkish barbers have been investigated for money laundering but it's well known in london the suspicion of money laundering is not just barbers shops it's uh it's vape shops american candy shops but he didn't he didn't talk about american candies why has he picked up on weird turkish barbers well turkey's been a thing and they were very they were very worried about his entry to the eu although i found myself falling into that track there's a turkish barber i've been going to for 20 years and I love it because all old like satirists from the 60s and punk blokes used to have their hair cut there so there's all photos of them on the wall.

Speaker 1 And it took me 15 years to pluck up the courage to have the full Turkish where they burn hair. Burn your hair.
Burn hair out of your ears.

Speaker 1 They put wax up your nose and dry it and yank it out and it pulls all the hairs out of your nose. And you have a shave like so close that you think you're going to die.

Speaker 1 And it's really, really, it's really exciting. But all the old guys that used to work there have gone now.

Speaker 1 And I went there recently and they um they just so i went i have the full turkish and they just the guy was so bad at it it was like about halfway through i was thinking that i really ought to like get out of this because i don't really think he knows what he's doing at all he put at one point he i had all like shaving foam on my face and to get it off he like wet his hands and then just rubbed his hands all over my face right

Speaker 1 didn't use a towel or anything it was really can you imagine that putting someone's hands just going all over your face like that all wet and then he just smeared smeared his hands all over my face like he'd never done it before.

Speaker 1 Then he didn't do the hair. He didn't burn the hair off with the match.
By then, I was relieved, to be honest. He didn't put wax up my nose.
Was he following like some AI barber box? I don't know.

Speaker 1 Then he still charged a full Turkish match. And then I found myself, because of Jenrid, I thought, well, he's obviously a drug dealer, this bloke.
He's obviously a front. Probably wasn't.

Speaker 1 He's probably just

Speaker 1 really bad at cutting hair. But even me, that's got to me now.
And I like to think that I'm impregnable to these things, but that phrase is out there now.

Speaker 1 And so my immediate go-to thought is, this barber's terrible. I bet there's loads of heroin in the back room, though, that's, you know, being shifted.

Speaker 1 But it could have just been a bad, a bad haircut doesn't necessarily mean that you're not. But then the phrase has done its job as far as gender.
It's done its job.

Speaker 1 I once went to a barber who, as he was shaving me, I'm cutting my hair really, said he genuinely, he believed in reincarnation and he genuinely believed he was the reincarnation of Romulus and Remus.

Speaker 1 Hey, there's two things. They're funny together, but only if they're reincarnated as a barber.
That's it, right?

Speaker 1 We have the top.

Speaker 1 Reincarnation of Romulus and Romulus. And Remus.
And I just didn't want to dispute it with him because he had a sharp instrument near my eye.

Speaker 1 I was once, a long time ago, I was being given a lift home from Cardiff by someone on a rainy night through a storm.

Speaker 1 And Robin Ince, the comedian, was sitting in the back seat of the car.

Speaker 1 And I said to the person driving, who was somewhat older than us, was probably about as old as I am now, which seemed ancient to me when I was 22.

Speaker 1 I said, are you all right driving over this seven bridge in this terrible storm? And the person said, yes, it's fine because I have a Native American spirit guide.

Speaker 1 And they're sitting next to me advising me on how to drive.

Speaker 1 And I looked in the mirror and I could see Robin in the back seat kind of going, oh God, like we're being driven home by the ghost of a man whose culture predates the invention of the motor car and he's um

Speaker 1 and he's guiding us through this storm. Is it just

Speaker 1 his way of explaining sat-nav? I don't know. It was before sat-nav.
We didn't need sat-nav then because you could have eight Native American spirit guides helping you get across.

Speaker 1 I mean, why would why would a Native American help us get home from Cardiff anyway?

Speaker 1 It's beyond his skill set.

Speaker 1 They've never been there. Anyway, man.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? Yeah, but you're right. You don't want to mess with people when they think they're communing with the spirit world.

Speaker 1 I think we've covered everything. What with, I don't know, but we certainly have covered it.

Speaker 1 Normally we ask, you're our demi-guest. We ask our guests some quickfire questions.
What's the best political speech or interview you've ever come across?

Speaker 1 Well, I miss Mick Lynch being on things when he used to, particularly when he was on news nights, because we sit there as viewers, don't we?

Speaker 1 And we can see politicians lying and we're shouting at the television. We're going, oh, you're lying.
But you never see someone do it in an actual interview, which is what Mick Lynch did.

Speaker 1 he just kept going that is a lie that is a lie you're lying that is another lie and the presenter's going well just let him finish and he's going he's lying and it was really great it was like being checked in real time and you just you never see it and it'd be so great if that happened all the time

Speaker 1 there was always a mick lynch standing there going that is a lie that is a lie

Speaker 1 That is a lie. A little vertical

Speaker 1 indeed. Well, they can do it.

Speaker 1 they could do it why haven't they why haven't they they should do yeah we should tell nick clegg to tell mark zuckerberg to do that yeah um political phrase you you would chuck in the bin i am minded oh you know when they say that yeah i am minded to give consideration to tightening the immigration laws i am minded to look at legislation involving definition of gender i am it's a because it's a way of them saying it's like they're not taking action for it themselves it's like i i am minded it's as if this thing is happening to them.

Speaker 1 Something has made them be minded. I mean, you never would, I am minded.

Speaker 1 I'm just sort of saying, you've raised that issue, and I agree with you, but I'm not saying I'm actually going to do anything about it. All I'm saying is I'm minded to do something about it.

Speaker 1 It's one up from I hear you. Yeah, yeah.
So no one should be minded of anything ever, ever again. And it is one of those phrases that nobody uses in real life as well, isn't it?

Speaker 1 But actually, we should all start using it all the time. And then it would seem awful when politicians do it.
We should say I am minded about everything.

Speaker 1 And the best political communicator at the moment. Is Kermit the Frog.
Oh, he managed to do it. I'm so glad you brought Kermit up.

Speaker 1 He managed to do a speech to the students at Maryland, which was one of the most thoughtful, inspiring, and fair-minded speeches we've seen in American politics this year.

Speaker 1 And it was delivered by a green felt frog. And it had a thoughtfulness and a depth and a humanity about it.

Speaker 1 He didn't keep deviating into discussions of attacking his opponents and calling them losers, like the other puppet companies. He didn't pick on them.

Speaker 1 Barbie. Or anything like that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Noddy or sooty. He just got on with it.

Speaker 1 And he can't run for president because it says in the Constitution, you must be over 30, born in the US, and not a puppet.

Speaker 1 I have a feeling he was initially manufactured on Newington Green in Stock Newington as well. So that would discount him on, you know,

Speaker 1 if there are any birthers. And presumably, in front of this whole room full of graduating students,

Speaker 1 there was a guy underneath the lectern. Yeah, yeah.
Although I wonder,

Speaker 1 does that tell us how utterly toxic American politics is, that perhaps they spent ages at Maryland University trying to think, who can we book, and realising that everyone would come with a set of political assumptions that would alienate someone, that the best option would be a green felt frog?

Speaker 1 Maybe that's the future for politics here is like some kind of glove puppet operated, glove puppet character that Emu. Emu would be great because he doesn't even speak.
Yeah. But he is good.

Speaker 1 He attacks people, which is good. You wouldn't be able to do Emu now, though, would you, in the current climate? Well, because he attacks people.
Because he grabs people's genitals

Speaker 1 through a plastic. But then, you know, Emu's spokesperson could then say, look, in the rough and tumble of politics, genitals will be grabs and graduation ceremonies.

Speaker 1 You know, inevitably, some genitals will be approached and or fondled. That is in no way a commentary on Emu's views on gender, on safety.
It's mischievous. That's all it is.

Speaker 1 And when you explain it, I mean, I know you're doing that as a joke, but it seems as good as anything else that's out there. I mean, how bad could it be if we had a vicious puppet of an Emu in charge?

Speaker 1 As long as there was a spokesman to interpret it and dampen down any controversy you caused

Speaker 1 how bad could it actually be well uh on that note stuart lee comedian and thinker

Speaker 1 thank you very much for having me thanks for listening to strong message here i'll be back next week and we'll be joined by comedian and author sarah pasco all our episodes are available in our feed so make sure you subscribe on bbc sons goodbye

Speaker 4 Hello, Russell Kane here.

Speaker 1 I used to love British history.

Speaker 5 Be proud of it.

Speaker 1 Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

Speaker 1 That has become much more challenging for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

Speaker 1 Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed. But if, like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Speaker 1 Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane. Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

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