Bonus Bugle: Who Says Comedy Has To Be Entertaining?

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to Bugle issue 4061 sub-episode A for apologies for there not being a full issue of the bugle this week.

Instead, we have some bonus extra bits from the recent live show in London, some other bonus extra bits from other bits, and in the first and latest installment of What the Hell Was Happening 10 Years Ago, we go back in time, hang on let me just add it up

to uh five three uh uh ten years to March 2008 and without wishing to spoil the fun I can exclusively reveal that in the news exactly 10 years ago this week, as exclusively revealed at the time in issue 20 of this esteemed organ of audio historical record, were Russia, the European Union, and women.

So, plus a change.

However, to get things started, and whilst I contemplate how all of you, as I speak, are almost certainly rushing to dispatch your ticket-buying carrier pigeons to Australia and New Zealand to purchase tickets to my forthcoming shows at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, that's from the 10th to the 22nd of April, Sydney Comedy Festival, the 23rd and the 24th, and the New Zealand Comedy Festival, that is the week after that, we will go back in time slightly less far to February 2018 and the Leicester Square Theatre with me, Nish Kumar and Alice Fraser.

Any particular requests, Nish?

Any requests?

Are there any stories you particularly want to get off your chest?

I thought you meant sort of in general, do some cricket puns.

Don't say those words out loud.

A man just immediately left.

As soon as I said cricket puns, a bloke just got up and is walking at some speed.

Either that guy really hates cricket puns or he is off to drop the mother of all doses.

It was a very bold exit.

I've got nothing, I've got nothing to add.

You've stumped me.

Let's move on quickly to a story emerging from Iceland where they appear to be clamping down on people chopping the end off other people's penises,

in which the Icelandic parliament

there's a bill that's been mooted in Ireland.

Another one's race, race, race, race, race.

They act as if that triggered a memory think, oh shit on you, that was something I forgot to do.

I was on circumcision duty today.

The Icelandic Parliament, there's a bill that could ban circumcision for non-medical reasons.

Family show, Christopher, family show.

Family show.

For those watching with their ears at home, that is a half-peeled banana.

Which, ironically, is what God was eating when he told Abraham to chop the...

Anyway, look, it's...

But of course, this has caused some ruptions

amongst Jews that's...

Well, of course, because, you know, as a...

Though I am lapsed.

I mean, very lapsed.

I'm very lapsed.

But I haven't had it sewn back on yet.

I'm not that lapsed.

I'm...

I'm a very, very lapsed Jew.

So lapsed that I am, in fact, to all intents and purposes, simultaneously a Christian and a Muslim.

The ultimate lapsed Jews in my book.

Basically, me plus a few thousand years.

But there are still some aspects of my Jewish background that I carry with me for life.

For example, a fondness for matzah, a dislike of genocide,

an almost vice-like control of shobis.

How do you think I got this gig?

Did you know that Nish is the first non-Jewish comedian ever to play the Leicester Square Fit?

And in absolute fairness, some racists on Twitter do think I'm Jewish.

It's true.

And above all,

probably a lifelong fear of people attacking the end of my penis with a sharpened blade.

I just can't shake for whatever reason.

The draft law would impose a six-year prison term on anyone guilty of removing part or all of the child's sexual organs.

Look, they argue the practice violates children's rights.

I'm not going to get involved in complex fraught religious medical traditions, but just as a point of order, there is a big difference between part and all.

I'm not, the rest is just medical stuff.

I'm not going to.

Doctors may recommend that a man or boy is circumcised if he has an unusually tight foreskin known as phimosis or suffers from recurrent infections of the foreskin and penis known as balonitis.

Who said comedy can't be entertained can't be

educational, that's the word I'm looking for.

Ladies and gentlemen, the mother of all Freudian slips.

Just do not use the word mother in that sentence.

You know, Freud was Jewish and the original Freudian slip is just the false skin.

Why do I say the things I think of?

I've got written material here.

Who says comedy has to be entertaining?

That'll be the epitaph on my headstone.

That's really the motto of the bugle.

The new line of merch, after this stuff, that will be on there.

Who says comedy has to be entertaining?

Certainly, all my reviewers.

Add mine, 1.5 stars, the Herald Sun 2014.

Why bother with the half?

Anyway.

Let's move on to...

How are we doing for time, Chris?

Keep going.

So much of what's going on in the world right now, and sort of has been for the last 25 years, can be summed up by the phrase, the problem is Americans.

There is one proposal that could actually

make a big difference, and that is that politicians henceforth do their thoughts and prayers in advance of these things

rather than retrospectively afterwards when they have limited practical value.

The prayer really has, I know God has a bit of a backlog on prayers, because just last week he tried to save this kid's ill cat, but the prayer had actually been made in the year 1834 because he's so behind.

He accidentally,

on the site of where this kid's cat lived, is now a zoo, and he's just created a bionic lion.

So you have to be careful.

I reckon we should do it like, you know, shops that don't accept cards and insist on cash because they're dodging their taxes.

We should say, we will take your thoughts and prayers, but they just have to be reformatted slightly into the form of legislation.

And we do not accept American Express thoughts and prayers.

What is the point of an American Express card?

We don't get it.

I know this is not strictly topical satire, but

also I think we need to look at the stats, though, because America, despite all its problems with gun crime, still has the third most people alive today who have not been slain by firearms of of any country in the world.

Only China and India are ahead of it with more people.

And Australia, you know, the pin-up boy of successful gun control.

Only 24 million people there who haven't been killed by guns.

So that means in America you've got a more than what, about 1,200% better chance.

You can work statistics, as I've said before, like a ventriloquist dummy.

Shove your hand far enough up them, you can make them say whatever the f you want.

Only children and idiots will take any notice.

Chris, how's the time doing?

It's it's you know, before it was a bit near.

Yeah, now it's a bit rude.

Right, okay, it's mission critical, is it?

Um, have we got time for QA?

Um, yeah, um, well, seeing as there was such enthusiasm for it earlier, Andy, I feel like it would be rude to not do a bit of a QA.

I mean, we can make them talk.

Um, has anyone got a question?

Oh, a hand went straight up.

Always a bad sign.

Hi, we're from Australia.

Just want to know how do we get to Lord's?

We'd like to see the ashes.

Practice, practice, practice.

Or bake a loo line to Marleybone and then walk.

It's in the museum there.

So the ash is the greatest sporting trophy in the universe.

Although Australia technically might have won it by cheating.

they actually keep the physical trophy, which is about three inches tall and an urn from the 1880s.

At Lord's, it never leaves because Australia can't be trusted with it.

You just can't be trusted with anything.

And also, I would say,

we were the moral victors in the ashes.

Because sure, we might.

Were we?

We might.

Yeah, we were.

Surely, sport is not all about results.

It's It's also about having a good, upstanding,

morally correct team, and far, far better to lose the Ashes 4-0 with people like Ben Stokes, who was

than

the morally squalid Australian team, which included Steve Smith.

Sure, great batsman, but he's never explicitly condemned Joseph Stalin for

those are 13 million lock him him up.

Lock him up.

30 million innocent.

David Warner, yes, superb player, the very good series against England, but he has never explicitly criticised the CIA for their complicity in the overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende

in a dodgy coup in the early 1970s.

Mitchell Stark, yes, great bowler.

But does he even give a shit about the persecution of the Jews in late 12th century England?

If he does, he's got a f ⁇ ing funny way of showing it.

Oh boy, Andy, I would get so mad at you for this if I cared about sport.

When you said you were here for the ashes, I thought you were talking about the series, and I was like, I think you are simultaneously both late and early.

Anyone else got a cue?

Oh, there's a man here who

looks like a more handsome version of me.

He does.

All right, mate.

Hi, guys.

Thank you for the compliment.

Why is it that only Alice has remembered her bugle-ishu pants?

Look,

let me emphasise that is pants in the American sense of the world.

Both Nish and I are wearing full-on bugle wire fronts.

Yeah.

I'm actually wearing a bugle thong.

Oliver's over my sack.

It was all I could.

Thanks to the love guru, not the worst thing he's been involved in.

We can say it.

We can say it, Piers.

It's fine for us.

He's family.

That was 2018.

However, this bit is today, roughly 10 years ago, in 2008, in the commentary box.

It's Andy Zoltzman and with him, John Oliver.

Top story this week, and democracy is everywhere.

Democracy shoots have been sprouting out across the globe this week.

Democracy is blooming, Andy, and it's time for it to be fully pollinated.

In America, it's all been kicking off, John.

What a week for American democracy.

It's been getting a bit nasty on the democratic side.

Hillary Clinton ran an adver which seemed to suggest that Barack Obama will snatch your children from their beds as they sleep just because he's a bit inexperienced.

Well, that's right.

I mean, she's she's had quite a comeback.

Her campaign recently had a priest following it around, ready to issue it the last rites, but it has spluttered back to life.

Her rebound success has been chalked down to a series of attack ads.

One surrounding a telephone saying it's 3am in the White House, the phone is ringing.

Who do you want to answer it?

I'll tell you who I want to answer that phone, Andy.

A secretary, an employed secretary, or some kind of switchboard operator.

I don't want a president manning the phones.

They have far more important work to do.

Who's got the direct number of the president anyway?

And why are they abusing it at three in the morning?

Because this whole thing was about your children being safe and asleep in their beds in the middle of the night.

But if it's at 3am,

I want someone to answer the phone in the White House who isn't going to put the phone down and then ring me straight up saying, are your children still safe and asleep?

Well, you'd better wake them up.

Sudan's kicking off.

I want them to deal with it and not involve my sleeping children in a global catastrophe.

Is that too much to ask?

It's good to see a bit of old-fashioned scaremongering coming into the election campaign at last because there's been a real lack of it so far and that's what democracy is all about, John: enabling the public to choose which made-up stories they want to be genuinely spooked by.

The Democrats can now concentrate on doing what they do best, completely destroying themselves.

In this week of democracy, what reflects the democratic process better than the looming prospect of superdelegates?

Just under 800 individuals with the power to vote directly against the will of the people.

In Russia, it seemed that only one vote was important, that vote being Vladimir Putin.

In the US, it's 794 superdelegates, which makes America 794 times more democratic than Russia.

And when you put it like that, it doesn't actually sound too bad.

I think it's part of the reason as well why we've got excited about it in Britain, John, because

we basically don't have elections anymore in Britain.

The last two general elections were foregone conclusions.

And the current leader, Gordon Brown, was elected after a poll in which only two people voted, Brown and his predecessor, Tony Blair, at a secret dinner 13 years in advance.

Now, understandably, that didn't really capture the public imagination.

So, we're kind of vicariously getting our fix of democracy through America, which is great.

And also, it's only the second election since 1976 not to feature a member of the Bush family as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate.

So, I think the world is just trying to enjoy that while it can, because there are plenty more Bushes where George W.

came from.

They actually breed them on a secret ranch in Texas, and the ones that don't make it are sold for scrap to the Chinese.

Kind of organ trade.

But Bush, in fact, backed McCain, or semi-backed McCain this week, the now official Republican presidential candidate.

This is the man who he said was mentally unstable after his experiences as a prisoner of war and also that he fathered a black baby.

Can you really endorse someone who you've treated like that?

Well, no, you can't.

So he didn't.

Instead, favouring a painfully awkward photo opportunity on the White House steps.

And this week, Iran is voting on Friday in a general legislative election, but their campaign is only one week long.

Now, surely this is more of a justification for a military invasion than any suggested nuclear weapons programme.

They've got democracy, John, but they're not stringing it out long enough, and they need to be taught a lesson.

Reports have suggested that more than 90% of independent and reformist candidates in Iran have been disqualified from standing.

Now, I'm sure those conducting the candidate vetting process are keeping reform-minded candidates off the ballot paper for perfectly reasonable and above-board above-board reasons.

Maybe they're helping them spend more time with their families, or perhaps they realise that democracy is flawed and these would-be candidates might find a more rewarding hobby.

We just don't know.

Also, posters with candidates' pictures on have been banned because the government says they're wasteful and lead to a costly and boring post-election clean-up, which is

a Madison's reason

for banning posters.

That is a great way of suppressing the will of the people.

It's just

hard to tidy up afterwards.

I appreciate that.

At least make an effort.

They're also apparently planning to block internet access on polling day.

Given that, you know, just to make sure it's okay.

Yeah.

Well, that's pretty much it.

Their quote is that this will ensure unimpeded internet access for the government.

How does other people having internet access impede their access?

That's not how the internet works.

2008, there.

Still one of the finest 20 or so years of this millennium so far.

Let's get the bugle time machine cranking again, back up to just one week ago, and some secret previously unreleased footage from last week's bugle recording.

Honestly, it's like finding Winston Churchill's home videos of him doing karaoke with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta, only more so, and with me, Felicity Ward, and Tiffany Stevenson instead, and a bit less singing.

What's that for

the quote from The Wire?

F me once, shame on you, f me twice, shame on me.

Yeah, it's like an ex-boyfriend that just keeps turning up again.

And you keep letting him back in.

Isn't he twice?

I thought that was Shakespeare, wasn't it?

It was also Shakespeare.

As in Silvio, we're on first name basis.

He's taken his case to the European Court of Justice because if he wins, he'll be able to run again in the future.

He's

81, I think.

That's just called the afterlife.

That's the only time you can run.

Because that'll be, what is it, another four or seven years?

Yeah.

I don't want an 85-year-old.

I'm not Italian.

Maybe Italy wants that.

I don't know.

I don't want an...

I think if you want an 85 in Italy, you want an 85-year-old nona.

That's who you want because nonas run shit.

Yeah.

Like that is no mess in nona

all of the time.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

You will never go hungry with a noner in charge, yeah.

That's a perfect, but I don't understand why.

I mean, how old's uh Trump 72?

I'm just saying, could we maybe get someone in their 50s or 60s?

Is that too

some young whipper snapper who's well who's had a political career?

Yeah, we did try that here with David Cameron at that one.

The tits up in a spectacular way, so

how old was Blair when he Blair was he would have been mid-mid-40s, I reckon, yeah, and um

yeah, he split split opinion in the end,

You know, maybe, maybe just someone who

doesn't think the end is round the corner, so maybe cares about what happens to people.

Yeah, someone that doesn't need a handrail in their bathroom.

Yeah.

I don't want to be ageist, but I do think there is a point where we can say, probably just step out of the race at some point in your 70s.

Yeah.

I should take that back because there's plenty of people who are not able-bodied that have a handrail.

I take that back absolutely.

What I meant was just someone that is.

Look, let's just lose that

tony blair um he also said that um people are sacrificing peace in northern ireland on the altar of brexit good old tony blair former prime minister warmonger and perpetual giver of opinions we didn't ask for if i had managed to escape being charged with a war crime i'd just maintain a slightly lower profile but oh tony i started a war that started the whole world crying blair cannot keep his shit to himself.

He loves it, doesn't he?

I think he might be onto something, though.

I think rather than sacrificing the Northern Ireland peace process, we should just be, you know, learn from the ancient Greeks.

We should just be sacrificing,

you know, oxen, daughters, the works, actual, literal sacrifices.

It worked

for Agamemnon, the Trojan War, didn't it?

Just about.

Are we just going to start taking all of Plato's ideas and then just, you know.

Oh, why not?

Yeah.

Learning from the ancient Greeks.

I mean, they had, they got some things right.

Philosophy?

Yeah.

Democracy?

Yeah.

Yogurt?

Yep.

Yeah, well, even their yogurts, even their yogurt's strained at the moment.

But

still got culture.

I mean, that's, I'm so sorry.

Do you know?

I'm so hungry, I ate a little bit of mandarin rind before.

I just realized I've got the taste of citrus in my mouth.

I'm like, why is that?

I was nervously eating some peel of a tatsuma.

I don't know the difference between a mandarin and a tatsuma, by the way i just call them tatsumas over here because everyone else does all right do you know the difference you're sharing too much for listening sorry um no orange is orange and it doesn't rhyme with anything it's a little that's true mind you i

side note i did was part of a theatre sports competition when i was younger like an improvisation composition competition and uh I said to one of my teammates, set me up with the word orange, but say it in a fancy accent.

And I managed to get the word blancmange in there and rhyme it.

Right, people weren't as impressed then either.

Let's move across the across the bottom to sorry, theatre sports as a phrase just fills me with like kind of like a sick, cold, sweat dread.

Yes, did you have theatre sports over here?

I realized after I said it, it was basically like

improv, yeah, improv, competitive, yes, competitive, like because that's what we need in art, more competition, yeah, that's right, making it more like sports.

Um, and also, what you want to do is give improv kids more confidence,

Heinous.

I thought when he meant unarmed, he just had his hands behind his back surrendering like he had in the past.

He's not running in.

The only place he's running in is a KFC.

Let's be honest.

That's how you take Trump out.

You just stand outside a KFC and rattle a bargain bucket.

Like, literally, if you ever want to distract him.

To be fair, I'm listening now.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely interested in that.

I was going to say, and then he could have something to eat.

He'll be distracted.

He doesn't eat.

He feeds, doesn't he?

Let's be be honest he feeds

like a trough

it's sort of crazy um

a the suggestion that this is what i would do when he wouldn't uh the other crazy thing that has come out of this is when he went to go meet the school kids that were involved he took notes with him he had to have notes in with sort of lessons as how to talk to children and one of the notes he had was i hear you which presumably means i'm not listening like it's, and but I'm not surprised that he doesn't know how to talk to his kids because

I've read a little bit of Ivana Trump's autobiography because someone had to.

And you get a real sense of how their parenting skills affected and kind of why those kids are the way they are.

I've got a little bit here for, I'll read to you, from Ivana's recipe for raising kids.

I encourage my children to try new things.

As much as I can tell them they can do anything, I don't want them engaging in pastimes that have no future.

I'm real First Lady.

I added that bit.

All my kids play tennis and ski beautifully.

This is genuinely true.

This is directly from the autobiography, right?

And this will explain everything.

At the age of two, I took each of them to the top of a hill and told them, ski down!

And they would wail, I don't like it!

Tough, honey, I'd tell them, get to the bottom of the mountain.

Donnie and Ivanka weren't too bad, but Eric would cry for hours at a time.

I'd give him to the ski instructor and say, don't worry if he cries, he'll get over it.

He's got to learn.

Today my kids love to ski.

We are a skiing family.

Speaking of guns,

look, whenever Australia trends in news stories and on Twitter around the world, I never think, this will be good.

I'm never like, oh, I'm about to be proud.

Here we go.

But in the wake of the Florida shooting, and it's happened multiple, multiple times.

And the weird thing is, is the same thing happened here, but you guys, I don't think, get the credit that you deserve for it.

In 1996, in Australia, Port Arthur, Tasmania, we had our biggest mass shooting, you know, aside from Aboriginal genocide.

But if we don't include that, we had our biggest mass shooting and we had an incredibly conservative government at the time with John Howard, who's been brought up already,

within 12 days banned automatic and semi-automatic weapons, which was so far out of character for him, but it was an immediate response that worked.

I think the same thing happened here after the Dunblane shooting.

Yeah, it turns out

if you get rid of the guns, people don't get shot.

What a shock.

In the National Gun Amnesty, Australians turned in more than 57,000 firearms to authorities.

That was the recent one.

Just last year.

In America, by contrast, the authorities turned more than 57,000 firearms on Americans.

So it's basically the same.

It's an exchange program.

It's got the words mixed up.

We should very quickly touch on the beast from the east weather news.

Here in Britain, Britain's been brought to a standstill.

The reason

Tiff is here today, in fact, is because your show in Swansea was postponed by the Beast from the East, this Arctic Russian weather coming over here to spy on our British clouds.

There's been some horrific incidents of.

I mean, obviously, British infrastructure is not dealed to design,

not

designed to deal with.

It's probably me rubbing off on you and I'm sorry.

Physically and emotionally.

Not designed to deal with weather that isn't proper British weather.

We do not vote for this kind of weather.

The government has let us down again.

We like a mild version of every weather.

I love it.

London is just the city prepared for nothing.

It's a little bit of snow, blizzard.

All roads and trains shut down.

24 degrees, it's a heat wave.

All roads and trains shut down.

14 in drizzle, manageable, but no southern rail.

It's beautiful how we know it's going to snow, but like we know like six weeks, two months before it's going to happen, but still on the day they go, run out of salt.

Yeah, so don't, I know it's a natural resource, we've just run out of it, so don't go outside because you will die.

Or if you do, you have to like take your salt grinder, season yourself down the street.

One of the people who's stuck on the M8 motorway in Scotland said it was like a car park, albeit a fucking shitly designed car park,

several miles long, only three vehicles wide, and with no way out.

So heathrow, then.

Yeah.

That is the kind of car park we voted to get rid of in this country.

It's bloody Brussels.

Do you know the best thing about the Beast from the East?

And no disrespect to anyone that is suffering the consequences, I understand it's a real thing, but holy shit, tune into morning television weather presenters.

Their eyes are fing bugging out of their heads heads with joy.

They get to use the word treacherous,

minus double digits, amper warning.

We are lucky they are not climaxing on screen.

They are delighted.

It's a honestly, and also watching like meek, well-dressed, comfortably shoed little people go, the boost from the oost.

I love it.

Seeing kids playing it is sort of fun.

I went back to my mum's the other day.

This is beautiful because near near where my mum and dad live, there's a big hill.

So there's loads of kids firing themselves down the hill on bin bags and stuff.

I come back to Moswell Hill where I live now and I see kids walking along with

cath kids and trays, which is just a beautiful, just showing the working-class kid versus the very spoiled middle-class child in Muswell Hill.

Like literally bin bags, cath kids and trays.

Yeah.

I ate a snowball yesterday.

I rolled myself a little snowball and I went home and I ate it over the bath.

Oh, did you?

Yep.

I love it.

Did you check if it was yellow first?

It wasn't yellow.

If I needed to, I could have made it that way.

But I did.

I am absolutely delighted by this snow.

You saw me before.

I'm so close to going out and rolling in it.

And when I was, I think it was like 2009, something like that,

it was a really bad winter.

And I went up to Edinburgh for Christmas and I dived into a pile of snow because I was so happy.

And then I remembered that snow is frozen water and then my clothes became very wet.

I do it again though.

I love it.

A little bit of physics.

There you go.

Something for everyone, depending on who everyone is.

We will be back with a full bugle next week.

Don't forget to book your tickets to the forthcoming Bugle live shows in Melbourne on the 15th and 22nd of April.

Also in London and Manchester.

Details online.

And set sail now for the Australian New Zealand region if you want to see me doing my shows there, unless you already live there, in which case, maybe charter a donkey and ride to the shows instead.

Until next week, your sincerely, etc., Andrew Zaltzman.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.