Scotland’s Jesus and My Shit Life So Far 2-in-1 Collection. Frankie Boyle

Far better to pull over, then change into your US cop costume, sneak up to the wreckage and stride purposefully from the flames like a T-1000. There’s also to be a £90 fine for smoking at the wheel. They won’t get me; I’ve just had my giant briar pipe electroplated as there’s nothing in the rules about driving while playing the sax.

      Recent research shows that one in eight drivers can’t see properly in the dark. There’s a simple solution – people with glasses should only be allowed to drive solar-powered cars. I sometimes drive when I’ve forgotten my glasses. It’s not dangerous, as I’d know if I were about to hit someone by the panic in the sat nav’s voice.

      And speaking of dangerous driving, George Michael fell out of a car door on a busy motorway! Great to see him taking a break from singing to get back to what he does best. Poor George. He now has no choice but to do another world tour as it’s the only way he can fund his next insurance premium. The police investigating the accident were looking for an explanation, then they saw George and went, ‘Ah, right.’ He’s set to be the first person to be banned from travelling in the passenger seat of a car.

      In much the same way as travellers favour a St Christopher, Middle Eastern truck bombers now clutch an effigy of George before driving at US embassies. I guess there was only so long George could look at the white line in the middle of the road whizzing past without wanting to hop out and attempt to snort it. There’s been a suggestion that George tried to commit suicide. I don’t believe it. After all, if he really wanted to hurt himself he’d have tried to park. It will be difficult to charge George with any kind of offence, as although he was caught on a speed camera going over the limit he has the unusual loophole defence that he wasn’t in a car at the time.

      George’s car needed work after the incident, requiring a new honky-honky horn and a bit more custard in the radiator. He was rushed to hospital, regaining consciousness just long enough on his trolley to plough it into an A&E vending machine.

*Hopefully, you’re reading this on a Kindle or similar so it’ll seem a lot less hypocritical of me.

       4

       WAR ON TERROR

The Batman villain The Scarecrow produces a fear gas that gives his victims terrifying hallucinations. I was laughing with my kid the other day, saying that Batman got hit with the fear gas on an early mission and everything else is just the effects of the gas on him. The larger-than-life villains are just local teenagers being beaten to a pulp by this madman. He probably doesn’t even put his costume on. The Joker is just some children’s entertainer who gets regularly victimised during his flashbacks and The Penguin is a local pigeon.*

      Really we’ve all had a blast of the fear gas. If you see a Muslim on a plane and think terrorist, that’s a delusion. People walk about thinking they’re going to be mugged or raped, and do you know why? They’re pumping us full of fear gas, man, and it gets into the house through your TV. That’s why in the Western world, in these times of plenty and no real threats, we’re governed by stress, the hormonal response to danger and famine.

      Politics nowadays isn’t so different from the way things were during the time of the Roman conquests. After their military victories the Romans held parades called ‘Triumphs’, in which the leader of a conquered territory would be paraded through the streets of Rome, symbolising in his person his defeated people. Compare this to Saddam and Gaddafi, and their very public deaths. Why did the Romans conquer? To provide popular support for their leaders and benefit financially from other countries’ resources.

      The Romans would enlist local leaders into their service by offering them money and patronage. It’s not so different from David Cameron’s relationship with our modern Romans. Oh, and the Romans aren’t the Americans by the way; they’re the corporations. The corporate interests that control the US thus control much of the world, like a modern empire. We’re just one of those tribes whose leaders have struck a deal, so we ignore the plight of the imperial slaves who make our phones and we ignore our own people when they starve on our streets.

      And, of course, we think of the Romans as this civilising force because we’re a product of the Romans. They were barbaric brutes who crucified their enemies and got the popcorn out for prisoners being mauled by lions and bears. Similarly, we think of the corporate US as a democratising, civilising force because we grew up under its cultural occupation and have internalised its values.

      There are the literal meanings of words and then there are the doctrinal meanings. The doctrinal meanings are what things are understood to mean within the system and are often different from literal meanings. So, for example, ‘terrorism’ literally means something done to terrorise the general population. Yet Britain and the US terrorise civilians every day with drone strikes and so forth, but we don’t call this ‘terrorism’. The doctrinal meaning of ‘terrorism’ is that it only includes acts against us, not by us – a pretty important shift of meaning.

      I saw this recently when the comedian Stewart Lee wrote an article titled ‘Where are all the right-wing stand-ups?’ Lee’s career since he got his own show is a bit like that episode where Father Ted gets an award and uses his speech to bitterly settle scores with everyone he’s ever met. Anyway, it’s interesting doctrinally, and interesting to me because Lee dismisses the idea that I’m a left-wing comedian. He wrote, ‘The Daily Mail inexplicably demonises Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle as “politically correct left-wingers”, yet to sensitive souls they appear callous, apolitical nihilists’, but at the end of the same paragraph he concludes I’m ‘too likely to be bluntly anti-war or pro-Palestinian to help Radio 4 out of its Trotskyite ghetto’. Of course, he’s absolutely right in strictly doctrinal terms because doctrinally ‘left-wing comedian’ means ‘a middle-class person concerned about social issues’. These will typically be people talking against the coalition, cuts and so on, but who generally draw the line at being bluntly anti-war or pro-Palestine.

      Of course, to people outside a doctrinal system these things can look very strange. You’d have to explain to them that Stewart Lee – an Oxbridge graduate with a militant anti-piracy stance who appears on BBC Two punching up at the big targets of the day, such as the autobiography of Chris Moyles, mild-mannered comic Russell Howard and the ugliness of Adrian Chiles – is in fact a political comic. Someone like me, who was described by the Daily Mirror as a ‘racist comedian’ after a career of telling anti-racist, anti-war jokes, who took the newspaper to court and used the damages to help a Guantanamo Bay prisoner sue MI6 for defamation – I’m apolitical.

      That’s the real reason doctrinal thinking is encouraged: it fosters an ability to be deeply irrational. Possessing the moral agility required to say that blowing up civilians with flying bombs is not ‘terrorism’, or even simply to call Paddy McGuinness a ‘comedian’, is tremendously useful to a society like ours. Because we don’t really need commentators to explain or reason; we need them to justify.

      Of course, you’re welcome to take Stewart Lee’s view that the best place to criticise the behaviour of a crocodile is from inside its belly, perhaps in the hope that some day you will be so counter-cultural and innately radical that you’ll be given your own show on BBC Two and the opportunity to edit Radio 4’s Today programme. I’d argue that would never happen with a genuinely left-wing comedian who thought outside of the doctrinal system. Someone like Bill Hicks or George Carlin would have raised too many awkward questions. For a start, they’d have written an article titled ‘Where are all the left-wing stand-ups?’

      As soon as you enter into something doctrinally important, language becomes charged and contested. In Iraq, troops fighting the US were called ‘insurgents’ in the BBC coverage. That’s quite an important choice of word, as an insurgency is something that happens against a legitimate government rather than, say,