In the same way as one would probably keep a small child away from a raging blast furnace with teddy bears and Lego ™ ® and sweets stuck all round it, the Green party should probably keep Zack Polanski away from social media. Like a man in an office stationery cupboard accidentally photocopying his testicles and then somehow pressing a magic button that sends the image to the entire workforce, Zack can’t seem to help himself from posting exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment. Dad! I think I got it wrong again!
To be fair though, the troublesome image that Polanski inadvertently disseminated this week, unlike my ex-fiancee’s cousin Lucy Connolly’s brutal social media request that an assembled mob of excitable flag-wavers burn down a migrants’ hotel and kill the migrants in it, was clearly a joke. Maybe if Polanski’s post had been less like a joke and more like a direct call to burn foreign babies to death, he, like Lucy Connolly, could have got a gig, to rapturous applause, as the free-speech star turn at the Reform conference.
There now follows a description of the image Polanski posted, along with an explanation of how the joke in the image works. And remember I know about jokes, because I am either the world’s best (the Times), or second-best (the Daily Telegraph), living standup comedian, depending on which rightwing journal of record you believe. Or, if you prefer, I am, according to Tony Parsons in the Sun, “a pot-bellied Bernard Manning for snowflakes”. Ah! Those bloody snowflakes! With their anti-racist tofu workshops! And their non-binary hessian muesli yurts!! And their pot-bellied Bernard Mannings!!!
Apparently Mark Twain said “analysing humour is a bit like dissecting a frog: you learn how it works but you end up with a dead frog”. But here goes. Last Sunday, Polanski shared with his 713,103 Instagram followers a post of a collection of images of attendees at a Green party event. Polanski hadn’t noticed that one of them was wearing a T-shirt sporting the words “We’re Only Making Plans For Nigel”, which most people of my generation would recognise as the title of the superb 1979 XTC hit single in which the sneering Swindon punks take a middle-class family to task for hoping their son gets a good job on a reasonable salary, perhaps with British Steel (stee-ole stee-ole stee-o-o-o-o-ole). I hope Nigel eventually worked in AI instead, perhaps for Palantir, as 47 years on things aren’t looking so good for British Steel, which was recently renationalised to avoid insolvency despite Nigel’s best efforts.
However, for comic effect, the T-shirt Polanski inadvertently posted a photo of has an image of a guillotine attached, the implication being that the “plans” being “made” for “Nigel” involve his public execution. And this is where the humour, such as it is, arises, as a good joke can rely on the listener (or reader of a T-shirt in this case) making connections for themselves between apparently unrelated concepts that add up to an extra idea not explicitly stated by the initial ideas themselves in isolation. Is the frog dead yet? I’m dissecting it as delicately as possible.
Which Nigel would one be talking about if a Green party event attendee were to suggest he should be executed? Nigel Havers? Nigel Slater? No. Probably Nigel Farage. Would it be funny to go out in a T-shirt saying “Execute Nigel Farage”? No. Is it funny to imply that one should execute Nigel Farage, cheekily, by a juxtaposition of apparently unrelated concepts? Arguably yes, especially as the listener/reader has the fun of making that unspoken connection themselves, probably involuntarily, using knowledge they didn’t even know they had. Croak!
And the T-shirt, by only suggesting its message rather than stating it explicitly, carries with it, and its observer, the self-aware understanding that it is crossing a line. It’s the T-shirt-humour equivalent of the music-hall comedian genius Max Miller checking both sides of the stage for censorious officials before confidentially sharing an obscene observation he knew was inappropriate. Can I have a jiffy bag for this dead frog please?
The T-shirt Gibb’s outfit produced stated: ‘Hang Nelson Mandela.’ Laugh? I nearly spent 21 years in captivity, shoes too small to fit my feet, my body abused but my mind still free!
The suggestion created by the T-shirt’s juxtaposition of the XTC lyric and the guillotine image is perhaps funny in a similar way to a T-shirt produced in 1984 by the Federation of Conservative Students, then headed by future BBC non-executive board director, future director of communications for Theresa May, and future sole owner of the discredited news provider Jewish Chronicle Media, Robbie Gibb. The T-shirt Gibb’s outfit produced stated simply: “Hang Nelson Mandela.” Laugh? I nearly spent 21 years in captivity, shoes too small to fit my feet, my body abused but my mind still free! This frog is starting to stink!
Now, if the statement “Hang Nelson Mandela” seems a bit unfunny and “on the nose”, you have to remember that Coventry ska boom survivors the Special AKA’s consciousness-raising afro-pop earworm Free Nelson Mandela had just spent a lengthy period in the British Top 40, back when that still meant something, and would have been front and centre in the collective subconscious. Young people today would call it a “meme”, but it wasn’t. It was a statement which had value in itself. I don’t know! Put the frog in the waste disposal!
Anyway, the phrase Robbie Gibb’s gang let out into the world was a brutal subversion of the record’s easily recognised titular sentiment, albeit one which history and the growing acceptance of the idea that apartheid was fundamentally wrong has rendered extremely ill-judged. It’s rightwing humour, joyless and essentially unpleasant as usual, admittedly, but the joke didn’t come from nowhere. And neither does the We’re Only Making Plans for Nigel juxtaposition. It can’t have jammed it. Press the button again.
Nigel Farage wanted the police to investigate Polanski for supposedly calling for his murder, though they eventually declined to do so, and Polanski declined to apologise to Farage. To be clear, it is necessary for Farage to emphasise any potential threats to his safety because he initially justified taking that £5m gift from a cryptobillionaire on the grounds that the money was for his personal security. In the end, he declared on LBC that it wasn’t for that, and said he could spend the money on Ferraris if he wished. He was talking to the LBC talk-tagnut Nick Ferrari at the time, so maybe that’s why he thought of spending the money on Ferraris. It’s lucky Farage wasn’t talking to the 1930s dance band leader Charlie Kunz instead, or his preferred purchases may have looked tasteless, especially given his support for the alleged sex trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate, whom Farage describes as an “important voice for men”.
(I do appreciate I have done a version of this joke twice now, but I just remembered that Charlie Kunz exists, which is a funnier name than the names I chose before, so I reserve the right to have another go at it. I might do it again next week if I can find someone with an even funnier surname than Kunz.)
But is Zack Polanski right not to apologise to Nigel Farage for sharing a picture of a T-shirt he didn’t know was in the photo he disseminated, especially when Farage has called explicitly for “pure cold rage” against ethnic minorities, and for the knife to be taken to Whitehall civil servants, and claimed that he would pick up a rifle and don combat gear should Brexit not have gone through? And given that his chief political rival is a bin from space. You should have put the lid on. Now there’s shredded frog all over the kitchen window.
And, moreover, is Polanski right not to apologise to the grifting and insincere bin challenger Nigel Farage, given that Nigel Farage’s own party’s conference platformed and celebrated and honoured my ex-fiancee’s cousin Lucy Connolly, who called for migrants to be burned to death in their beds? Maybe if Connolly had just worn a T-shirt saying “Come Home to a Real Fire” with a picture of a disused Holiday Inn going up in flames and children with third-degree burns fleeing the righteous inferno, her demands might at least have been able to be considered a joke, rather than a call to action. Wipe the window down, and then put the cloth, and the frog fragments, in the brown garden waste bin.
Farage’s criticisms of Polanski are hypocrisy in the extreme, and I think Nigel Farage knows he is absolutely full of shit here. But at this moment, truth and consistency aren’t important to Farage. What is important is that Farage mobilises any smokescreen of manufactured controversy that will help him avoid being beaten in his own Clacton byelection by a bin from space that isn’t even a real bin from space, but is in fact a man pretending to be a bin from space.
Nonetheless, Polanski, like all under-16s and all over-60s, needs to get off the internet or nominate a less trigger-happy successor. The Cairngorms are on fire. Arthur’s Seat just burned in the middle of Edinburgh, a British capital city. A quarter of a million French people, just over that narrow stretch of Channel that one day might act as a useful firebreak, are displaced by an inferno near Bordeaux. Our capital city is running out of water. And, as the Nerve reports this week, it would appear our own government are actively suppressing terrifying reports from MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ now disbanded “Futures Team”, which detail the catastrophic danger to national security, by the end of this decade, caused by the imminent collapse of all ecosystems. Hot enough for ya? I hope you like your oysters boiled!
Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch is standing down any Tory MPs that support the net zero commitments that were actually in the last Conservative manifesto; Andy “Burn Them” Burnham threatens to reopen North Sea oil drilling for short-term political gain in a world that is literally going up in flames due, undeniably now surely, to fossil fuels; and the tech-bro billionaires hoover up as much wealth as they can while planning to download themselves into memory sticks and shoot themselves into space to inhabit yet-to-be-terraformed alien worlds, in virtual marble mansions full of AI-generated naked teenagers and compliant African American bellboys of immense dignity.
It’s too late to save life on Earth. I think we all know that in our hearts. Think about it too much and you will weep for the children and their lost futures, and for the decades of political paralysis that lingered long after we were told the undeniable risks of ongoing fossil fuel extraction. But if we are to go down fighting with the courage and honour that defines our species at its best, and at least slow our descent into the inevitable inferno of white-hot death, we need some credible Green voices in British politics to stand up to the propaganda of oil-money-funded outfits like GB News and Reform plc, and the global evil of Donald Trump’s fossil fuel fanaticism. And it doesn’t look like Andy “Burn Them” Burnham is going to make room for those voices. The irony is, there’s no point making any plans for the ambitious young Nigels of today, as Nigel’s conscientious parents did in 1979, 47 years ago. Because in 47 years’ time, the burning world of 2073 will have precious few opportunities for young would-be executives like Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh) Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh) Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh) Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh) Nigel Nigel Nigel Nigel (ooh-oh-ooh).
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart is appearing in various capacities at the Krankenhaus festival at Muncaster Castle in the Lake District, 28-30 August, which also features Sea Power, Stereolab, Charlotte Church’s End Times Pop Dungeon, Tristwch Y Fenywod, Earthball, Smote, the Fallen Women and Best Dog Competition.
And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around his forthcoming book, Pea Green Boat, at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October.