(finally, it’s crossover time for Roy “Chubby” Brown!)
As you’ve probably heard elsewhere, Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro recently offered no objection to the nutcase claims of self-styled terrorism expert Stephen Emerson, who opined on air that “there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.” Comedian/Guardian op-ed columnist Stewart Lee visits Birmingham in a couple of months time, and he’s very mindful that his upcoming appearance necessitates coming up with “standup material that can be consumed by both the Islamic and the anti-Islamic customer bases, both of which are growing fast in modern Britain.”
I am currently in talks, with both Roy “Chubby” Brown and Citizen Khan’s Adil Ray, aimed at creating a central databank of Islamic-related standup content, which can be loaned out to different comedians and finessed in any direction, by way of facial expressions, tonal vocal shifts and amusing headgear, then targeted towards the racial and religious breakdown of the specific audience.
But Birmingham, apparently, is now totally Islamic. Will there be time before 2 May to spin my new two hours of comedy to address the concerns of Birmingham’s suddenly exclusively Islamic audience? Perhaps they will assume that my new Anti-Islamic Observational Comedy section is in fact a celebration of difference, like Ricky Gervais’s microtonally nuanced Derek, and I will be given the Freedom of the City of Birmingham, such as it is?
But I wouldn’t want the freedom of this new Islamo-Birmingham now, as there will be no pubs. I still remember the bad old days of the 1970s, when Birmingham was controlled by Quakers. Oats were all there was to eat, and the only drink was lukewarm drinking chocolate in a chipped mug with a picture of the pig from Pipkins on it.