Satirists from Scotland

"(as Tony Blair): "Look we believe Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Now if we don't attack him, then he might not use them, and in that case we'll never know whether he's got them or not. And you know, that's not a risk I'm prepared to take. Besides if we do conquer Iraq, and remove Saddam Hussein, there's a chance we could win the Nobel Peace Prize, and you know, frankly, isn't that something worth going to war for?""

"Bremner (as himself): "But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair. No, the difference is Saddam rules Iraq through a combination of terror and brutality, backed up by a vicious regime of intimidation and torture - or is that David Blunkett? As absolute ruler Saddam recently claimed 100% victory in a Presidential Election." John Fortune: "Although that's not surprising, given that voters were accompanied into the booths by Saddam's Ba'ath party officials, and given a choice between voting for Saddam or voting for their wives and children to be killed, and their houses to be burnt down." Bremner (as Peter Snow): "And just a bit of fun, just a bit of fun, even small children were counted as supporters on the principle that you might as well throw in the baby with the Ba'ath voter.""

"(as himself): "So to recap: we may or may not be going to war with Iraq because Saddam may or may not have weapons of mass destruction, which he may or may not use, or pass to other terrorists groups with whom he may or may not have links.""

"(as himself): "Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are much like Nancy Dell'Olio and Ulrika Jonsson: they can't stand each other, but they both enjoy fucking the same bloke.""

"(as himself): "Multimedia? As far as I’m concerned, it’s reading with the radio on.""

"I exhort all People, gentle and simple, men, women and children, to buy, to read, to extol, these labours of mine. Let them not fear to defend every article; for I will bear them harmless. I have arguments good store, and can easily confute, either logically, theologically, or metaphysically, all those who oppose me."

"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."

"There are, while human miseries abound, A thousand ways to waste superfluous wealth, Without one fool or flatterer at your board, Without one hour of sickness or disgust."

"Weak withering age no rigid law forbids, With frugal nectar, smooth and slow with balm, The sapless habit daily to bedew, And give the hesitating wheels of life Gliblier to play."

"This restless world Is full of chances, which by habit's power To learn to bear is easier than to shun."

"How happy he whose toil Has o'er his languid pow'rless limbs diffus'd A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain Invokes the gentle Deity of dreams. His pow'rs the most voluptuously dissolve In soft repose; on him the balmy dews Of Sleep with double nutriment descend."

"'Tis not for mortals always to be blest."

"Of right and wrong he taught Truths as refined as ever Athens heard; And (strange to tell) he practis'd what he preach'd."

"Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, Expels diseases, softens every pain, Subdues the rage of poison, and the plague."

"Unthrift, sweirnes, falset, povertie, and stryfe Pat polacey in dainger of hir lyfe."

"That nicht he sleipit never ane wink, Bot still did on the Ladie think."

"Quhowbeit that divers devote cunnyng Clerkis In Latyne toung hes wryttin syndrie bukis, Our unlernit knawis lytill of thare werkis, More than thay do the rauyng of the Rukis. Quharefore to Colyearis, Cairtaris, & to Cukis, To Jok and Thome, my Ryme sall be diractit, With cunnyng men quhowbeit it wylbe lactit."

"Quhen the Sonne is at the hycht, Att nonne quhen it doith schyne most brycht, The schaddow of that hydduous strength Sax myle and more it is of lenth. Thus maye ye Juge, in to your thocht, Gyfe Babilone be heych, or nocht."

"Heir sall Wantones ga spy them and cum agane to the king"

"Heir entirs Flattery new landit owt of France"

"Brother Wantonness, what thinks thou? Yon are the Three Estates I trow Gangand backwart."

"Sir, I wald speir at ȝow ane questioun. Behauld sum Prelats of this Regioun: Manifestlie during thair lustie lyvfis, Thay swyfe Ladies, Madinis and vther mens wyfis. And sa thair cunts thay haue in consuetude. Quhidder say ȝe that law is evill or gude?"

"Ere I depart this natioun, I shall mak Reformatioun!"

"And to the Devill of hell condemne this mein3e; For quhy sic reformatioune, as I weine Into Scotland was never hard nor seine."

"But in the glances of his eye, A penetrating, keen, and sly Expression found its home; The flash of that satiric rage, Which, bursting on the early stage, Branded the vices of the age, And broke the keys of Rome. * * * Still is thy name in high account, And still thy verse has charms, Sir David Lindesay of the Mount, Lord Lion King-at-arms!"

"Lyndsay, with all his ancient coarseness…maintained for two centuries, even among the precise, his position as the popular poet of Scotland."

"He usually lacks the originality of Henryson and the brilliance of Dunbar and Douglas. But what there is of him is good all through."

"Nobody thought Mel Gibson could play a Scot but look at him now; an alcoholic racist!"

"Apparently they're going to bring in 'Super Asbos'. But 'Asbos' already sound too cool. Teenagers see them as a badge of honour. They should call them 'Gaybos' or 'Bender Badges'."

"I watched the footage of Saddam being executed, and it really made me think…is there nothing on the internet that I won’t masturbate to?"

"The Americans want to build a big tower on the site of September the 11th. Freedom Tower they're going to call it but now apparently they're worried and they're looking at ways to try and make it terrorist proof. I think they should have just build a giant fucking mosque. No one is going to fly into that are they?! Or even better, a runway."

"They say that the Olympics is going to rekindle English national pride. I mean, for £9.2 billion they could have written “Fuck off Germany” onto the moon."

"Apparently Jordan and Peter Andre are fighting each other over custody of Harvey, well eventually one of them’ll lose and have to keep him. I have a theory that Jordan married a cage fighter cause she needed someone strong enough to stop Harvey from fucking her."

"Ministry of Defence? At least in the old days we were honest, called it the Ministry of War. "Hello, Ministry of War, department of nigger-bombing. How can I help?""

"Religion's just what we thought before we understood what mental illness was. "A bush talked to me!" "Brilliant, what did it say? What did the bush say? Let's live our lives by what the bush said!" You stupid fucking cunts."

"You've got a blank face there pal, if you hold that expression for long enough in a hospital you'd get fucking switched off."

"There's two empty seats right middle - this is supposed to be sold out, where are they? I hope they're dead in a fucking car crash!"

"TV's a fantasy, right? It's a middle class, bourgeois fantasy. You look at daytime TV and how aspirational it is, then ask yourself "who's watching daytime TV?" Benefit cheats, and prisoners. They don't buy and sell antiques. They don't renovate houses to sell them on. They don't have stuff in their attic and if they did have stuff in their attic, it'd be fucking Shannon Matthews."

"There's a place for McCanns jokes, it's probably here. It's probably not on Dictionary Corner on Countdown. "And as we go into the break, we'd like to remind you that MADDIE is an anagram of I'M DEAD.""

"(on his previous "department of nigger-bombing" joke) That actually comes from a quote by Lloyd George. Lloyd George, when he was British Prime Minister, said "Britain reserves its right to bomb niggers". And that's an important quote, because once you hear that, you realise that Britain has always been racist from the top down. I thought it's worth using that in a joke for, it's worth using that word for. Guy came up to me after a gig in Glasgow, a white guy, and he said "I don't think that you should ever use the word nigger, in any context." And I said, "Well, you've just used it." And do you know what he said? He said what I kind of hope I would say in the same circumstances. He went "No, I didn't." See, you can't really ban words, right? Ricky Gervais got in trouble for saying "mong", I don't know why he did it, he didn't seem to be able to make it very funny. You can't ban a word! Even a horrible word like that. That's like saying, "Let's just burn one book. Let's just burn Mein Kampf. It's a horrible book, nobody likes it. At the point you burn Mein Kampf, you're a fucking fascist society. And you're not even a proper fascist society, because you've burnt the fucking guide book! You're on marching about in peach military uniforms, invading Poundland. (adopts German accent) "Why did you burn the guide book? Why did you burn the guide book, you fucking spastic?!" "You can't call me that, Herr Groppenführer. That word has been banned. You must call me der Nincompoop!""

"(Speaking about French and Italian tabloids printing naked topless photos of Kate Middleton) A family of billionaire perverts [the Royal Family] going nuts about a picture of a pair of tits. The hypocrisy of the British press, [mimicking British press] “oh we wouldn’t print these pictures of tits”. I had to go past pictures of tits to read about how you wouldn’t print pictures of tits. I went past good pictures of tits to read about some shit tits. The only reason Kate Middleton is pregnant is because her tits aren’t worth finishing on."

"Comic relief raised £8 million last year. Britain sold hundreds of millions worth of weapons last year to Africa. So next year, one country in Africa will get blown to smithereens, and the next country along will get a visit from Lenny Henry. And both will feel bitterly jealous of each other."

"(Speaking about Pope Benedict XVI's resignation) The Pope must have done something that even the Catholic church found unacceptable. My theory is that he fucked an adult woman."

"I wish the Queen had died the night before the Royal Jubilee – I wish she’d just fucking died. But they wouldn’t have been able to tell us that she’d died. They would have had to hollow out her body and get that guy who plays Gollum to wear it."

"American foreign policy is horrendous 'cause not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse, I think, is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad. Oh, boo hoo hoo. Americans making a movie about what Vietnam did to their soldiers is like a serial killer telling you what stopping suddenly for hitchhikers did to his clutch."

"Hello you cunts, black power!"

"People get the wrong idea about me, they think I'm depressed or something - I'm not depressed. I don't wish that I was dead, I wish... that you were all dead."

"(Speaking about Comic Relief and charity) Look, there's a colonial side to British charity, it's true; look at Yemen, right? We're the number one provider of weapons and bombs and expertise to Saudi Arabia that they use to bomb Yemen, to engineer a famine in Yemen. At the same time, we're the number two provide of aid to Yemen - and why not? Life gives you Yemen, you give Yemen aid."

"At least Theresa May went, she had to go didn't she? Towards the end she had all the authority of the "Do Not Tumble-dry" label. She always had the charm of a fucking war crime. Towards the end her body language had gone; I didn't realise it was possible to limp with both legs. So now we've got Boris Johnson; an evolutionary dead-end of the Honey Monster. A bin bag of albino body parts. A cross between the Incredible Hulk and a Haribo fried egg... is the fucking prime minister! The Prime Minister! It's not just that he's the worst person for the job, he might be the worst mammal! And let's not forget how they create these people; they're created in the public school system, that's where they lose their empathy. They're forged in the crucible of hierarchical sodomy. That's why they can't get along, the last time the cabinet saw eye-to-eye it was over the back of a weeping first year. Incidentally, I'm not one of those people who thinks there's a paedophile ring in Westminster, I think it's probably more of a queue."

"You get these people, and they'll probably always be with us, who get offended by comedy. And I used to not mind until it occurred to me one day; most people who get offended at jokes watch porn! Like, pretty much all of them! There's someone right now watching torture porn going (mimicking someone masturbating) "I hope nobody makes a joke about a fuckin' swimmer's nose!" And then you get these people who defend comedy and say "oh this is a free speech issue", it's not a free speech issue; it's an artistic license issue. You're allowed to talk about it because it's not real on some level, right? There will always be people who won't get it, there's always those people who go "I think you'll find that if two blokes actually took a crocodile into a pub, there would be fucking carnage." But it's not real, so we get to joke about it. I think people sometimes get confused with how they use humour in their own life with what this is. So most people use humour as a form of politeness, as an ice breaker - this isn't that. This is sentences that end in a very surprising way."

"(Speaking about jokes he made about the 2012 Summer Paralympics Opening Ceremony) The one that papers hated the most was "The Saudi Arabian Paralympic team are mainly thieves.""

"I don't like people who lash out at jokes - at the same time, I don't like people who lash out at political correctness. I think it's lazy, and I think it sometimes encourages people to dismantle stuff that protects them. So I'll give you an example; there's a guy I talk to a lot in Glasgow, he's a homeless guy and he was an alcoholic - I suppose that's why I talk to him, because I was an alcoholic. (...) So I was talking to this guy the last time I saw him and I went "What would you say is your biggest problem in life at the minute?" and he went "Do you know what's my biggest problem, Frankie? It's all these fucking snowflakes in the media!" It can't be! It just literally fucking cannot be! You're sleeping rough in the streets of Glasgow, your biggest problem is actual flakes of fucking snow!"

"(Speaking about Ricky Gervais' joke about trans women) Now, I've got nothing but love for trans women, I've got nothing but love and support for trans folk in general. But they themselves would admit it's a very contentious issue that people try not to talk about, and Ricky Gervais obviously is a very powerful guy in show business. So nobody, really, who had the best years of their careers ahead of them... would tell you what they thought of that routine. Ricky Gervais, he does maybe fifteen minutes where he goes "well if a trans woman can say that they are a woman, I can say that I'm a chimpanzee, I'm a chimpanzee!" And my genuine reaction was; it's not that much weirder than Ricky Gervais saying that he's a stand-up comedian. I mean look, we know Ricky Gervais, he's a brilliant actor, he's a brilliant writer, he's not a fucking stand-up comedian! Just because Ricky Gervais self-identifies as a stand-up comedian, am I supposed to say he is one? It's fucking political correctness gone mad! Also, loving animals - brilliant, wonderful. Going on about loving animals? Suspect."

"I watched Hannah Gadsby's show Nanette. Now, it's a really great show, you should watch it if you get the chance. She talks a lot in it about comedy and her main point is that she feels that, herself as an oppressed person, she's often used her comedy to let the audience off too lightly - she makes a lot of good points. I think the problem with stand-up comedy is it simplifies stuff. It's hard to get at the truth when you've got to get a lot of regular laughs. And sometimes I think, am I trying to get to the truth here or am I just trying to tell funnier lies? So for example, I think she simplifies some stuff in her show. She says, stand-up comedy works by creating a tension in the audience, that's then punctured with a punch line. I don't think mine works like that, I think for me the tension arrives in the punchline. My uncle always said "do something you love, and you never have to work a day in your life" - he did heroin. (laughter) The tension arrives in the punchline and the setup line is almost supposed to be soothing, really. People say, don't they, that you only regret the things in your life that you don't do. I don't know who said that first, but it's someone who's never broken two corkscrews trying to get an unlubricated parsnip out of their arse. (laughter) The tension arrives... in the punchline."

"Sometimes I write stuff now and I go "am I really rebelling there, or am I just conforming?" Because our society works on conformity. People talk about racist cops; they don't select for racism. There isn't a test where they go "I'm afraid you failed; you answered several questions about the history of Motown correctly." They test you for conformity so that you'll just nod along with structural racism, and sometimes I say to myself "well, am I conforming?" So look, I compèred Live at the Apollo a couple of years ago - which is a type of conformity in itself - and at the time, you're supposed to do jokes on all these celebrities they've got down at the front and one of them was this really brilliant female boxer who I really admired and I'd followed her whole career. I had written this joke which I was really proud of which was "At the Olympics, in the women's boxing, they fought in two minute rounds which was good, because if had been three minute rounds I think I would have ejaculated my own pelvis." (laughter) And you know, I really laughed when I wrote that. I thought "that's fucking hilarious" because you'd never say that to someone's face, would you? And then as I was walking to the show I was thinking; people do say that kind of thing, people say that kind of thing in school - especially me. People say it now on social media, so am I just fucking conforming here? And what am I conforming with, a deeply sexist society?"

"Men don't have to assess women, that's why we can objectify them so quickly. On some level, we don't really give a fuck. A man can see a woman with a heavy cold and all he'd think would be "I would rattle that fucking phlegm loose.""

"I do think that getting a dog says something about you, it says; I'm so lonely that I could pick up shit."

"I'm gonna leave yous with one final piece of advice, and my advice is; never trust the super rich. What's the first thing they do when they get rich, they buy a yacht. Ever been on a yacht? It's like being in a two star hotel on fucking roller-skates. The only reason anyone would want to own a yacht is so that they can abduct children, sail them out to international waters, fuck them, and dispose of their bodies. And that's what everyone who owns a yacht... is doing. I don't care who it is, J. K. Rowling? I have to say, for legal reasons, that J. K. Rowling is not fucking and killing children in international waters... to the best of my knowledge. That's what's happening out there; the sea levels aren't rising, it's just the weight of dead, fucked kids. The sea isn't even salty."

"Do you know, there's now hotels for the super rich that are so exclusive that when you phone down and ask for an extra pillow, that's actually a code word. That's actually a code word for a prostitute. Imagine that, you phone down for an extra pillow, and a prostitute turns up. Now you have two prostitutes. And only one pillow to smother them with."

"Before I go, I want to leave you with this: Conservative voters, you have destroyed this country. We’re about to birth the first generation of babies that will be regularly woken by the nocturnal screams of their parents. And you did this. With your affordable four-wheel drives, your Coldplay albums, your canvas trousers, your NutriBullet, your rape pornography. Your James Corden, your Sky Atlantic, your mistress, your numb smile, your diazepam, your wanking glove, your weight gain, your constant googling "does this dream make me gay?". Your fear of buttons, your Amazon Prime, your unrealistic goals, your friend with terrible spinal injuries, your secret jealousy of all the attention he gets. Your constant fear of cancer, your dream of swimming with a dolphin who will at best feel complete indifference towards you. Your tutting at the news, your Gucci belt, the books you have pretended to read, your love of cock, your cock of love. Your daughter’s wedding, your first bike. Your suicide."

"There is a vegetarian option: you can fuck off."

"I've had a few medical problems this year: I'm now so old, that my pussy is haunted.(series 4, episode 1; What the Queen didn't say in her Christmas message)"

"Dear points of view, watching "Queer eye for the straight guy" made me think that if I made gay friends, they'd give me fashion tips. Actually, they fucked me."

"I thought it was sad, you know, that they had that pop concert to commemorate Diana. I mean, she didn't have much to do with pop music, did she? They should've done something that celebrated what was really great about her life: By staging a gangbang in a minefield."

"["Lines you wouldn't hear in a superhero movie"] What's that Joker, you'll be back? Somehow I don't think you will be."

"["Lines you wouldn't hear in a superhero movie"] Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Whatever it is it's heading straight for the World Trade Center!"

"[Talking about Richard Hammond's high-speed dragster crash] That should be the anti-speeding advert. It should be footage of Richard Hammond trying to remember his own wedding day.[Mimicking Richard Hammond] "She was wearing black... or was it red? Am I married?""

"The thing that nobody really said about Rebecca Adlington is that she looks pretty weird. She looks like someone who's looking at themselves in the back of a spoon."

"3 Million for the funeral of Margaret Thatcher? For 3 Million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person."

"When I was about 8 or 9, I was a massive Michael Jackson fan and I wish I had known at the time that I was his type."

"Can I just say, my routine about raping and f*****g Holly Willoughby was part of a very long routine about whether or not it's OK to do a joke about that, and I look at it from both sides, there are pluses and minuses."

"Give me but one hour of SCOTLAND, Let me see it ere I die."

"There is yet one place of shelter, Where the foeman cannot come, Where the summons never sounded Of the trumpet or the drum. There again we'll meet our children, Who, on Flodden's trampled sod, For their king and for their country Rendered up their souls to God. There shall we find rest and refuge, With our dear departed brave; And the ashes of the city Be our universal grave!"

"Fhairshon had a son, Who married Noah's daughter, And nearly spoiled ta Flood, By drinking up the water. Which he would have done, I at least pelieve it, Had the mixture been Only half Glenlivet."