Stewart Lee : How I was busted by the O------ Advertisement Enforcement Office
"Visiting athletes enjoying their first taste of an East End curry have just discovered a new purpose for their Olympic Rings!" That was the tweet that started it all. Fans of me and my comedy work will know I am an inescapable presence on the Twitter social networking site and have more than 900,000 followers. It's not an ego thing. Drip-feeding a few gags every 20 minutes helps me to maintain my customer base and the discipline of being humorous in 140 characters or fewer forces me to develop different kinds of comedy from the multi-award-winning, long-form, idea-driven monologues I am best known for. When you've won two British Comedy awards, a Bafta and a Chortle award all in the same year, it's easy to rest on your laurels and I find that grappling with Twitter's stylistic limitations helps me keep my wits sharp and my comedy muscle match-fit.
The throwaway Olympic Ring gag isn't among my best work, admittedly, drawing as it does a simple and direct comedic comparison between the Olympic Rings themselves and the perhaps inflamed anuses of visiting Olympians who might perhaps have gone out for a curry in the East End of London, maybe around Brick Lane, and who might then perhaps have ordered a dish that was somewhat hotter than advisable, perhaps leading to soreness later when defecating. I'm not saying this did happen or ever will happen. It probably didn't and probably never will. What I am saying is that if it did happen, and the information that it had happened were somehow to leak out into the public domain, then there would be more than ample opportunity for we satirists to use the word "ring" in both its Olympic and its rectal sense.
Anyway, the gag, which I made on the Twitter network three days ago, wasn't intended to be analysed to death. It was just supposed to be a bit of spur-of-the-moment fun, something to keep my fans in the loop and my follower numbers up until the next pithy bon mot, although I noticed David Baddiel had re-tweeted it to Jonathan Ross, who in turn had re-tweeted it to United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who in turn had re-tweeted it to Ricky Gervais, who had then sent it to all his followers, without clear attribution, sadly. But what I could not have anticipated was the Olympic ring of fire that the gag would cause to surround me over the next 48 hours.
I wasn't aware of the extent to which unauthorised use of key Olympic phrases is being policed during the Games this year. Nearly 300 "Advertisement Enforcement Officers" are on hand to ensure that only the Olympics' official sponsors get sole commercial use of a list of Olympics-associated phrases so extensive it even includes "summer", "bronze" and "London".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/22/stewart-lee-olympic-games-twitter
I hope the majority of the 300 or so "Advertisement Enforcement Officers" can actually count the rings. Otherwise an absurd number of Audi drivers will be arrested.
