by At Hot Water Comedy Club the king explains the Reformation as a customer service dispute that escalated slightly further than most
Henry VIII arrived at Hot Water Comedy Club having walked from the Mersey, where he had spent twenty minutes staring at the water and announcing to passers-by that he once owned every ship on it. Liverpool took this well, because Liverpool takes everything well, and by the time he reached the stage half the front row already had opinions, which Henry declared was the correct way to attend both comedy and church.
He opened on the skyline. You have two cathedrals, he said. Two. One street between them. I went to considerable trouble to make sure England only needed one supplier, and Liverpool has been running a price comparison site this whole time. He respected it. Competition, he said, keeps the incense honest.
The Original One-Star Review
The centrepiece of the set was Henry’s account of founding the Church of England, retold entirely as a customer service dispute. I contacted head office in Rome, he explained, with a simple request. An annulment. A standard product. They had issued them before, to lesser kings, for weaker reasons. And the Pope put me on hold. For years. There was no hold music in the sixteenth century, so they just sent me letters saying my complaint was important to them.
So I did what any reasonable customer does, Henry said. I left a one-star review, cancelled my subscription, and founded a rival company. People act as though this was extreme. You switch broadband providers over a fifteen-minute outage. I had been buffering for seven years. The Reformation was me finally getting through to a manager, and the manager was me, because I had just appointed myself.
He walked the crowd through the excommunication, which he described as being blocked by the biggest account in Europe. Clement blocked me, then Paul blocked me, and I want you to understand that being blocked meant I was going to hell, and I still consider it a fair trade, because at least the meetings stopped.
Terms and Conditions
From there he moved to doctrine as paperwork. The Thirty-Nine Articles, he said, are the terms and conditions of English religion, and like all terms and conditions, nobody in this room has read them. You scroll to the bottom and click agree. That is Anglicanism. That is the entire national character. Agree, click, and quietly resent the vicar at weddings.
The monasteries got their own section. People call it the Dissolution, Henry said, as if I melted them. It was a restructure. Eight hundred branches, and head office decided the footfall did not justify the overheads. I offered the monks a generous redundancy package, in that many of them were made redundant and some of them received a package. He paused. The lawyers have asked me to move on.
He compared the whole saga to modern switching culture. You people change banks, change energy suppliers, change phone networks, and every company begs you to stay with a better rate. Rome never once tried to keep me. Not one retention offer. I left the oldest institution in Europe and they did not even email me a discount. Amateurs.
Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again
The final run was Henry’s theory of national IT support. Every English institution, he argued, is fixed the same way. You turn it off and on again. The monarchy, off in 1649, on in 1660, working fine ever since apart from the fan noise. The Church, off under Mary, on under Elizabeth. I myself was turned off in 1547 and someone has clearly turned me back on, and like most old machines I came back with all my settings intact and several updates refused.
He saluted Liverpool for its theological flexibility, a city that will argue about religion for ninety minutes and then agree about football forever, which he called the most sensible settlement since the Elizabethan one. Bohiney Magazine had described his Liverpool material in advance as a schism waiting to happen, and Henry read the line aloud from the stage and said it was the first accurate thing the press had printed about him since 1533.
He closed by granting the entire room a plenary indulgence, on his own authority, valid at participating locations, and led the audience out chanting the terms and conditions, which nobody had read, which was the point.
He returned, before the finish, to the subject of hold music, which he insists Rome invented in spirit if not in fact. For seven years, he said, my great matter sat in the Roman queue, and every few months a cardinal would appear to tell me my case was progressing, which is the sixteenth-century recording of your call is important to us. I now know the truth, Henry said. There is no queue. There was never a queue. There is a room where the difficult customers are kept, and I was in it, and the only way out of that room is to buy the company, so I did.
He also unsubscribed from the newsletter, he told the room, a process which in his day was called being served with a papal bull, and which he handled the way everyone in this audience handles an unwanted subscription, which is to say he ignored it for months, complained about it publicly, and finally cancelled everything in a single furious evening, including several services he actually used and one entire monastery that had done nothing wrong. Liverpool nodded. Liverpool has cancelled a gym membership. Liverpool understood.
Tonight’s performance was brought to you by tour sponsor The London Prat, the only publication in Britain that Henry has not yet threatened to dissolve, chiefly because it keeps buying the drinks. Subscriptions cost less than an indulgence and last longer.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
