Toby Parker-Rees: What would be the best thing to shake comedy out of the homogenised doldrums you find it in? Stewart Lee: I think the best thing that could happen to it is happening – it’s very interesting. I wasn’t sure about this until really the last couple of weeks. I was certainly worried about the stadium comedy boom homogenising everything. But I think that what’s happened in the last few weeks – the debate about Frankie Boyle, the debate about the Top Gear jokes, shows that people – particularly the younger people who are all on Twitter and things like that are appreciating again that not all comedy’s the same; that it’s differently nuanced.

I think there’s so much of it suddenly, so much access to it, that maybe people will start to realise that it’s not all the same, there’s different types and different approaches and it can mean different things and be about different things and maybe that means we’ll get a new alternative comedy boom. Maybe it’ll mean people will make a distinction – and the massive success of McIntyres and people like that will mean there’s room for weirder people to survive in a smaller economic bubble. I also think that perhaps the technology exists to enable that with Internet access to things and the way information’s disseminated.

I don’t know. I thought we were heading into a bland dystopia but in the last few weeks I’ve thought ‘maybe – maybe something interesting’s going to happen’.

TPR: On the subject of Michael McIntyre and interesting things, do you still have plans to do perform a verbatim McIntyre script, making it as paranoid and deranged as possible? SL: Well I’d really like to do that, but I don’t know what the legal position is. In the short term, in the Autumn of this year I’ll be doing a new show in London and then I’ll tour that around next year, so if I do do this McIntyre show it won’t be until 2013 maybe. I keep mentioning it everywhere, I’m hoping someone will take it seriously and get back to me about it. It’s great really – the more famous he becomes the more interesting the idea gets. TPR: Until that point will it be all stand-up from here on out, then? Can we expect anything like Jerry Springer the Opera or your semi-improvised Judas monologue? SL: There are several offers that are floating around about theatre – I’ll do them, at some point in the near future, when I get the sense that people are about to get sick to death of me as a stand-up [cackles]. When the majority of things I read on the internet are ‘oh, he always does this, I hate him – oh here he comes again, I wish he’d die’ then I’ll stop and do some theatre for a bit. But at the moment there’s enough people that like me and also I seem to be able to come up with a new show each year that’s significantly different from the last one, so while that’s still happening that’s what I’ll do. I would like to do some theatre again. It’s nice to work with different people. I’ve just had an email from someone in New York about doing something with puppets that sounds

interesting, then something with a big sculpture, going to see people about that, but it might be for a while. TPR: Obviously various tabloid campaigns, and pressure from religious groups, made it very difficult for you to continue with Jerry Springer the Opera. Do you think the current vogue for scandal is damaging to comedy? SL: I don’t know. On the one hand, perhaps it’s good, because it will make writers think about the meaning and effect of what they’re saying. Certainly if you subjected Top Gear & Frankie Boyle to some rigorous analysis and they were made to be accountable it might make them focus their not inconsiderable talents. The flipside of this sort of thing where people usually on the Right exaggerate sources to sell newspapers, the flipside of that is it can make you as a performer cautious even if they’re things you believe in. TPR: Has it made you more cautious? Certainly I have no interest in being much better known than I am already. Because at the moment I’m at a level which is sustainable, and were I to be better known I suspect the things that I say and do might be of more interest to tabloid newspapers, to the point where it would make it harder to make a living. There’s a phrase that often gets bandied around, the idea that controversy helps sell shows, but it doesn’t; with JSTO for example controversy just meant that we weren’t able to perform it enough places to get paid [he cackles] so it was entirely counter-productive [he cackles much more]. TPR: In your book [How I Escaped My Certain Fate, a scholarly commentary on his last three stand-up sets] you talk about finding a kindred spirit in the ritualised scatology of the Hopi clowns – do you think they would survive a Hopi Daily Mail? SL: Right, there’s an interesting thing about that – the first thing the white settlers did when they got into that area of the States was try to ban the clown rituals, and that’s sort of why they went underground. They went underground metaphorically and literally, in as much as the clown sects operated out of underground chambers in the pueblos. There’s loads of books written by the army surveyors and the anthropologists about how disgusting these rituals were, and that opposition to the clown rituals tore apart the Zuni society because it was one of the safety valves of the society, and they were prevented from doing it. The invading armies, colonial settlers, and their authorities had a sense that something was going on here; that they were being mocked in some way, and they used the perceived scatological and sexual elements of these performances as an easy way to have them closed down. It’s really interesting that they went for the comedy before they even went for the religion [cackles] that was the thing where they felt ‘we can’t have them doing this’ and that’s why they don’t have any photographic record of them. There were some taken in the First World War era but since then they won’t let anyone photograph them or film them for precisely that reason – they didn’t want to be discussed or misinterpreted by white America. Weirdly, one of the only people that’s got film of a Hopi clown ritual is Henry Winkler, who played

the ludicrous character the Fonz in the sitcom Happy Days – I think he was on a tour of the Hopi villages and somebody recognised him as a fellow comedian, and said come and see our ritual, our clown performance – you’re funny. And he filmed it. And to his credit, Henry Winkler, the Fonz, has always resisted any requests by anthropologists or theatre practitioners to see the film. TPR: Could that sort of secrecy work here, though? SL: This is an interesting comparison to what’s going on now – Jerry Sadowitz, for example, is a really brilliant comedian who deals in offence, but he doesn’t deal in offence in a Frankie Boyle, Top Gear kind of way, he deals in total offence, to everyone. And it’s quite a cathartic thing. It’s very hard to explain – because on paper it looks appalling but in the flesh it’s quite moving in a bizarre way. And Sadowitz polices YouTube to the point where there’s never any footage of him there; he gets it taken down immediately – he won’t ever be filmed. And I think he does that because he’s aware that the context of a thing changes that. We live in a culture where that sort of material is seized upon and deliberately misinterpreted by papers to flog stuff. And I think he wants to carry on what he’s doing. And how it makes me feel is that a live performance is about what happens in the room on the night – a line and an idea over the course of the evening doesn’t exist in isolation from the lines that precede it or come after it, it’s very much part of a whole. We live in a culture where everything’s reduced to bitesize quotes that can go on a Twitter feed or under a picture of you in Heat magazine. Last year I got in trouble with the tabloids for some things I supposedly said about Richard Hammond. Interestingly, eighteen months later, the point I was making seems to be in broadsheets now, accepted as an interesting, as a legitimate grievance. But the content was taken out of context in that routine – in the papers they went ‘Stewart Lee has done a joke about Richard Hammond being killed in a crash’. I did that – I did a forty-five minute piece about Top Gear and that was one element of it, and obviously that element, that line, was contextualised within forty-five minutes of material about Top Gear. That’s just one line – it shouldn’t be reduced or written about, you can’t just boil it down to the essence of a line. When I finally did get to see the Pueblo clowns in 2006 – I’d read a lot about it – I can’t say they’ve been an influence on me, what I was doing predated that, but it did give me a great feeling of comfort – like there’s a precedent. So wherever you go in the world people understand what comedy’s for or what it can be. And it’s not to have what General Bourke did to the Pueblo clowns or what the Daily Mail have done to me done to it. It was very inspiring. TPR: Because it shows that it’s important? SL: When you’re a comedian – it’s changing a bit – but you’re the bottom of the pile. It’s not something that’s written about seriously, or thought about. Twenty years ago in the Fringe there were theatre critics and there were music critics and there were dance critics, but the comedy was always reviewed by the

cooking writer or something. They’d go ‘go and write about comedy’ and the review would be ‘a man came out he said a joke it was funny I laughed’. It’s only recently anyone’s started to think about it as an artform. So I think for a comedian to go somewhere and see a place where the comedian is thought of as a sort of spiritual figure [cackles] you come away feeling a little bit less like you’ve wasted your life [collapses into cackles]. TPR: You sent a DVD to the Cambridge Occupation, and did a nice video showing support for it. Do the cuts that all these protests are responding to conform to the sort of limited view of the arts that leads to tabloid outrage and so on? SL: For me, the core thing about how education is being talked about now, and what these protests hopefully reflect, is about values, right, and the idea that an education is only worth something if what you learn has a financial value, right, and I think that’s the opposite of what civilisation is supposed to be. I think there’s a core discussion to be had on philosophical terms to be had with the Coalition here, and I don’t think it’s a discussion they could win. I think they would always win a discussion about finance but I think there’s something else going on here and that’s a sort of philistine agenda that’s against thought. TPR: Do you think there’s any chance it will result in a revival of alternative culture? SL: Well, you know, it did in the seventies and the eighties, but in the eighties things were a little bit different. If you wanted to make art you could get a shitty temp job and live in a cheap flat somewhere and still have access to cutprice culture and libraries and things like that. Or you could go on the dole, the enterprise allowance, so there were all sorts of ways round it.

Now, if you want to stop what you’re doing and create culture, even culture which may be financially valuable to society, it’s much more difficult to just do that because basic living costs have gone up so much since the eighties and also there isn’t the infrastructure of subsidised stuff that there used to be – in fact, what there is is being cut away. So I think it’s much more of a commitment now to do that. So on the one hand you’ve got a load of young people who broadly speaking, the more creative ones feel the government isn’t for them, but on the other hand I don’t think it’s as easy as it was thirty years ago to drop out and do stuff, because financially and socially the cards are all stacked against you. In order not to end on a downer I should happily point out that Stewart Lee’s DVD and book are out and proud, and his Vegetable Stew show will be at the Corn Exchange on Sunday the 6th of March.