May 8, 2025 • 41 mins
Once described as the 'comedian's comedian' Stewart Lee has been performing stand up since 1988.
He is known for pushing boundaries with his intelligent, self-referential and often provocative style of comedy but in his new show 'Stewart Lee vs the Man Wulf' he questions his place on the comedy circuit in an era of increasing populism rhetoric and the popularity of, in his words “$60m Netflix comedians of hate.”
In this episode of Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy he discusses the state of comedy today and what he thinks of the comedy style of comics like Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle as well as why he wouldn't tour America right now.
As The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper begins a new era under Tortoise media he also reflects on his column for the paper which he's stopped after 15 years.
Produced by Holly Snelling and Sachin Croker
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I I don't see a way out of wherewe're going, you know, and, and
so you. You So when you talked about
fascism in your last column, youmeant.
Call it what it is, absolutely, I think.
That's where we're heading. People are pussyfooting around
this idea. You know, you you you, you
people are being deported wrongly from the states to an El
Salvador jail without due process.
(00:20):
What what, what's that Trump is doing deals for resources with
with dictators? You know, it's, it's, it
absolutely is that and we have to call it that.
I wouldn't work in the States atthe moment.
I'd worry about them going through my jokes and, and ending
up spending two days locked up without my heart medication.
You know, I just would worry about it.
(00:45):
Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World.
I'm Krishna Guru Murphy, and this is the podcast in which we
talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their
lives and the events that have helped shape them.
My guest this week is the stand up comedian Stuart Lee.
Now, Stuart has just written hislast column for The Observer
after The Observer's transfer ofownership.
(01:06):
And he is on tour with a show called Stuart Lee versus the Man
Wolf, which we will explore in terms of what it is and what
he's saying. But Stuart, welcome.
Thanks. For having me.
Normally this podcast begins with this idealistic question of
how would you change the world if you could do do you have a
how you would change the world? Well, I think one way you could,
(01:28):
you could change the world massively is, is if, if we
could, if we could bring bring to bear upon the Internet and
upon service providers and upon social media providers some kind
of universally agreed standard of, of truth and of fact
checking. And obviously we're, we're
heading into an even worse situation with that whereby it,
(01:51):
it, it appears, reading between the lines, that one of the
things Vance wants, if he gives us a trade deal is for us to
abandon Internet safety regulations and hate speech and
stuff like that. I don't know whether it's so he
can create markets across Europefor the tech companies that have
bankrolled Trump's government orwhether it's about trying to
leave him free to destabilize European democracy and push it
(02:14):
rightwards. But I think it's just, it's just
going to be a major, major problem.
And I think it's it's really hard to, it's really hard to
move forward on anything. While truth is mutable in that
fashion, it's really difficult in stand up because you, you
sort of come out and do a joke based on something.
But now the, the, the facts themselves are in doubt.
(02:34):
You know, if I get if I get in acab and talk to the driver, it
may be that he thinks that Keir Starmer defended the parents of
the of the Southport killer. And, and so before you can even
talk about that, you've got to unravel these just false things
that are propagated by the Internet.
And so I think I think that's really going to make a massive
(02:55):
difference to democracy and people's well-being and and the
future of civilization. Education, information and news.
Because there is always evidencethat they can cite as well that
I've seen it, I've seen the picture, or I've seen the the
quotes. Especially with the speed at
which AI is moving really, you know, because you can, you can
fabricate, you can fabricate an image and a story and also AI
(03:16):
will, AI will generate further AI information simply based on
the bulk of information that's out there.
It doesn't cherry pick what's accurate and so you know,
falsehoods will propagate yourself.
And that makes doing comedy really difficult because we we
need, we need a commonly understood truth to either agree
with. Or to know what's funny or.
Kick against, Yeah. And now it's all, it's all out
(03:37):
there. Anything is possible.
I mean, this is really interesting because in in your
last column, you, you did right.I think someone needs to build a
new global news network disinvested for media money men
and Trump knee benders to save objective truth as we know now.
I thought that was a joke. I put a joke on that.
I put perhaps Andrew Neil could do it with the experience he had
(03:59):
from setting up TV news. Yeah, so.
So that made me think the whole thing was a joke as sort of a
sort of a, well, this is the kind of ridiculous thing that
people say. Yeah, but you actually believe?
It well in the in the, in the columns, in the stand up.
I'm really, I'm really lucky because I'm able to, I think a
lot of the idealistic or extremethings that I have.
I'm aware that they can sound ridiculous.
(04:20):
I sort of think them, but I'm able to put them forwards in the
kind of clown persona of me who is a non realistic person who's
got these, you know, ideals but is also in despair of
everything. But yeah, I do think that.
I do think it's true. I think that I think the the
best thing for Western democracynow would be to say you can't
(04:42):
use Google. You can't have Twitter in your
country. You probably shouldn't have
Amazon and you can't really you can't.
I mean, it's Google. It is a verb, isn't it?
If my kids ask me something, I go, oh, don't ask me Google it.
But Google are changing the names of huge bodies of water
depending on the whims of the Trump government, the Gulf of
America, the Gulf of America so that that so we we shouldn't be
(05:03):
Googling things, you know, and and we certainly shouldn't be
using it. One of the problems with the
with the columns, for example, and this is a question generally
about how do we get information out there is I didn't really
have a social media presence, but I was aware that my observer
columns used to be shared on sayTwitter.
Now currently X in in the hundreds of thousands.
(05:26):
Now they're in the low dozens, if that because he is engineered
the algorithms to skew everything towards shock right
wing content. And I, I mean, more people come
and see me live than read the observer.
But but I'm, I'm aware that on some level that social media was
doing the work of letting peopleknow that I was out there doing
gigs. And, and a lot of comedians have
(05:46):
built their new comedians have built their careers on social
media presence. Yeah, and also also writers and
cartoonists and personalities and, and there was a it appears.
I mean, I'm, I'm too old for it,but it appears to me it was a
kind of window where lots of great talent was getting
through. There's a, there's a flip side
to that, which is I think it, itkind of it, it developed a
certain kind of culture which, which developed work in short
(06:09):
bursts that were just, that wereinterpretable and consumable on
social media. Whereas if you've seen me live,
you know well Sean Ono Lennon has called me the James Joyce of
stand up, so I think what he means.
It's a sit down experience. It's not going to land in 45
seconds. You know, it's a, there's
normally some of the jokes take two hours to make sense.
(06:31):
And so it's kind of it's, it doesn't really suit me, but
certainly there have been some great people that that were able
to get leverage out of that. But what?
What effect do you think the thechanging in the algorithms is
having or going to have on that whole class of comedians gonna?
Wipe them out. I mean, it's gonna, it's gonna,
it's gonna wipe them out. It's gonna make it really
difficult for them. It's and I think it's on some
(06:53):
level deliberate because it that's clearly deliberate
because one, one thing those kind of right wing demagogues
like Musk don't like is the ideathat people are with you than
them and they're having a laugh.You know, it's it's they hate
it. I mean, I sometimes think the
whole awful situation we've got into in the world is because
Obama did a good joke about Trump at a press dinner and is
(07:14):
this is everything is the death of all these people in Ukraine,
is the abandonment of Ukraine isattempts to destabilize
democracy in Germany. Is all that an act of revenge
for Obama doing, having a good laugh at Trump?
But the press correspondents dinner, you know, it's kind of
it's so I think, I think on somelevel it is about it is about
shutting it down, yeah. But I mean, does that leave you
(07:36):
feeling a little bit smug that you're not vulnerable in the
same way because you've got you've plowed your own path?
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasonsI'm not vulnerable is it's quite
hard to cancel me or to, to fabricate complaints against me
in bad faith and have me removedfrom employment because I'm not
really, I'm not really on anything, you know, and so, you
(07:58):
know, you can be, you can be dropped from theaters and stuff.
But really I, I don't have, I try, I try not to be visible.
And I know that sounds ridiculous.
It's very odd for a performer. Yeah, but I don't, I think,
first of all, I think the obligation for all performers
and writers to have to be personalities.
Now, I was just talking to an editor, a book editor at
(08:20):
lunchtime about this, about how she says she misses the days
where a writer could be a reclusive eccentric.
Because now even a, a, a, a, a, you know, a literary novelist
has to have some sort of personality so they can kind of
go and sell themselves on things.
And you think of someone like Tracy Thorne from Everything.
The girl is very good writer. But partly why she was able to
reach an audience is because in the golden age of social media,
(08:41):
she was very good at it. She was big on Twitter.
On Twitter and and middle-aged mums felt they had this advocate
who was able to write about their lives in a really witty
way and that that. But you know, writers ought not
to have to be. A lot of people become writers
because they don't want to have to see anyone.
And as a comedian, I think the stage persona is a sort of a
(09:01):
construct. I mean, we know, we know that
the pub landlord or Dame Edna Everidge or whatever or Lily
Savage were constructs. But I think all stand ups are on
some level and have to be a kindof a character act.
And I feel the character act would sort of be undermined if I
was an actual personality in theworld as well.
This is undermining me now because I seem much more
(09:23):
reasonable and happy. Than you really are.
Yes. I was expecting you to be more
grumpy. Yeah.
I mean, but if if you're right about the algorithms and what
it's going to do to I mean, not just comedians, but liberals,
yeah. Yeah.
You know, you're, you're going to have social media dominated
by the rights. And what does that mean for
(09:47):
progressives, liberals, people who want to challenge, people
who want to oppose? Is it?
Is it a real back to basics moment where you have to do it
for real, in front of real audiences on pieces of paper?
I think you do. I mean, I, I, I another thing I
really worry about is, is context, you know?
So I, I write. I write shows where the ideas
sometimes take two hours to pan out and they're not meant to be
(10:09):
boiled down into bits. When I've run afoul of people in
the last few years, it's where they've been able to take a
sentence out without the counterweight bits.
And so I do, I do really worry about that.
I mean, they they're writing thenewspaper columns with the
change of management of the Observer came at quite a good
time really, because it's been getting increasingly difficult
to avoid that happening because there are a lot of bad faith
(10:31):
actors who spend all day lookingfor a bit that they can take
out. I mean, I mean, Lee Anderson was
in the run up to the last election.
He stated explicitly, he said the bit out loud that you're not
supposed to say. He said we can win this if we
pursue transgender issues as a culture war wedge issue.
So they they looking for things that they can that they can take
(10:55):
out of context and blow up. And so it's difficult for for us
to avoid that. Once she works out there, it can
be fragmented. But when you say you're, you
know you're not that well known and you're not a big
personality. You do also have an extremely
loyal audience. I mean, who love you.
(11:15):
Yeah. I'm incredibly lucky.
And I, I, I, I don't really knowhow it's happened.
I'm really, really lucky that these people come back.
I keep thinking the tours will tail off because I'm not on
anything and I don't have a social media presence.
I don't advertise. But they hold pretty steady and
and seem to build. And who are they?
(11:36):
Well, they're not they're not exactly who you think they are.
They they're there's a lot of people that would fit the
Guardian reader stereotype. But this but you know, when I go
to South End or Carlisle or Derby simply aren't that many
people like that living there. So you, you know, a lot of
people come out, people come outthat like comedy, right?
They have to agree with you. This is another thing.
(11:58):
The assumption is everyone goes to laugh at things they agree
with. And while I am happy to provide
crumbs of comfort towards an ideologically disenfranchised
liberal middle class who've beenmade to leave Europe and
whatever, I also like the fact that people come that don't
agree with you, but but like thescale of the humor, you know
what I mean? I think there is something in
(12:19):
that. So it's a kind of broader
coalition and you think? Do people get annoyed?
Less. You, you, you have the angry
Heckler. Sometimes those people have
stopped coming. It was, sometimes it was
orchestrated. There was a period whereby
whereby I know pockets of peoplewould come along to try to
sabotage it, often based on somemisunderstanding they got of the
ACT, based on some bad faith actor on a website or or in a
(12:41):
newspaper column. But no, they tend not to.
There's a good social spread now, but I think I've reached
the point now where parents and grandparents are bringing their
kids and grandchildren. They're going, this is what an
alternative comedian from the 1980s is like.
A bit like I took my kids to seethe Sunra Orchestra when they're
about 9. I thought was really important
that they saw 60s free jazz in in full because it I feel it's a
(13:04):
dying sort of art form. And the main guy, Marshall
Allen, was like 96 at the time or something.
But I'm really glad that they saw that.
I think I'm like that now. Yes, and the cool.
The cool kids will like you. Yeah.
Although I found this old guy called Stuart Lee.
Yeah, I. Was interviewing Julian Cope
once and the teardrop explodes about 15 years ago and he said a
really wise thing he said, whichI always think of, he said at
(13:24):
the moment, he said I know I'm ahas been, but if I keep going
I'll be a legend. There's a kind of yes, it's a
bit you have to get through and if you're still there, people
go, oh, fair play. So how do you?
Well, I don't know whether you find your audience, whether your
audience finds you. If you're if you're not on
social media, you're not really on telly.
No, you used to be on telly a lot.
(13:46):
I had a really good run. I mean, I had, I had, I wrote, I
had 12 hours of stand up on, on BBC Two in a kind of six year
period where I did 4 series of BBC Two and no one's really done
anything like that since. So I think I'm kind of the, I
was like the last person to do that.
The model that I had in mind wasDave Allen, you know, from you
(14:08):
probably, of course, you might even be three years younger than
me, a bit young, but because he is.
But yeah, I was really lucky that I had that that little.
Burst So what's happened to TV comedy?
Well, there's a lot less money in it.
You know, there's, I mean, Channel 4, for example, are
making what 25% of what they didin comedy 20 years ago.
(14:30):
And so, and it's it's it's harder to get funding for things
that feel specifically British. And I think what I do does
because you're trying to do partnership deals to make to
make programs like sex educationthat are set in a blandly
anonymous non place. That things that Americans will
(14:50):
get as well. As well.
Yeah, and there's always there'sa worry that things are
culturally too specific, although my my my ex-wife
Bridget Christie show is very culturally specific to a
particular kind of rock White Royal British working class, I
think. And yet that is seems to be
(15:11):
popular abroad because its specificities become become
specificities become universal in some way.
And also, I think the fact that adolescents did really well
might change the way British TV thinks about funding things,
because that's set in a very British manure.
But it seemed to be universally understood as being true.
But that's certainly a problem of it.
(15:31):
So, yeah, I mean, it was just, it was just, we didn't really
realize looking back, the 90s was a bit of a golden age.
Certainly my kids, they like to look at Big Train and the
Armando Iannucci shows and The Thick of It.
And they, they see that as all belonging to some kind of school
of comedy, which I don't appear to be included.
(15:54):
I'm kind of good. I I used to write for them
actually. But they, they love that whole
time. And we, we, we're in that.
And you look back and you go, yeah, that was really good,
actually. And so in terms of your show, I
mean your shows all have a sort of, you know, a theme or an
idea. The new show is Stuart Lee
versus the Man Wolf. Yeah, the Man Wolf is is what is
(16:14):
the is the manosphere. Yeah, I mean, the reality is
approach to this show incrediblespeed.
Normally I write them and I feeltheir relevance diminishing.
And then by the time I finished the tour, 18 months later,
people are going. What's he bothered about that
for? I mean, there was one I remember
where it was all about a lot of it was about Brexit and Boris
and whatever. And the the whole payoff was
(16:36):
something to do with Johnson andit it just went out.
It finally went out on TV about a week before he was
disappeared, you know, and so itjust got in under the wire.
But this one is about this idea that there's a certain kind of
rhetoric and a certain kind of value system that is informing
American politics on the grand scale, British politics a bit.
(16:56):
And a lot of a lot of the kind of comedy that we see on
Netflix. And it's stand up comedy that,
yeah, you could say it's from the manosphere.
You could say it's callous. You could say it's ignorant.
You could say it's bullying. And it's so it's about it's
about how that squares off against liberal ideas.
And again, when I when I wrote it and I tried to embody this
(17:18):
idea by dressing up as an angry werewolf, it seemed a bit of a
stretch. But but within weeks it felt
almost 2 on the nose. And now people are absolutely
get what it is and I have to keep rewriting it because the
things that the horrible American Netflix werewolf
standard comedian says just simply not nasty enough as the
(17:40):
weeks go by after ramping them up because because of the speed
at which Trump is degrading acceptable rhetoric.
I mean, the, the, the thing thatI, I love about you is that you
know, you, you, you, you don't ever hold back from say, from
the saying or naming the people and even the publicity for this
show names Dave Chappelle, RickyGervais and Jordan Peterson.
(18:01):
I mean, that's, I mean, I don't equate them as being the same as
not to say it's slightly funny like two things and a really
awful one, but yeah, yeah. But what?
What? What is it about what Dave
Chappelle and Ricky Gervais are doing that you are kicking
against? Well, I think, well, I think the
(18:23):
with with Gervais specifically, I think the the thoughtless
stereotyping of less privileged minorities in order to get cheap
laughs. Yeah.
And I think that that. When he says it's a joke, it's
not what I think it's. It's, it depends, it depends on
(18:45):
how the audience take it away, doesn't it?
And and saying, saying it's a joke, It's not, it's not quite
enough. You know that that there has to
be some sort of character behindthat or there has to be some
overarching shape to the idea. It's not a get out of jail free
card for everything. Particularly the problem that
those people have is we, we all in my, my generation of
(19:09):
comedians, particularly in this country, we came out of a
culture where even when the Tories were in power in media
and in entertainment, there was a sort of a liberal consensus,
right. So when Sadovich started out and
he would say Nelson, his openingline was Nelson Mandela.
What AC word he lends someone a fiver and you never see them
again while he was in prison, right?
(19:30):
To say that to the kind of whiteliberal social worker audience
that were in the audience for analternative comedy gig.
Really funny, right? But the problem is those kind of
things now being said by Nigel Farage or Donald Trump or
they're they're they're out there.
So you're saying you're the sameas them.
You're not, It's not, it's, it'snot, it's not some sort of
(19:51):
kickback against the, the, you know, you.
So when Dave Chappelle hits out about the trans issue, yeah,
he's now with mainstream opinionand the Supreme.
Court, absolutely. Yeah, he is, he's with
mainstream and he's with, you know, he, he, he is, he is with
a, a, a drift towards the right that has left in the pursuit of
(20:12):
clarity, vulnerable people feeling uncertain of how they're
perceived by society now and what the way forward is.
So I think they, you know, and I, what I noticed with Bill
Burr, for example, is another American standard who I suspect
isn't right leaning, but has gota lot of comedy out of misogyny.
(20:34):
He's trying to sort of backtrackabout even Joe Rogan, who you
could say is probably personallyresponsible for a significant
amount of the Trump vote, is asking questions about due
process and things like that andwhether it's right to just
deport people to El Salvador. They let this monster
out-of-the-box, right? And they, and they were toying
with it and they were playing with fire.
(20:55):
And now as the world drifts towards a reactionary consensus,
they, they need to wonder what part they played in it.
And to say it's just a joke I don't think is necessarily good
enough. I suppose the the defense, if
there's going to be 1 yet includes Yes, but the the
liberal left went too far. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's the
(21:16):
same old argument. Political correctness had the
same thing in the in the 80s and90s, Yeah, but that there became
a tyranny of progressives as well, which also needed to be
kicked again. And that's what they were doing.
Yeah, I sorry, go on. But but the question is in in
doing so, you still end up punching down.
(21:37):
Yeah, I mean, a lot of as soon as you've said punching down,
there'll be loads of comments below the line on this.
When you put it on YouTube of what a cliched idea that is,
there'll be loads of people thatappear on GB news panel shows
furious with you for even sayingthat.
But yeah, you're right. I mean, what I'm I'm lucky,
right? In as much as I'm allowed to
have a bit more fun in my ACT because I, I can attack my
(22:02):
audience as well for being liberals and progressives.
And because a lot of them are liberals and progressives, they
like it. That's the thing about those
people is they, they recognize the stereotype of themselves and
they enjoy being being attacked for it.
I did a benefit for an environmental charity the other
week and I spent the half hour complaining that they're all
trust apharians and that they shouldn't block up the road and
(22:24):
killing people blocking up ambulances and stuff like that.
And but then somebody filmed it and it was, and it looked like
it was on YouTube for a bit. And I was very worried about
that because those jokes worked in that room for those people at
that point. And I wouldn't wouldn't want
them decontextualized as evidence of what I actually
think, because I don't think that.
But you can say that to those people.
And they, they, they like the catharsis of being, of being
(22:48):
insulted. I get, I get trans people come
up afterwards when I'm selling this stuff afterwards and
signing things. And they people often say we're
really happy that we can go to your shows and we know we're not
going to be insulted in, in a really straight, in a really
obvious way. The caveat I would have there is
that if I do do a joke about them, it's going to be original
(23:09):
enough that hopefully they're going to have to laugh because
it's not just going to be my shoe identifies as a Wellington
or whatever, you know what I mean?
So it's going to be like, and I think actually the the liberal
audience are very good at laughing at themselves.
So so you can on stage. I can have it both ways really.
Are you, are you generally? I mean, you sound like you watch
(23:32):
the news a lot. Do you have to?
Yeah, I mean, I, I watch news. I watch news and read news all
the time. I watch Channel 4 News.
Or can I? I miss, I miss the BBC
Newspapers Review. I used to think that was great
at 11:00. It's not there anymore.
I watch the Sky One, but a lot of the contributors they have
the, the binary nature of it is so tedious, you know, and I
(23:56):
don't really listen to BBC News anymore.
I kind of lost faith in it with during the Robbie give era.
I just kind of think I don't feel I can trust it.
So, you know, I read left-leaning and liberal
broadsheets and, and follow up stories.
But I, but I always make sure I,if I'm, if I'm writing about
something, I try to make sure I Fact Check it and where and
(24:17):
where it's from. And you know you have to do
that. Now.
But you're not. I mean, a lot of people are
finding the news crushingly depressing.
Well, it's you're not. No, I mean, I oh, yeah, I am.
And in fact, you know, I was doing a column every week or
every two weeks for the Observer15 years.
And it did become increasingly depressing because it's got it.
It's rapidly. I don't see a way out of where
(24:40):
we're going, you know, and. And so you.
You So when you talked about fascism in your last column, you
meant. Call it what it is, Absolutely.
I mean, you think? That's where we're heading.
People are pussyfooting around this idea.
You know, you, you, you, you people are being deported
wrongly from the states to an ElSalvador jail without due
process. What's that Trump is doing deals
(25:03):
for resources with dictators. You know, it's it's, it
absolutely is that. And we have to call it that.
And we have to act in the way that we should have done more
quickly in the 30s, you know. And I mean, I just got an offer.
When you come and do a week in this club in Chicago, it's not
something I'd normally do anywaybecause I at the moment I'd have
(25:24):
to take a huge set of an American cityscape and two full
size werewolf costumes. I'd have to get those through
American customs. But, but I wouldn't work in the
States at the moment. I'd worry about them going
through my jokes and ending up spending two days locked up
without my heart medication. You know, I just would worry
(25:45):
about it. So I think, yeah, we are what we
are heading out. But it is it is depressing.
And I was I was a bit worried that the the topical jokes are
becoming like the dance band on the Titanic, you know where and
people will write, write me these letters and go.
The only thing I look forward toevery week is at least having a
laugh about the news with your column, like crying.
(26:07):
So, you know, you feel a sense of responsibility as well.
But is it? Is it good for for for for
comedy? It should be.
Yeah. It should be good.
I mean, absolutely. Although of course, Peter Cook
always had that very famous jokeabout when people say, I used to
ask me if the establishment clubwas make any difference.
He said it was. Let's not forget what a vibrant
(26:28):
cabaret scene there was in Weimar Germany.
Yeah, kind of like what? But yeah, it should be good.
It should be good. And in fact, in fact, and also
in times of censorship or when people are afraid of what they
can say, sometimes you get really interesting creative work
where people are trying to find new ways of expressing things
that don't fall foul of of official guidelines.
The trouble is going to be how people find it.
(26:49):
The trouble is going to be how people find it because what's
happened to lots of the great liberal satirists that came up
through social media in the lastfew years, They have to all
intents and purposes been silenced by the but they they in
in the, in the window after the collapse of print media, you
know, which is on the on the on the way down, a lot of people or
(27:11):
a lot of people. And in the reduction of TV and
TV comedy and in the caution that mainstream broadcasters
have about political material. We'll never really know why the
match report went down, You know, on the on the BBCI didn't
they were being hysterical saying that it was closed down
for political reasons, but maybeit was we'd never know.
(27:32):
But you know, the social media enabled people to flourish in
that, in that gap. And I think they people had no
reason to believe it wouldn't always be thus.
And lots of campaigning, lots ofcampaigns got traction on it.
You know, lots of lots of the resistance to Tufton Street
attempts to infiltrate things like the National Trust or
(27:53):
whatever was driven by people organizing on social media.
And that will that will be much harder now to for people to get
get any traction going. So, so, so when so is there is,
I mean, do you see new talent out there?
Do you go and see a lot of comedy?
Well. In in the 90s, which is a long
(28:13):
time ago now, I used to be, I used to be a club comic doing
gigs five nights a week on billswith four or five people and I
did. I felt I had until about the mid
noughties. I felt like I had a feel of what
was going on. I'd be lying if I said I did.
Now the only time I I see a bunch of new comics that I don't
know about is if I do a benefit and then I see amazing people.
(28:37):
I mean, the, the, the standard is higher, right, In terms of
people's professionalism and their ability to hold a room.
But what I do miss is that when I came on the alternative comedy
circuit, as it was then called in the 80s, a lot of people,
(28:59):
it's difficult to imagine what else they could have done.
There were people that were justnuts in a brilliant way.
Like the Iceman who's got a filmbeing made about him.
His act was that he melted ice. Or Steve Murray, who died
recently, whose act was that he would just tear teddy bears to
pieces, called himself the teddybear torturer.
Well, there were people like like Sadovitz who seemed to be
(29:20):
able to be in that state who were really like furious to the
point where in a different society they might have been
locked up. So it seemed to create, it
seemed to be a space where a lotof quite, quite problematic
people were able to rub along and monetize their madness.
Whereas now it's the the opportunities that comedy
presents has necessarily meant that ambitious, professional
(29:43):
people tend to go into it, whereas before it seemed like a
retreat from the world into a hermetically sealed environment
where you might be safe. And do you and do you think the
man Wolf is a, is a phase we're going through?
Is everything sort of circular? Well, or I think that we Simon
Reynolds wrote about this very well in a book about pop music
(30:04):
where he said I think it was in RIP it Up always said that we we
grew up viewing popular culture as a series of sections of
rocket. They were gradually jettisoned
as it moved forwards. But what's happening now is
there's so much media out there that everything is available all
at once. For example, my kids music
(30:24):
tastes are bizarre that they cherry pick from different eras.
They don't recognize age as an issue or go and see someone
really old as we wanted to see people of our age doing things
that were new moving forward. I think with comedy now, it's
difficult to make a generalization about it because
all sorts of things are available simultaneously in a
(30:46):
way that they that they never quite have been before.
There were definitely feelings of phases.
It just depends, and we're back where we started is how do we
tell people about it when there seems to be mechanisms in place
and economically and politicallyto actively silence and repress
(31:07):
certain forms of certain forms of expression?
I saw an interview answer you gave in print ones about
regrets, and one of your regretswas not enjoying things that
were popular because I think when we were young it was deeply
uncool to enjoy anything that was popular, so you rejected it
out of hand. What do you feel you missed out
on? Well, you know, like there's
(31:31):
loads of things I just didn't. I mean, I was, you know, I was
around in brick pop, but I was going to see, you know, free
jazz while that was happening. And I didn't ever go to raves.
So you're how are we going to get a sort of a regular fix,
surely now I mean like have you stopped doing columns now or?
It was very nice for me to have the column because I don't
(31:54):
really know how the average person copes with life.
But when I see when I see thingsin the news that really annoy
me, I think my next thought is how do I do a joke about that?
I'll write something about it and it'll be funny and that kind
of cures me a bit. And now I don't I'm not able to
do that with the immediacy that I could.
So I thought maybe once a week I'll film myself doing 10
(32:16):
minutes of new stuff in a club, try and find some way of getting
it to pay for itself online. And actually just in the last
couple of days somebody started talking about doing sub stack.
The problem is that when I was writing for the Observer and
when I wrote for TV, when it stuff was on TV, highly paid
(32:37):
lawyers from competent organizations like the Observer
and the BBC would check that what you're saying was that the
setup was fact, factually accurate, even if the punch line
was exaggerated for comic effect.
And they would also look to see if something you'd said run the
risk of being misinterpreted in a way that could be acted upon
(33:01):
in bad faith by people. And even with that, there were
three times in the last five years with the Observer, even
after the legal checks where I came close to career ending
disasters in terms of people complaining about things and and
how they would have chosen to portray me and whether there
would be legal action. So I don't think I can really
(33:21):
afford to do political comedy asan independent without, without
the lawyer. Without the lawyer.
Yeah, I actually, I've gone in the last 10 days from thinking
leaving this paper is actually an opportunity to operate and do
political satire independently to thinking I can't lose my
(33:42):
house or or not be able to live or, you know, we can't.
I can't because. The option would be to play
safe, which you which is sort ofpresumed the impossible.
So what I have to do is I tour the stuff for two years.
I think the next show will be onSky and Now TV again.
And they will, they will help meat the point of delivery to make
(34:04):
sure that whatever's in it is not actionable, because I can't.
So actually the chilling effect of how these people nibble away
at you is that I probably can't afford to do that independently.
I probably can't afford to do. I can't afford the personal risk
of doing topical comedy on the sub stack or setting up my own
(34:26):
YouTube channel or whatever. And you, you also sort of
rejected panel shows, didn't you?
Quite a long time. It was a mutual look.
I was conscious. On getting creatively, I
rejected them because I think that in all forms of art, in a
music and comedy, it's collaborative process, right?
Whereas the panel show is set upin such a way as people are
(34:47):
trying to get noticed as individuals, either to win the
round or because they want to dominate it to them.
And I remember particularly one where I I did what I would have
done when I was in the double act, when I was working in
groups of people, where I, I setup someone on the other team for
a joke by giving them a feed line where I pretended to not
understand something, knowing that they could say a particular
(35:10):
thing and they did it, which I'dset up and then acted like it
was a victory. It wasn't seen as part of a
collaboration or whenever we want to be a part of that.
Also, I felt like it wouldn't really suit the character of me,
wouldn't be on them. But also when I did do them, I
was terrible at them as well. I did.
(35:31):
I did about 3:00. But when when the Nyora got
married, I was very naive as well.
I went along. I went along thinking they were
what they pretend to be. And then I had the realization
that so many of us have where you realize the writers are
there writing the lines for everyone.
Most people are taped from the writers.
Some people would bring in theirown writers.
(35:53):
The writers might get paid more than that comics fee for the
show, but they wanted to give that money to the writer so that
they would look good on it. It's nonsense, the whole thing.
And I can't, I can't help thinking there probably is a
there probably is a window somewhere for a show in which
comedians generally collaborate and are not being not being
manipulated by producers and writers.
Although I understand there's a thing at the moment called the
(36:14):
last laugh or something. Yeah, and young people probably,
which is brilliant. Young people tell me that is
that and that. Yeah, but I'm not going to watch
it. But it sounds, but it sounds
like, sounds like someone's thought, what if we actually did
this? Yes, maybe that would.
Be we put 12 comics in a room together and yeah, and they like
each other. I mean, do you, do you think
that? I mean, is the panel show the
(36:35):
string quartet on the deck of the Titanic right now?
I don't know. I mean, I certainly, I don't
know. I think it.
I think it, I don't watch enoughof them to know.
I know. I haven't seen one for 10 years,
so I don't know. Yeah.
But I, but I mean, I do often think about an interview that
Chris Morris gave a few years ago where he talked about, are
(36:58):
you, if you're a political satirist, are you just the kind
of gesture to the court, you know, and there is a worry of
that. And certainly, I mean, Larry
David has come out fighting. I wanted to ask you about this.
I mean, Bill Maher, Yeah, I meanBill Maher.
Bill Maher went to have dinner with Trump and then came out and
(37:18):
did a whole thing about his dinner with Trump and said, you
know, if only Trump could be more like this in, in public,
then maybe we'd think about him differently.
And then Larry David did this very funny reply and now Bill
Maher sort of hit back. Where do you where do you sit in
this conversation? Well, with Larry David,
absolutely. And I think you, you know, look,
(37:38):
I mean, what? OK, one, one of the problems a
lot of us had on the left was that or in the centre.
I'll be I'll be I'm a centrist dad, of course.
What what, what is that some when Starmer got in, despite
everything that has happened andwe've Corbyn everything, a lot
of us are thinking, well, it's going to be difficult to do
comedy about him because compared to what's just come,
(37:59):
he's competent and not actively evil and set on them.
But obviously he's blotted his copy book fairly quickly and is,
you know, you have to sometimes go against your political
instincts to, to, to, to, to do jokes about people that you
might perhaps sympathise with because you you have to look for
the angle. But I think to, I think for that
(38:20):
no one should be doing anything in support of Trump.
No comedian with any sense of the.
Person are you happy to excoriate Starmer?
It depends what he does. Certainly, certainly, certainly
the the audiences are. I feel like they're expecting it
more than they were three, threemonths ago.
You know, that that if if you'rethe Canary in the mine, then,
(38:43):
yeah, then something's going on.Something's going on.
Yeah. And so, yeah.
But. But I mean, it must be weird for
for Larry David because of course, Cheryl's Cheryl's the
actress who plays Cheryl's husband is, is Kennedy the, the,
the who's dismantling, dismantling of the health what,
what little health knowledge there is in in the
(39:05):
infrastructure of American government.
So it's incredible. You know, I don't know how that
how those dinner parties work. But what I mean, but in talking
about Starmer, what I mean is like you, you do not feel that
as a as a liberal. As a centrist dad.
Centrist dad who sees the March of reform as the big threat to
Starmer that you know you you should lay off.
(39:28):
Well, A. Starmer for fear of helping
along. We'll have to see.
We'll have to see. And it's interesting doing this
show at the moment. You know, basically there's,
there's, there's a story arc to it that I've got to hold onto.
But I do 10 minutes at the beginning.
I say, look, over the course of the night, I say to the
audience, I'm going to do 10 minutes of liberal stand up from
a liberal perspective. They're going to do 10 minutes
(39:50):
of reactionary Netflix star stand up in a reactionary
Netflix way. Then at the end of the
second-half, I'm going to do 10 minutes of liberal stand up in a
reactionary Netflix way. It's like the stand up comedy
equivalent of the great triptychpaintings in the cathedrals of
medieval Europe, right? But so it kind of at the moment
it's an interesting experiment into testing all those things
out which. Gets the biggest law.
Well, the interesting thing is that it's so easy to do nasty
(40:15):
reactionary Netflix comedy, and it's such a surprise that the
nasty reactionary Netflix bit iskind of the best bit of the
topical stuff. And I think it's partly because
that audience enjoy the fact that it's not the sort of thing
they should normally see. And also they're off the hook
because I'm dressed as a werewolf.
(40:36):
But yeah, that and that, but andthat kind of plays into the
hands of the show because something is clearly attractive
about callousness and cruelty atthis point in history that is
allowing those sorts of people to flourish in politics,
journalism and entertainment. So what's the difference between
what you're doing in that bit and what Ricky Gervais is doing?
I'm dressed as a werewolf. I think on that note, Stewart
(41:03):
Lee, thank you very much. Indeed.
Cheers. Thanks for sharing your ways to
change the world. I hope you enjoyed that.
You can watch all of these interviews on the Channel 4 News
YouTube channel. Our producer is Holly Snelling.
Until next time, bye bye.
I I don't see a way out of wherewe're going, you know, and, and
so you. You So when you talked about
fascism in your last column, youmeant.
Call it what it is, absolutely, I think.
That's where we're heading. People are pussyfooting around
this idea. You know, you you you, you
people are being deported wrongly from the states to an El
Salvador jail without due process.
(00:20):
What what, what's that Trump is doing deals for resources with
with dictators? You know, it's, it's, it
absolutely is that and we have to call it that.
I wouldn't work in the States atthe moment.
I'd worry about them going through my jokes and, and ending
up spending two days locked up without my heart medication.
You know, I just would worry about it.
(00:45):
Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World.
I'm Krishna Guru Murphy, and this is the podcast in which we
talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their
lives and the events that have helped shape them.
My guest this week is the stand up comedian Stuart Lee.
Now, Stuart has just written hislast column for The Observer
after The Observer's transfer ofownership.
(01:06):
And he is on tour with a show called Stuart Lee versus the Man
Wolf, which we will explore in terms of what it is and what
he's saying. But Stuart, welcome.
Thanks. For having me.
Normally this podcast begins with this idealistic question of
how would you change the world if you could do do you have a
how you would change the world? Well, I think one way you could,
(01:28):
you could change the world massively is, is if, if we
could, if we could bring bring to bear upon the Internet and
upon service providers and upon social media providers some kind
of universally agreed standard of, of truth and of fact
checking. And obviously we're, we're
heading into an even worse situation with that whereby it,
(01:51):
it, it appears, reading between the lines, that one of the
things Vance wants, if he gives us a trade deal is for us to
abandon Internet safety regulations and hate speech and
stuff like that. I don't know whether it's so he
can create markets across Europefor the tech companies that have
bankrolled Trump's government orwhether it's about trying to
leave him free to destabilize European democracy and push it
(02:14):
rightwards. But I think it's just, it's just
going to be a major, major problem.
And I think it's it's really hard to, it's really hard to
move forward on anything. While truth is mutable in that
fashion, it's really difficult in stand up because you, you
sort of come out and do a joke based on something.
But now the, the, the facts themselves are in doubt.
(02:34):
You know, if I get if I get in acab and talk to the driver, it
may be that he thinks that Keir Starmer defended the parents of
the of the Southport killer. And, and so before you can even
talk about that, you've got to unravel these just false things
that are propagated by the Internet.
And so I think I think that's really going to make a massive
(02:55):
difference to democracy and people's well-being and and the
future of civilization. Education, information and news.
Because there is always evidencethat they can cite as well that
I've seen it, I've seen the picture, or I've seen the the
quotes. Especially with the speed at
which AI is moving really, you know, because you can, you can
fabricate, you can fabricate an image and a story and also AI
(03:16):
will, AI will generate further AI information simply based on
the bulk of information that's out there.
It doesn't cherry pick what's accurate and so you know,
falsehoods will propagate yourself.
And that makes doing comedy really difficult because we we
need, we need a commonly understood truth to either agree
with. Or to know what's funny or.
Kick against, Yeah. And now it's all, it's all out
(03:37):
there. Anything is possible.
I mean, this is really interesting because in in your
last column, you, you did right.I think someone needs to build a
new global news network disinvested for media money men
and Trump knee benders to save objective truth as we know now.
I thought that was a joke. I put a joke on that.
I put perhaps Andrew Neil could do it with the experience he had
(03:59):
from setting up TV news. Yeah, so.
So that made me think the whole thing was a joke as sort of a
sort of a, well, this is the kind of ridiculous thing that
people say. Yeah, but you actually believe?
It well in the in the, in the columns, in the stand up.
I'm really, I'm really lucky because I'm able to, I think a
lot of the idealistic or extremethings that I have.
I'm aware that they can sound ridiculous.
(04:20):
I sort of think them, but I'm able to put them forwards in the
kind of clown persona of me who is a non realistic person who's
got these, you know, ideals but is also in despair of
everything. But yeah, I do think that.
I do think it's true. I think that I think the the
best thing for Western democracynow would be to say you can't
(04:42):
use Google. You can't have Twitter in your
country. You probably shouldn't have
Amazon and you can't really you can't.
I mean, it's Google. It is a verb, isn't it?
If my kids ask me something, I go, oh, don't ask me Google it.
But Google are changing the names of huge bodies of water
depending on the whims of the Trump government, the Gulf of
America, the Gulf of America so that that so we we shouldn't be
(05:03):
Googling things, you know, and and we certainly shouldn't be
using it. One of the problems with the
with the columns, for example, and this is a question generally
about how do we get information out there is I didn't really
have a social media presence, but I was aware that my observer
columns used to be shared on sayTwitter.
Now currently X in in the hundreds of thousands.
(05:26):
Now they're in the low dozens, if that because he is engineered
the algorithms to skew everything towards shock right
wing content. And I, I mean, more people come
and see me live than read the observer.
But but I'm, I'm aware that on some level that social media was
doing the work of letting peopleknow that I was out there doing
gigs. And, and a lot of comedians have
(05:46):
built their new comedians have built their careers on social
media presence. Yeah, and also also writers and
cartoonists and personalities and, and there was a it appears.
I mean, I'm, I'm too old for it,but it appears to me it was a
kind of window where lots of great talent was getting
through. There's a, there's a flip side
to that, which is I think it, itkind of it, it developed a
certain kind of culture which, which developed work in short
(06:09):
bursts that were just, that wereinterpretable and consumable on
social media. Whereas if you've seen me live,
you know well Sean Ono Lennon has called me the James Joyce of
stand up, so I think what he means.
It's a sit down experience. It's not going to land in 45
seconds. You know, it's a, there's
normally some of the jokes take two hours to make sense.
(06:31):
And so it's kind of it's, it doesn't really suit me, but
certainly there have been some great people that that were able
to get leverage out of that. But what?
What effect do you think the thechanging in the algorithms is
having or going to have on that whole class of comedians gonna?
Wipe them out. I mean, it's gonna, it's gonna,
it's gonna wipe them out. It's gonna make it really
difficult for them. It's and I think it's on some
(06:53):
level deliberate because it that's clearly deliberate
because one, one thing those kind of right wing demagogues
like Musk don't like is the ideathat people are with you than
them and they're having a laugh.You know, it's it's they hate
it. I mean, I sometimes think the
whole awful situation we've got into in the world is because
Obama did a good joke about Trump at a press dinner and is
(07:14):
this is everything is the death of all these people in Ukraine,
is the abandonment of Ukraine isattempts to destabilize
democracy in Germany. Is all that an act of revenge
for Obama doing, having a good laugh at Trump?
But the press correspondents dinner, you know, it's kind of
it's so I think, I think on somelevel it is about it is about
shutting it down, yeah. But I mean, does that leave you
(07:36):
feeling a little bit smug that you're not vulnerable in the
same way because you've got you've plowed your own path?
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasonsI'm not vulnerable is it's quite
hard to cancel me or to, to fabricate complaints against me
in bad faith and have me removedfrom employment because I'm not
really, I'm not really on anything, you know, and so, you
(07:58):
know, you can be, you can be dropped from theaters and stuff.
But really I, I don't have, I try, I try not to be visible.
And I know that sounds ridiculous.
It's very odd for a performer. Yeah, but I don't, I think,
first of all, I think the obligation for all performers
and writers to have to be personalities.
Now, I was just talking to an editor, a book editor at
(08:20):
lunchtime about this, about how she says she misses the days
where a writer could be a reclusive eccentric.
Because now even a, a, a, a, a, you know, a literary novelist
has to have some sort of personality so they can kind of
go and sell themselves on things.
And you think of someone like Tracy Thorne from Everything.
The girl is very good writer. But partly why she was able to
reach an audience is because in the golden age of social media,
(08:41):
she was very good at it. She was big on Twitter.
On Twitter and and middle-aged mums felt they had this advocate
who was able to write about their lives in a really witty
way and that that. But you know, writers ought not
to have to be. A lot of people become writers
because they don't want to have to see anyone.
And as a comedian, I think the stage persona is a sort of a
(09:01):
construct. I mean, we know, we know that
the pub landlord or Dame Edna Everidge or whatever or Lily
Savage were constructs. But I think all stand ups are on
some level and have to be a kindof a character act.
And I feel the character act would sort of be undermined if I
was an actual personality in theworld as well.
This is undermining me now because I seem much more
(09:23):
reasonable and happy. Than you really are.
Yes. I was expecting you to be more
grumpy. Yeah.
I mean, but if if you're right about the algorithms and what
it's going to do to I mean, not just comedians, but liberals,
yeah. Yeah.
You know, you're, you're going to have social media dominated
by the rights. And what does that mean for
(09:47):
progressives, liberals, people who want to challenge, people
who want to oppose? Is it?
Is it a real back to basics moment where you have to do it
for real, in front of real audiences on pieces of paper?
I think you do. I mean, I, I, I another thing I
really worry about is, is context, you know?
So I, I write. I write shows where the ideas
sometimes take two hours to pan out and they're not meant to be
(10:09):
boiled down into bits. When I've run afoul of people in
the last few years, it's where they've been able to take a
sentence out without the counterweight bits.
And so I do, I do really worry about that.
I mean, they they're writing thenewspaper columns with the
change of management of the Observer came at quite a good
time really, because it's been getting increasingly difficult
to avoid that happening because there are a lot of bad faith
(10:31):
actors who spend all day lookingfor a bit that they can take
out. I mean, I mean, Lee Anderson was
in the run up to the last election.
He stated explicitly, he said the bit out loud that you're not
supposed to say. He said we can win this if we
pursue transgender issues as a culture war wedge issue.
So they they looking for things that they can that they can take
(10:55):
out of context and blow up. And so it's difficult for for us
to avoid that. Once she works out there, it can
be fragmented. But when you say you're, you
know you're not that well known and you're not a big
personality. You do also have an extremely
loyal audience. I mean, who love you.
(11:15):
Yeah. I'm incredibly lucky.
And I, I, I, I don't really knowhow it's happened.
I'm really, really lucky that these people come back.
I keep thinking the tours will tail off because I'm not on
anything and I don't have a social media presence.
I don't advertise. But they hold pretty steady and
and seem to build. And who are they?
(11:36):
Well, they're not they're not exactly who you think they are.
They they're there's a lot of people that would fit the
Guardian reader stereotype. But this but you know, when I go
to South End or Carlisle or Derby simply aren't that many
people like that living there. So you, you know, a lot of
people come out, people come outthat like comedy, right?
They have to agree with you. This is another thing.
(11:58):
The assumption is everyone goes to laugh at things they agree
with. And while I am happy to provide
crumbs of comfort towards an ideologically disenfranchised
liberal middle class who've beenmade to leave Europe and
whatever, I also like the fact that people come that don't
agree with you, but but like thescale of the humor, you know
what I mean? I think there is something in
(12:19):
that. So it's a kind of broader
coalition and you think? Do people get annoyed?
Less. You, you, you have the angry
Heckler. Sometimes those people have
stopped coming. It was, sometimes it was
orchestrated. There was a period whereby
whereby I know pockets of peoplewould come along to try to
sabotage it, often based on somemisunderstanding they got of the
ACT, based on some bad faith actor on a website or or in a
(12:41):
newspaper column. But no, they tend not to.
There's a good social spread now, but I think I've reached
the point now where parents and grandparents are bringing their
kids and grandchildren. They're going, this is what an
alternative comedian from the 1980s is like.
A bit like I took my kids to seethe Sunra Orchestra when they're
about 9. I thought was really important
that they saw 60s free jazz in in full because it I feel it's a
(13:04):
dying sort of art form. And the main guy, Marshall
Allen, was like 96 at the time or something.
But I'm really glad that they saw that.
I think I'm like that now. Yes, and the cool.
The cool kids will like you. Yeah.
Although I found this old guy called Stuart Lee.
Yeah, I. Was interviewing Julian Cope
once and the teardrop explodes about 15 years ago and he said a
really wise thing he said, whichI always think of, he said at
(13:24):
the moment, he said I know I'm ahas been, but if I keep going
I'll be a legend. There's a kind of yes, it's a
bit you have to get through and if you're still there, people
go, oh, fair play. So how do you?
Well, I don't know whether you find your audience, whether your
audience finds you. If you're if you're not on
social media, you're not really on telly.
No, you used to be on telly a lot.
(13:46):
I had a really good run. I mean, I had, I had, I wrote, I
had 12 hours of stand up on, on BBC Two in a kind of six year
period where I did 4 series of BBC Two and no one's really done
anything like that since. So I think I'm kind of the, I
was like the last person to do that.
The model that I had in mind wasDave Allen, you know, from you
(14:08):
probably, of course, you might even be three years younger than
me, a bit young, but because he is.
But yeah, I was really lucky that I had that that little.
Burst So what's happened to TV comedy?
Well, there's a lot less money in it.
You know, there's, I mean, Channel 4, for example, are
making what 25% of what they didin comedy 20 years ago.
(14:30):
And so, and it's it's it's harder to get funding for things
that feel specifically British. And I think what I do does
because you're trying to do partnership deals to make to
make programs like sex educationthat are set in a blandly
anonymous non place. That things that Americans will
(14:50):
get as well. As well.
Yeah, and there's always there'sa worry that things are
culturally too specific, although my my my ex-wife
Bridget Christie show is very culturally specific to a
particular kind of rock White Royal British working class, I
think. And yet that is seems to be
(15:11):
popular abroad because its specificities become become
specificities become universal in some way.
And also, I think the fact that adolescents did really well
might change the way British TV thinks about funding things,
because that's set in a very British manure.
But it seemed to be universally understood as being true.
But that's certainly a problem of it.
(15:31):
So, yeah, I mean, it was just, it was just, we didn't really
realize looking back, the 90s was a bit of a golden age.
Certainly my kids, they like to look at Big Train and the
Armando Iannucci shows and The Thick of It.
And they, they see that as all belonging to some kind of school
of comedy, which I don't appear to be included.
(15:54):
I'm kind of good. I I used to write for them
actually. But they, they love that whole
time. And we, we, we're in that.
And you look back and you go, yeah, that was really good,
actually. And so in terms of your show, I
mean your shows all have a sort of, you know, a theme or an
idea. The new show is Stuart Lee
versus the Man Wolf. Yeah, the Man Wolf is is what is
(16:14):
the is the manosphere. Yeah, I mean, the reality is
approach to this show incrediblespeed.
Normally I write them and I feeltheir relevance diminishing.
And then by the time I finished the tour, 18 months later,
people are going. What's he bothered about that
for? I mean, there was one I remember
where it was all about a lot of it was about Brexit and Boris
and whatever. And the the whole payoff was
(16:36):
something to do with Johnson andit it just went out.
It finally went out on TV about a week before he was
disappeared, you know, and so itjust got in under the wire.
But this one is about this idea that there's a certain kind of
rhetoric and a certain kind of value system that is informing
American politics on the grand scale, British politics a bit.
(16:56):
And a lot of a lot of the kind of comedy that we see on
Netflix. And it's stand up comedy that,
yeah, you could say it's from the manosphere.
You could say it's callous. You could say it's ignorant.
You could say it's bullying. And it's so it's about it's
about how that squares off against liberal ideas.
And again, when I when I wrote it and I tried to embody this
(17:18):
idea by dressing up as an angry werewolf, it seemed a bit of a
stretch. But but within weeks it felt
almost 2 on the nose. And now people are absolutely
get what it is and I have to keep rewriting it because the
things that the horrible American Netflix werewolf
standard comedian says just simply not nasty enough as the
(17:40):
weeks go by after ramping them up because because of the speed
at which Trump is degrading acceptable rhetoric.
I mean, the, the, the thing thatI, I love about you is that you
know, you, you, you, you don't ever hold back from say, from
the saying or naming the people and even the publicity for this
show names Dave Chappelle, RickyGervais and Jordan Peterson.
(18:01):
I mean, that's, I mean, I don't equate them as being the same as
not to say it's slightly funny like two things and a really
awful one, but yeah, yeah. But what?
What? What is it about what Dave
Chappelle and Ricky Gervais are doing that you are kicking
against? Well, I think, well, I think the
(18:23):
with with Gervais specifically, I think the the thoughtless
stereotyping of less privileged minorities in order to get cheap
laughs. Yeah.
And I think that that. When he says it's a joke, it's
not what I think it's. It's, it depends, it depends on
(18:45):
how the audience take it away, doesn't it?
And and saying, saying it's a joke, It's not, it's not quite
enough. You know that that there has to
be some sort of character behindthat or there has to be some
overarching shape to the idea. It's not a get out of jail free
card for everything. Particularly the problem that
those people have is we, we all in my, my generation of
(19:09):
comedians, particularly in this country, we came out of a
culture where even when the Tories were in power in media
and in entertainment, there was a sort of a liberal consensus,
right. So when Sadovich started out and
he would say Nelson, his openingline was Nelson Mandela.
What AC word he lends someone a fiver and you never see them
again while he was in prison, right?
(19:30):
To say that to the kind of whiteliberal social worker audience
that were in the audience for analternative comedy gig.
Really funny, right? But the problem is those kind of
things now being said by Nigel Farage or Donald Trump or
they're they're they're out there.
So you're saying you're the sameas them.
You're not, It's not, it's, it'snot, it's not some sort of
(19:51):
kickback against the, the, you know, you.
So when Dave Chappelle hits out about the trans issue, yeah,
he's now with mainstream opinionand the Supreme.
Court, absolutely. Yeah, he is, he's with
mainstream and he's with, you know, he, he, he is, he is with
a, a, a drift towards the right that has left in the pursuit of
(20:12):
clarity, vulnerable people feeling uncertain of how they're
perceived by society now and what the way forward is.
So I think they, you know, and I, what I noticed with Bill
Burr, for example, is another American standard who I suspect
isn't right leaning, but has gota lot of comedy out of misogyny.
(20:34):
He's trying to sort of backtrackabout even Joe Rogan, who you
could say is probably personallyresponsible for a significant
amount of the Trump vote, is asking questions about due
process and things like that andwhether it's right to just
deport people to El Salvador. They let this monster
out-of-the-box, right? And they, and they were toying
with it and they were playing with fire.
(20:55):
And now as the world drifts towards a reactionary consensus,
they, they need to wonder what part they played in it.
And to say it's just a joke I don't think is necessarily good
enough. I suppose the the defense, if
there's going to be 1 yet includes Yes, but the the
liberal left went too far. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's the
(21:16):
same old argument. Political correctness had the
same thing in the in the 80s and90s, Yeah, but that there became
a tyranny of progressives as well, which also needed to be
kicked again. And that's what they were doing.
Yeah, I sorry, go on. But but the question is in in
doing so, you still end up punching down.
(21:37):
Yeah, I mean, a lot of as soon as you've said punching down,
there'll be loads of comments below the line on this.
When you put it on YouTube of what a cliched idea that is,
there'll be loads of people thatappear on GB news panel shows
furious with you for even sayingthat.
But yeah, you're right. I mean, what I'm I'm lucky,
right? In as much as I'm allowed to
have a bit more fun in my ACT because I, I can attack my
(22:02):
audience as well for being liberals and progressives.
And because a lot of them are liberals and progressives, they
like it. That's the thing about those
people is they, they recognize the stereotype of themselves and
they enjoy being being attacked for it.
I did a benefit for an environmental charity the other
week and I spent the half hour complaining that they're all
trust apharians and that they shouldn't block up the road and
(22:24):
killing people blocking up ambulances and stuff like that.
And but then somebody filmed it and it was, and it looked like
it was on YouTube for a bit. And I was very worried about
that because those jokes worked in that room for those people at
that point. And I wouldn't wouldn't want
them decontextualized as evidence of what I actually
think, because I don't think that.
But you can say that to those people.
And they, they, they like the catharsis of being, of being
(22:48):
insulted. I get, I get trans people come
up afterwards when I'm selling this stuff afterwards and
signing things. And they people often say we're
really happy that we can go to your shows and we know we're not
going to be insulted in, in a really straight, in a really
obvious way. The caveat I would have there is
that if I do do a joke about them, it's going to be original
(23:09):
enough that hopefully they're going to have to laugh because
it's not just going to be my shoe identifies as a Wellington
or whatever, you know what I mean?
So it's going to be like, and I think actually the the liberal
audience are very good at laughing at themselves.
So so you can on stage. I can have it both ways really.
Are you, are you generally? I mean, you sound like you watch
(23:32):
the news a lot. Do you have to?
Yeah, I mean, I, I watch news. I watch news and read news all
the time. I watch Channel 4 News.
Or can I? I miss, I miss the BBC
Newspapers Review. I used to think that was great
at 11:00. It's not there anymore.
I watch the Sky One, but a lot of the contributors they have
the, the binary nature of it is so tedious, you know, and I
(23:56):
don't really listen to BBC News anymore.
I kind of lost faith in it with during the Robbie give era.
I just kind of think I don't feel I can trust it.
So, you know, I read left-leaning and liberal
broadsheets and, and follow up stories.
But I, but I always make sure I,if I'm, if I'm writing about
something, I try to make sure I Fact Check it and where and
(24:17):
where it's from. And you know you have to do
that. Now.
But you're not. I mean, a lot of people are
finding the news crushingly depressing.
Well, it's you're not. No, I mean, I oh, yeah, I am.
And in fact, you know, I was doing a column every week or
every two weeks for the Observer15 years.
And it did become increasingly depressing because it's got it.
It's rapidly. I don't see a way out of where
(24:40):
we're going, you know, and. And so you.
You So when you talked about fascism in your last column, you
meant. Call it what it is, Absolutely.
I mean, you think? That's where we're heading.
People are pussyfooting around this idea.
You know, you, you, you, you people are being deported
wrongly from the states to an ElSalvador jail without due
process. What's that Trump is doing deals
(25:03):
for resources with dictators. You know, it's it's, it
absolutely is that. And we have to call it that.
And we have to act in the way that we should have done more
quickly in the 30s, you know. And I mean, I just got an offer.
When you come and do a week in this club in Chicago, it's not
something I'd normally do anywaybecause I at the moment I'd have
(25:24):
to take a huge set of an American cityscape and two full
size werewolf costumes. I'd have to get those through
American customs. But, but I wouldn't work in the
States at the moment. I'd worry about them going
through my jokes and ending up spending two days locked up
without my heart medication. You know, I just would worry
(25:45):
about it. So I think, yeah, we are what we
are heading out. But it is it is depressing.
And I was I was a bit worried that the the topical jokes are
becoming like the dance band on the Titanic, you know where and
people will write, write me these letters and go.
The only thing I look forward toevery week is at least having a
laugh about the news with your column, like crying.
(26:07):
So, you know, you feel a sense of responsibility as well.
But is it? Is it good for for for for
comedy? It should be.
Yeah. It should be good.
I mean, absolutely. Although of course, Peter Cook
always had that very famous jokeabout when people say, I used to
ask me if the establishment clubwas make any difference.
He said it was. Let's not forget what a vibrant
(26:28):
cabaret scene there was in Weimar Germany.
Yeah, kind of like what? But yeah, it should be good.
It should be good. And in fact, in fact, and also
in times of censorship or when people are afraid of what they
can say, sometimes you get really interesting creative work
where people are trying to find new ways of expressing things
that don't fall foul of of official guidelines.
The trouble is going to be how people find it.
(26:49):
The trouble is going to be how people find it because what's
happened to lots of the great liberal satirists that came up
through social media in the lastfew years, They have to all
intents and purposes been silenced by the but they they in
in the, in the window after the collapse of print media, you
know, which is on the on the on the way down, a lot of people or
(27:11):
a lot of people. And in the reduction of TV and
TV comedy and in the caution that mainstream broadcasters
have about political material. We'll never really know why the
match report went down, You know, on the on the BBCI didn't
they were being hysterical saying that it was closed down
for political reasons, but maybeit was we'd never know.
(27:32):
But you know, the social media enabled people to flourish in
that, in that gap. And I think they people had no
reason to believe it wouldn't always be thus.
And lots of campaigning, lots ofcampaigns got traction on it.
You know, lots of lots of the resistance to Tufton Street
attempts to infiltrate things like the National Trust or
(27:53):
whatever was driven by people organizing on social media.
And that will that will be much harder now to for people to get
get any traction going. So, so, so when so is there is,
I mean, do you see new talent out there?
Do you go and see a lot of comedy?
Well. In in the 90s, which is a long
(28:13):
time ago now, I used to be, I used to be a club comic doing
gigs five nights a week on billswith four or five people and I
did. I felt I had until about the mid
noughties. I felt like I had a feel of what
was going on. I'd be lying if I said I did.
Now the only time I I see a bunch of new comics that I don't
know about is if I do a benefit and then I see amazing people.
(28:37):
I mean, the, the, the standard is higher, right, In terms of
people's professionalism and their ability to hold a room.
But what I do miss is that when I came on the alternative comedy
circuit, as it was then called in the 80s, a lot of people,
(28:59):
it's difficult to imagine what else they could have done.
There were people that were justnuts in a brilliant way.
Like the Iceman who's got a filmbeing made about him.
His act was that he melted ice. Or Steve Murray, who died
recently, whose act was that he would just tear teddy bears to
pieces, called himself the teddybear torturer.
Well, there were people like like Sadovitz who seemed to be
(29:20):
able to be in that state who were really like furious to the
point where in a different society they might have been
locked up. So it seemed to create, it
seemed to be a space where a lotof quite, quite problematic
people were able to rub along and monetize their madness.
Whereas now it's the the opportunities that comedy
presents has necessarily meant that ambitious, professional
(29:43):
people tend to go into it, whereas before it seemed like a
retreat from the world into a hermetically sealed environment
where you might be safe. And do you and do you think the
man Wolf is a, is a phase we're going through?
Is everything sort of circular? Well, or I think that we Simon
Reynolds wrote about this very well in a book about pop music
(30:04):
where he said I think it was in RIP it Up always said that we we
grew up viewing popular culture as a series of sections of
rocket. They were gradually jettisoned
as it moved forwards. But what's happening now is
there's so much media out there that everything is available all
at once. For example, my kids music
(30:24):
tastes are bizarre that they cherry pick from different eras.
They don't recognize age as an issue or go and see someone
really old as we wanted to see people of our age doing things
that were new moving forward. I think with comedy now, it's
difficult to make a generalization about it because
all sorts of things are available simultaneously in a
(30:46):
way that they that they never quite have been before.
There were definitely feelings of phases.
It just depends, and we're back where we started is how do we
tell people about it when there seems to be mechanisms in place
and economically and politicallyto actively silence and repress
(31:07):
certain forms of certain forms of expression?
I saw an interview answer you gave in print ones about
regrets, and one of your regretswas not enjoying things that
were popular because I think when we were young it was deeply
uncool to enjoy anything that was popular, so you rejected it
out of hand. What do you feel you missed out
on? Well, you know, like there's
(31:31):
loads of things I just didn't. I mean, I was, you know, I was
around in brick pop, but I was going to see, you know, free
jazz while that was happening. And I didn't ever go to raves.
So you're how are we going to get a sort of a regular fix,
surely now I mean like have you stopped doing columns now or?
It was very nice for me to have the column because I don't
(31:54):
really know how the average person copes with life.
But when I see when I see thingsin the news that really annoy
me, I think my next thought is how do I do a joke about that?
I'll write something about it and it'll be funny and that kind
of cures me a bit. And now I don't I'm not able to
do that with the immediacy that I could.
So I thought maybe once a week I'll film myself doing 10
(32:16):
minutes of new stuff in a club, try and find some way of getting
it to pay for itself online. And actually just in the last
couple of days somebody started talking about doing sub stack.
The problem is that when I was writing for the Observer and
when I wrote for TV, when it stuff was on TV, highly paid
(32:37):
lawyers from competent organizations like the Observer
and the BBC would check that what you're saying was that the
setup was fact, factually accurate, even if the punch line
was exaggerated for comic effect.
And they would also look to see if something you'd said run the
risk of being misinterpreted in a way that could be acted upon
(33:01):
in bad faith by people. And even with that, there were
three times in the last five years with the Observer, even
after the legal checks where I came close to career ending
disasters in terms of people complaining about things and and
how they would have chosen to portray me and whether there
would be legal action. So I don't think I can really
(33:21):
afford to do political comedy asan independent without, without
the lawyer. Without the lawyer.
Yeah, I actually, I've gone in the last 10 days from thinking
leaving this paper is actually an opportunity to operate and do
political satire independently to thinking I can't lose my
(33:42):
house or or not be able to live or, you know, we can't.
I can't because. The option would be to play
safe, which you which is sort ofpresumed the impossible.
So what I have to do is I tour the stuff for two years.
I think the next show will be onSky and Now TV again.
And they will, they will help meat the point of delivery to make
(34:04):
sure that whatever's in it is not actionable, because I can't.
So actually the chilling effect of how these people nibble away
at you is that I probably can't afford to do that independently.
I probably can't afford to do. I can't afford the personal risk
of doing topical comedy on the sub stack or setting up my own
(34:26):
YouTube channel or whatever. And you, you also sort of
rejected panel shows, didn't you?
Quite a long time. It was a mutual look.
I was conscious. On getting creatively, I
rejected them because I think that in all forms of art, in a
music and comedy, it's collaborative process, right?
Whereas the panel show is set upin such a way as people are
(34:47):
trying to get noticed as individuals, either to win the
round or because they want to dominate it to them.
And I remember particularly one where I I did what I would have
done when I was in the double act, when I was working in
groups of people, where I, I setup someone on the other team for
a joke by giving them a feed line where I pretended to not
understand something, knowing that they could say a particular
(35:10):
thing and they did it, which I'dset up and then acted like it
was a victory. It wasn't seen as part of a
collaboration or whenever we want to be a part of that.
Also, I felt like it wouldn't really suit the character of me,
wouldn't be on them. But also when I did do them, I
was terrible at them as well. I did.
(35:31):
I did about 3:00. But when when the Nyora got
married, I was very naive as well.
I went along. I went along thinking they were
what they pretend to be. And then I had the realization
that so many of us have where you realize the writers are
there writing the lines for everyone.
Most people are taped from the writers.
Some people would bring in theirown writers.
(35:53):
The writers might get paid more than that comics fee for the
show, but they wanted to give that money to the writer so that
they would look good on it. It's nonsense, the whole thing.
And I can't, I can't help thinking there probably is a
there probably is a window somewhere for a show in which
comedians generally collaborate and are not being not being
manipulated by producers and writers.
Although I understand there's a thing at the moment called the
(36:14):
last laugh or something. Yeah, and young people probably,
which is brilliant. Young people tell me that is
that and that. Yeah, but I'm not going to watch
it. But it sounds, but it sounds
like, sounds like someone's thought, what if we actually did
this? Yes, maybe that would.
Be we put 12 comics in a room together and yeah, and they like
each other. I mean, do you, do you think
that? I mean, is the panel show the
(36:35):
string quartet on the deck of the Titanic right now?
I don't know. I mean, I certainly, I don't
know. I think it.
I think it, I don't watch enoughof them to know.
I know. I haven't seen one for 10 years,
so I don't know. Yeah.
But I, but I mean, I do often think about an interview that
Chris Morris gave a few years ago where he talked about, are
(36:58):
you, if you're a political satirist, are you just the kind
of gesture to the court, you know, and there is a worry of
that. And certainly, I mean, Larry
David has come out fighting. I wanted to ask you about this.
I mean, Bill Maher, Yeah, I meanBill Maher.
Bill Maher went to have dinner with Trump and then came out and
(37:18):
did a whole thing about his dinner with Trump and said, you
know, if only Trump could be more like this in, in public,
then maybe we'd think about him differently.
And then Larry David did this very funny reply and now Bill
Maher sort of hit back. Where do you where do you sit in
this conversation? Well, with Larry David,
absolutely. And I think you, you know, look,
(37:38):
I mean, what? OK, one, one of the problems a
lot of us had on the left was that or in the centre.
I'll be I'll be I'm a centrist dad, of course.
What what, what is that some when Starmer got in, despite
everything that has happened andwe've Corbyn everything, a lot
of us are thinking, well, it's going to be difficult to do
comedy about him because compared to what's just come,
(37:59):
he's competent and not actively evil and set on them.
But obviously he's blotted his copy book fairly quickly and is,
you know, you have to sometimes go against your political
instincts to, to, to, to, to do jokes about people that you
might perhaps sympathise with because you you have to look for
the angle. But I think to, I think for that
(38:20):
no one should be doing anything in support of Trump.
No comedian with any sense of the.
Person are you happy to excoriate Starmer?
It depends what he does. Certainly, certainly, certainly
the the audiences are. I feel like they're expecting it
more than they were three, threemonths ago.
You know, that that if if you'rethe Canary in the mine, then,
(38:43):
yeah, then something's going on.Something's going on.
Yeah. And so, yeah.
But. But I mean, it must be weird for
for Larry David because of course, Cheryl's Cheryl's the
actress who plays Cheryl's husband is, is Kennedy the, the,
the who's dismantling, dismantling of the health what,
what little health knowledge there is in in the
(39:05):
infrastructure of American government.
So it's incredible. You know, I don't know how that
how those dinner parties work. But what I mean, but in talking
about Starmer, what I mean is like you, you do not feel that
as a as a liberal. As a centrist dad.
Centrist dad who sees the March of reform as the big threat to
Starmer that you know you you should lay off.
(39:28):
Well, A. Starmer for fear of helping
along. We'll have to see.
We'll have to see. And it's interesting doing this
show at the moment. You know, basically there's,
there's, there's a story arc to it that I've got to hold onto.
But I do 10 minutes at the beginning.
I say, look, over the course of the night, I say to the
audience, I'm going to do 10 minutes of liberal stand up from
a liberal perspective. They're going to do 10 minutes
(39:50):
of reactionary Netflix star stand up in a reactionary
Netflix way. Then at the end of the
second-half, I'm going to do 10 minutes of liberal stand up in a
reactionary Netflix way. It's like the stand up comedy
equivalent of the great triptychpaintings in the cathedrals of
medieval Europe, right? But so it kind of at the moment
it's an interesting experiment into testing all those things
out which. Gets the biggest law.
Well, the interesting thing is that it's so easy to do nasty
(40:15):
reactionary Netflix comedy, and it's such a surprise that the
nasty reactionary Netflix bit iskind of the best bit of the
topical stuff. And I think it's partly because
that audience enjoy the fact that it's not the sort of thing
they should normally see. And also they're off the hook
because I'm dressed as a werewolf.
(40:36):
But yeah, that and that, but andthat kind of plays into the
hands of the show because something is clearly attractive
about callousness and cruelty atthis point in history that is
allowing those sorts of people to flourish in politics,
journalism and entertainment. So what's the difference between
what you're doing in that bit and what Ricky Gervais is doing?
I'm dressed as a werewolf. I think on that note, Stewart
(41:03):
Lee, thank you very much. Indeed.
Cheers. Thanks for sharing your ways to
change the world. I hope you enjoyed that.
You can watch all of these interviews on the Channel 4 News
YouTube channel. Our producer is Holly Snelling.
Until next time, bye bye.
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