#stewart lee

[terastalungrad]

Sometimes, you’re a comedian with a touring show to promote, so you do an interview with a regional newspaper.

I think that’d be the funniest possible time to reveal a big scoop, wouldn’t it?

Stewart Lee is currently touring, and to promote his Yeovil performance, gave an interview to Blackmore Vale Magazine.  According to Wikipedia, the Blackmore Vale is an area of north Dorset, south Somerset and southwest Wiltshire.  According to the comedian Jake Baker, the magazine would cover his school sports day as he grew up in Dorset.  That’s the level of news you’d expect.

The questions are friendly and easy, from a journalist clearly familiar with Lee’s work and history.

The first question is about the show’s angle.  Lee describes the nature of the show, and here’s an excerpt:

So it looks like stand-up, and sounds like stand-up, but it’s actually a kind of character piece about a desperate person who’s frightened and trying to organise the world in a way that puts them in control. And I guess you could argue that’s what a lot of stand-ups are doing anyway. Ricky Gervais to me looks like a very frightened man. He’s frightened of transgender people coming after him, the act is a defensive wall.

Fun!  This is a Ricky Gervais hate blog, so it’s nice to see a sudden, unexpected attack in an unrelated promotional interview.

Lee mentions Gervais again in response to question four.

Sometimes I become bitter and think ‘I get all this good press, why can’t I get 10 million quid for a TV special like Ricky Gervais?’ But on the other hand, I wouldn’t want that audience, it wouldn’t allow me to be better.

And then again to question eight, where Lee explains why he spends six months running new shows in the relatively small Leicester Square Theatre (as opposed to arena comics who might do 10 warmup shows followed by 60 tour dates).

You can still run it like a club gig, you can interact with people in real time. Also, you wouldn’t get better at the show because you wouldn’t have done it as many times. You can see this with an act like Gervais. Those shows have not been run in, they’re not fluid, they’re a succession of inflexible statements that would snap like twigs if the pressure of an unforeseen event was applied to them.

The journalist finally addresses this head on.  It really is worth reading the entire article - there’s a lot more than I’m quoting, including an interesting story about Sean Lock:

But here are my favourite bits:

[Gervais] still kind of copies me though, which is the weird thing. There’s still a lot of cadences of what I do but they’re used in the service of evil. In Star Wars, he’s Darth Vader and he’s taken the force, which is me, and used it for evil purposes. He was a fanboy, he was actually the booker at University of London and used to book me and Sean Lock all the time. And when he became famous for the Office, he wrote an hour-long act that was so indebted to us it was awkward. [...] If he’d come up through the circuit that would have been rubbed off him because you find your own voice doing club gigs. It took me two years of gigging five nights a week to come through the mesh of things I liked. But he didn’t have that experience in the same way. [...] Funnily enough, in his first show there were bits I’d never recorded that he’d do almost verbatim. He’d clearly remembered them. I went to see him at the Bloomsbury – on his invitation actually – with my then girlfriend and she was very concerned for me. I’d given up at that point due to lack of interest, and she was concerned for what it felt like to see my act being done to hundreds of people, it was quite weird. On the other hand, that sort of did make me think I don’t want it to be consumed into someone else’s vocabulary. And also, I think because he had a residual sense of guilt, he would always credit me in interviews as being an influence – that helped me in 2004 to get the audience back.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time Lee’s ever claimed that Gervais stole his material.  He’s certainly talked about Gervais clearly taking influence from him (though in the past, he downplayed this compared to the account given in this interview).

It’s a pretty big thing to accuse a comic of stealing material.  That’s a big taboo.  I reckon this is partly because Lee wants to discourage fans of Gervais from coming to the show.

Anyway, let’s finish by quoting the end of the interview:

It must be strange to have that level of financial remuneration and those audience figures but not really a single good review. And I expect what that does for you is create a cognitive dissonance where you have to manufacture a worldview by which the whole world is wrong and you’re right. Which can’t necessarily be very good for your mental health, although I expect the money’s nice.

#stewart lee #ricky gervais #tagging my hate

[doyouknowthismusical]

#musical theater #do you know this musical #poll #jerry springer the opera #richard thomas #stewart lee #language: english

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

#british comedy #reading #Stewart Lee

[generalbritcomconfessions]

britcom confession submissions: open!

submissions of confessions relating to British comedians/ the world of britcom are currently open. Anything is welcome to be discussed and nsfw content will be tagged!

Send them in via the ask box. Anon is on

#Britcom #british comedy #confessions #britcomconfessions #james acaster #Stewart lee #standup #no more jockeys #nmj #the league of gentlemen #sara pascoe #romesh ranganathan #Greg davies #Alex horne #tim key #mark watson #Richard ayoade #the six idiots #Reece shearsmith #Ed gamble #Taskmaster

[neomachine]

stewart lee literally me motivational sigma aggressive drift phonk edit

#stewart lee #uk comedy

[tundrafloe]

Julian: "Edinburgh was very important to us because that was the first time we ever worked together. Before we did our own show, we were in one of Stewart Lee's called King Dong versus Moby Dick. Noel and I used to do a little bit of banter in the show, and it was different every night. That was our first time on stage together, so that was where a lot of it started. The next year we went up to Edinburgh with our own show, and that was the first time that we ever tried to do anything ourselves. We worked on it a bit in London and then we did it in Edinburgh and it worked very well."

(Edinburgh Evening News, 2006)

#Julian playing a 6 foot penis! #Noel as a whale #baby boosh #chemistry electric from the start #julian barratt #noel fielding #noelian #howard moon #vince noir #howince #the mighty boosh #mighty boosh #Stewart Lee #booshlr

[midnightmines]

Sorry for lack of updates, forgot about tumblr!

THIS SATURDAY (27 January 2024)

MYSTERY PLANES #6 Walthamstow Trades Hall, 61-63 Tower Hamlets Rd, London E17 4RQ 8pm til midnight £6 on the door

live sets from:

THE BOHMAN BROTHERS “Sound art veterans The Bohman Brothers invest random words with unearned meanings via the eloquent juxtapositions of their elegantly neutral voices. After three decades of experimentation, these alchemists of banality, these banalchemists, turn everyday leaden language into poetic gold.” Stewart Lee

MIDNIGHT MINES Special expanded guitar/clarinet/drums/more guitar/more drums line-up, celebrating the release of their new LP 'Since My Baby Left Me' on Minimum Table Stacks. Should have some copies for sale on the night if the courier gods are kind.

+ tape collage DJ set from:

THE MAJOR TRAUMA SOUND SYSTEM

See you by the dart board

#midnight mines #bohman brothers #minimum table stacks #stewart lee

[terastalungrad]

"I don't suppose Robert Oppenheimer felt great about having created the atomic bomb."

-- Stewart Lee, on being told that he was a big inspiration for Ricky Gervais

#stewart lee #ricky gervais #tagging my hate

[inthefallofasparrow]

#stewart lee #shakespeare #macbeth

[oxymoronish]

Adam Buxton introducing Stewart Lee at Stand Up For Ukraine (28th January 2023)

#adam buxton #stewart lee

[ashtray-girl]

man, i just love stewart lee so much

#i know i said this a million time already but what can i do? #the man never misses! #(well he does... just not very often) #stewart lee #morrissey

[amiscellany]

I’m a man of a certain age and size. An XL Fred Perry shirt fits me, physically and culturally. It’s as stylish as I can get without feeling stifled, it locates me temporally in the 2 Tone/post-punk era that shaped me as an impressionable teenager and it’s smart enough to sport on stage but casual enough for me to wear around the house in just my pants. My clothes rail has a dozen identical Fred Perrys and I especially used to favour the black ones with yellow trim. But apparently, according to a pink-haired hipster girl in the merch queue at one of my Leicester Square theatre shows five years back, this has now been adopted as a covert uniform by the far right in Europe and the US. So I quickly took six neo-Nazi black and yellow Fred Perry shirts to the local People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals charity shop, where hopefully they were snapped up by a delighted cat-loving north London racist.

#stewart lee #charity shops #fashion #turns of phrase #patriotism

[kocourmokroocko]

"Spousta lidí si myslí, že lochneska neexistuje, že jo. No, já sice nic nevim o zoologii, biologii, geologii, geografii, mořské biologii, kryptozoologii, evoluční teorii, evoluční biologii, meteorologii, luminologii, historii, herbatologii, paleontologii nebo archeologii. Ale stejně si řikám:

Co když do rybníka vlez dinosaurus?"

— Stewart Lee, Comedy Vehicle, 2014 (přeloženo)

#jeden z mejch nejoblíbenějších standupovejch počinů na světě #žádná mozková buňka nikde vůbec žádná #citáty #překlad #stewart lee #česky

[pablolf]

It's all very well to convince yourself you're ignoring rules and due process but you have to know what they are in the first place before you could avoid them. And even then, they'll always be informing what you do. The comedian Simon Munnery has this neat little joke; "Many are prepared to suffer for their art, few are prepared to learn how to draw."

Stewart Lee

#stewart lee #comedy #writing #art #creativity #simon munnery

[shakespearenews]

Stewart Lee is rewriting Shakespeare, after branding one of the Bard's scenes as 'rubbish'.

The comedian is to create a new version of the Porter scene in Macbeth, usually seen as a glimmer of light relief in the bloody tragedy - and believed to be the first use of the 'Knock, knock! Who's there?' construction that spawned so many jokes.

His scene will be in a new production opening at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford-upon-Avon home from next month, directed by Wils Wilson and with Scottish actress Alison Peebles in the Porter's role.

 Lee said: 'I am delighted to have been asked by Wils Wilson to rewrite the rubbish Porter scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which is in dire need of a post-alternative comedy makeover.  Alison Peebles is an inspired piece of casting sure to bring the requisite level of attack.'

#Royal Shakespeare Company #rsc #shakespeare #william shakespeare #stewart lee #comedy #comedian #macbeth #porter #porter scene #knock knock #shakespeare and adaptation

[neomachine]

stewart lee oingo boingo fancam lets goooooo

#stewart lee #NOTHING but respect for MY autistic king #i saw his most recent set in leicester square and god he's so good #it felt so novel for him cause he does a Ton more improv since he's looking at the structure of standard stand up #there was an extended bit where he took the piss out of someone for eating fruit pastilles cause they have gelatin in them #before the lass shouted out that they were vegan and he was about ready to fight his audience like never before #also an extended bit impersonating a bbc commentator trying to be funny about kier starmer that descends into nonsense speech #no one does it like him