Finding himself suddenly devoid of the anger of his youth, comedian Stewart Lee turned his attention to the vagaries of modern life – just don't expect him to be nice about it, writes BRIAN BOYD
WHEN STEWART Lee was accused of faking a loyalty card in a high-street coffee chain, he knew there was a problem, a big problem. “It wasn’t that someone could accuse you of something so banal and trivial – why would anyone try to fake the stamps on those stupid loyalty cards,” he says. “The problem was that after this incident, I sat down and began to write material about being accused of faking a loyalty card in a coffee chain. I had this sort of awakening – is this what being a 40-something comedian is all about? Writing about stuff like this?”
Lee came to a conclusion: “I realised I had lost all my anger and focus. Around the same time, I read a quote by comedian Frankie Boyle saying that all comics should give up when they reach 40. And I understood that in my context – I was beginning to write about life’s little annoying things. I had lost the anger of my youth – maybe that was a naive form of anger, but at least it was exciting. I though it really all must be over if I was beginning to do stuff about loyalty cards. I mean, what a cowardly act of fraud that would be – faking a little stamp on a loyalty card.
“And I shouldn’t have been using the loyalty card in the first place. I’m the sort of person who refuses to use an ‘Oyster’ card [the card that gives you cheap travel on London’s tubes and buses] because I am in principle opposed to anything from the business world that uses a word from the natural world. I pay the higher fare instead.”
The loyalty card incident gave him the idea for his current show, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One, in which he sprays some well-considered invective on subjects as diverse as the Top GearTV programme, cheap Italian restaurants, DH Lawrence and cider advertisements. He has brought himself back from the homely, safe, middle-aged brink.
Handily, he provides a check-list of what to expect from the show:
1. Some punchy stuff near the top
2. Inexplicable hostility towards relatively innocuous figures
3. Repetition
4. Sudden and/or gradual shifts in tone, velocity and volume
5. A quasi-serious bit at the end
6. A song
Touring the show around the UK and Ireland at the moment, he is finding a very different type of audience. "Earlier this year, I did a six-part series on television called Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehiclefor the BBC," he says. "The show did really well and had over a million viewers. And that changes your profile. I'm used to playing to a certain size crowd who would have some idea of what I talk about, but now I find that people are coming along because 'he's been on the telly' and it's not what they were expecting. Which is why I came up with the show's title as a sort of warning."
One of the most literate and knowledgeable comics around, he's been performing for more than 20 years to some acclaim, but for some he is still best known as the co-writer and director of Jerry Springer – The Opera. The show came under fire from Christian groups, who were annoyed by the depiction of Jesus and Lee was charged in a private court for blasphemy – with the charge being rejected.
Two years ago, he was dubbed "The 41st best stand-up comedian ever" in a 100 Best Comedians Ever poll of Channel 4 viewers. Finding it surreal that he was placed above both Robin Williams and Tommy Cooper in the poll, he came up with a show called Stewart Lee – 41st Best Stand-Up Ever!which, in part, looked at the ridiculous nature of such polls. To put some much-needed balance into the debate about "best ever comedians", he later hired out a theatre in London and presented his own selection of 10 Best Stand-Ups Ever.
“It used to be just stupid lists in magazines,” he says. “But now they’re using stupid lists to make television programmes. So I decided to present 10 comedians who wouldn’t be as well known as many of the people on the Channel 4 list. I got people such as John Hegley, Kevin McAleer and Simon Munnery to do shows. The whole idea was to present something different to people who have only ever seen five comics. I know some people have only ever seen five comics because once, after a show, someone came up to me and said: ‘Lee Evans used to be my favourite comedian, but now it’s you.’ That statement could only come from someone who has only ever seen five comedians.”
Working now on his new show, he is taking a scabrous look at social networking sites. “This all started when I left my management company and decided to manage myself,” he says.
“A MySpace page is vital when you’re trying to promote yourself, but I found that there was already a Stewart Lee page in existence. It was somebody pretending to be me. I emailed ‘me’ and the person who was pretending to be me said they didn’t believe that I was ‘me’. It all became very weird.
“Then I looked on Facebook and found somebody else pretending to be me. Not just that, but this fake Stewart Lee was having conversations on Facebook with my friends who were also on Facebook. Except that my friends weren’t real either – they were people pretending to be my friends. That’s what I’m working on at the moment – this bizarre Kafkaesque world of social networking sites where nothing and nobody is real.
“Looking at Twitter, Facebook, blogs and all that’s out there now, you have a situation where people are voluntarily giving up information about themselves, it’s like they’ve agreed to be electronically tagged. If you were to force people to give up the information they now freely give up on these sites, it would be a breach of their civil rights,” he says.
“It’s got to the stage now where you’re not sure of the etiquette in certain social situations. Do you have to ask somebody who blogs or uses Facebook or Twitter not to repeat everything you say to them in a social situation? Is that person taking a picture of you with their arm around you going to post it as a photo of ‘me and my friend Stewart Lee’? And there are some really strange sites out there: there’s a guy who takes photographs of the shopping baskets of minor celebrities and then discussed the contents on his blog.”
Stewart Lee is at the at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway Comedy Festival on Sun, Oct 25, Vicar St, Dublin, Oct 26 and the Belfast Festival on Oct 27. The Galway festival runs Oct 21-25 and features John Cooper Clarke, Reginald D Hunter, Des Bishop, Maeve Higgins and Gerry Mallon. galwaycomedyfestival.com. The Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queens opened last night and runs to Oct 31. belfastfestival.com