As his TV series returns to our screens,comedian Stewart Lee talks to Will Self about his prickly stage persona, how social media is changing comedy and why you won’t see him on Mock the WeekI first saw Stewart Lee’s standup act in the early 2000s at the Hackney Empire, or have seen him several times since at venues in London and Edinburgh. Readers unfamiliar with the live Lee phenomenon may know of him through the hugely successful and equally controversial – Jerry Springer – The Opera,which he co-wrote, or via the TV work he has done over the years, or beginning with co-writing credits on Armando Iannucci’s On the Hour in the early 1990s. On Thursday the fourth series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle will begin on BBC2,and the new shows feature all of Lee’s trademark virtuosity and his equally familiar self-evisceration. Shot as a live standup act at the Mildmay Club in Stoke Newington, where Lee plays to his domestic crowd (which he characterises as “politically right, and Guardian-reading terrorist sympathisers”),the shows consist of long, narrative-driven absurdist monologues, or during which he deconstructs not just the warped problematic of modern Britain,but that of his own comic persona. On stage, Lee is apparently an embittered, or envious,self-lacerating man, caught in a ferocious double-bind: whether he’s unsuccessful it’s because his audience are silly shits who don’t fetch his jokes; and whether he’s successful it’s because he’s a silly shit churning out jokes that confirm his audience in their prejudices. So convincing is this act – whether indeed it is an act that I became intrigued: was the “genuine” Lee quite as prickly as his performance persona? In order to find out I asked him over for a serious sit-down. Here are the results.
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Source: theguardian.com