by Stewart Lee
41 Half an hour late.
42 This blunt statement of fact was always well received.
43 This is a misremembering of the BBC’s statement of core values, ‘Inform, educate, entertain.’
44 This is a fun example of a routine that survived the news changing around it. As the exact post-Brexit status of EU citizens in the UK kept changing, so the routine was able to double endlessly back on itself and become a way of reflecting the fog of Brexit through the sheer impossibility of trying to write cast-iron comedy comment on something that was itself unstable.
45 Frustratingly, the show has been immediately derailed again into diversions and cul-de-sacs.
46 2017.
47 2018.
48 Most mid-length jokes by mainstream stand-ups, in the space between one-liners and shaggy-dog stories, follow this rhythm.
49 I sort of think all this stuff a bit, but I am exaggerating to appear like a comedy snob.
50 The punchline, but it relies on the audience having followed the argument and filling in the unspoken section themselves. When people say I ‘have no jokes’, they are right to some extent. A lot of the jokes have been removed, and the audience are invited to find them for themselves in the joke-shaped spaces that have been left behind.
51 The topper makes the relationship between being unable to plan post-Brexit comedy and being unable to plan post-Brexit industry clearer, and gives the slower punters a second chance to get on board.
52 I performed this with a diametric shift from unfocused pleading and mumbling into Live at the Apollo stand-up salesman mode, and the audience recognised the different performance registers and laughed at that, as the comedian tried to reset his act and begin again.
53 I also did this running around in the 2011/12 live show Carpet Remnant World.
54 I would aim to visibly exhaust myself during the Live at the Apollo running-around stand-up section, so that the audience, and I, were genuinely concerned about my health. On this recording for BBC2, I look positively unwell.
55 This was actually at His Majesty’s Theatre, Westminster, 15 April 1984, and was broadcast live on the LWT show, Live at His Majesty’s. Jimmy Tarbuck’s manager pulled Cooper back through the curtain, and the rest of the show was performed in the limited space in front of it.
56 Here I addressed this to an individual near the front, but this section would pan out differently on different nights.
57 After a few weeks of touring I had developed various routes that could get me to wherever I needed to go whether the chosen punter said a price higher or lower than the actual price of £3.67. Needless to say, people assumed I used plants, but I didn’t need to. I would go online once a week and try to buy the right amount of copies of Stand-Up Comedian to keep its online second-hand price at or near £3.67.
58 In the filmed version I started talking to this camera behind me, which looked quite funny in the edit, but I don’t really know what I was doing or what I was trying to achieve.
59 There was usually some way, most nights, of intuitively driving the audience to clap and cheer at the points I wanted them to, without apparent prompts, making them think they had chosen their responses themselves, but I honestly couldn’t tell you how exactly I was doing it. As I write these notes, I am also starting to think about my forthcoming show, Snowflake/Tornado, which will open in the autumn of 2019, and suddenly I feel like I can’t remember how I ever used to make anything work. It’s terrifying. Every time I feel like I am starting from scratch with nothing. I can feel the vomit in my mouth.
60 Usually, but not always, there would be odd laughs from a minority of the room here, which would usually, but not always, get me into some kind of improvisation about who was in the room – for example, the accountants’ theatre trip.
61 The ill-considered and unnecessary use of the word ‘fucking’ here tells me that I was genuinely improvising, and so using the swear to buy time and make the rhythm work, rather than for any especially valid reason.
62 I do like ’70s Turkish psychedelic funk, having got into it via the 2003 Love, Peace and Poetry compilation, on QDK Media, and I thought it was a funny, obscure thing to choose as the genre I am searching for. Each night I would try and improvise a different bit about it, using different real band names, to amuse myself. Oddly, during the course of the tour, Daniel Spicer published his ground-breaking study of the genre, The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion: Andalou Psych (1965–1980), and the rise of a more authoritarian state in Erdoğan’s Turkey led to a reassessment of the kind of cultural freedoms that had allowed the music to flourish in the first place. Meanwhile, Umut Adan is among the contemporary artists reviving the genre. It’s not really an album music, but my favourite Turkish psych album would be Erkin Koray’s Elektronik Türküler (1974). I used to do a world-psych show on Resonance 104.4 FM called Global Globules, in the guise of my Canadian comedy alter ego Baconface, and the Turkish episode can be accessed here: http://www.baconfacecanada.com/global-globules/episode-34-turkey/.
63 The inference here is that the people of Southend have left London because they are racist. This is drawn from the kind of coded speak that elderly people used to use with me when they talked about leaving Birmingham.
64 At some point during the tour, Music Magpie stopped taking my orders for my own DVDs.
65 Something like this happened, but I forget exactly what, and there was a bloke called Rick involved. Good luck to him!
66 This is funny because the amount of profit is very small given the effort involved. And, of course, it is more absurd because I was actually doing this sort of thing, going online to buy the DVDs cheaply to make small profits. In the end I forgot whether I was doing it ‘in character’ as the mad, obsessive, on-stage Stewart Lee, as some kind of ongoing off-stage method act, or whether I was just doing it as the real me in my own time, but it was getting done, all the same, by one of us.
67 Though the initial scattering of second-hand stand-up DVDs for the set was sourced by the production manager, Ali Day, as the tour went on it became necessary for tour manager James Hingley and I to replenish them, so that there were about a thousand ready to be crunched underfoot each night. It was funnier if there were enough fresh DVDs for them to make a good shattering noise when I stood on them, as people are still rightly horrified by the wanton destruction of cultural artefacts, however lowbrow they are. It seems like fascism. I wore special steel-heeled cowboy boots to aid the crushing and shattering, and it would be obvious to anyone who watched the show that I had worn them for this purpose. Nevertheless, the fact that I was wearing steel-heeled cowboy boots was used as evidence by online posters that I was pretentious or old or whatever. You try shattering hundreds of Jason Manford DVDs, night after night, in trainers. It can’t be done. For the year or so of the tour proper, if we had time between shows, whenever we saw a CeX DVD-exchange shop, we would clean all the 50p stand-up DVDs off the shelves and load them into the van. It would take the staff ages to find them all behind the counter, and though some were good-humoured, many were understandably resentful of being asked to spend hours carrying out the odd task of packing the DVDs. Even though we told them we wanted only the packaging, an odd internal rule meant they were obliged to give us the actual DVDs in plastic wallets. This meant that throughout the tour, customers at the merch stand were incentivised with the offer of free sleeveless stand-up DVDs, from a box of thousands, by the likes of Frankie Boyle, Rufus Hound and Jethro. In Liverpool’s CeX, they wouldn’t sell us any stand-up DVDs as they suspected us of working some scam, whereby we emptied all the CeXs in the land of Michael McIntyre DVDs in order to drive up their value, due to scarcity, and then drip-fed our own stash back to CeX at inflated prices. Inevitably, there were more McIntyre DVDs for 50p than anyone else’s, and this is the reason we chose to pile them up uniformly for me to kick over, but pretty much every stand-up who’d ever had a DVD out could be found in CeX for 50p, with two exceptions. There were never any of my DVDs in CeX
, because I didn’t do them with the kind of companies that have to saturate the retail market to try and make back the act’s advance; and because, I suspect modestly, people think they might watch them twice. There were no 50p Dylan Moran DVDs either, as they seemed to hold their value at around £3.50–£4, probably for similar reasons.
In February 2019, an article in The Times proclaimed the death of the stand-up DVD as comics began to aim directly for streaming services like Netflix, who will not release actual viewing figures to any stand-ups who upload their content to the Netflix app. I countered this trend by saying that I would continue to make DVDs, as I see them as finished pieces of work, and also planned to put out vinyl, both of which I can always sell personally at shows. Dara Ó Briain helpfully tweeted the journalist Dominic Maxwell to correct some information about me, by pointing out that he had also had stand-up specials on terrestrial TV this decade, and to express his delight at the death of DVD and its impact on the globalisation of the industry and the international expansion of his own customer base. ‘Glad to see someone notice this; the whole industry has gone international in the last five years. DVDs are dead, but tours are now international; both due to digital media. Honestly,’ concluded Ó Briain, ‘I’d happily trade the DVDs for the shows in Norway, say. Just tons of fun.’ I am offered shows in Norway, but as I treat each tour as a finished piece of work, often with a set that relates to it, it is not ideal for me to have to break the material from these shows down into isolated sections, or to take the sets to, for example, Norway. This is not to say these types of shows are better than the more utilitarian shows Ó Briain, for example, might delight Norwegians with; they’re just different. The logistics of taking a heavy set made mainly out of worthless stand-up DVDs – a large percentage of them Dara Ó Briain’s – over the sea to Norway don’t really add up. It barely makes sense to go to Ireland even. Honestly, I’d happily trade the shows in Norway for writing, performing and touring fully realised stand-up shows with sets and cues, rather than just generating interchangeable slabs of monetisable content. Just tons of fun! Why does Dara Ó Briain need to do stand-up in Norway anyway? If he wants to go there, can’t he just make another one of those programmes where the BBC film him and Ed Byrne going on holiday? And if I felt doing stand-up was ‘just tons of fun’, I’d think I was doing it wrong. Stand-up is a job of hard work, and it should feel like it for both performer and audience, Norwegian or not. ‘Just tons of fun’ is something you have at Center Parcs, unless you are too fat to go on the waterslides.
68 On reading this line back, it appears to be indebted to an old Simon Munnery joke that went something like: ‘We do not burn the American flag because we are anti-American. We burn the American flag only because it is the cheapest available in this region.’ Except that, in this instance, all the information is factually true, so the line probably evolved out of that realisation.
69 I was offered more money by Sky to do two series for them after series two of Comedy Vehicle, after the BBC initially declined to recommission it, but in the end the possibility of reaching a larger audience for less money at the BBC made more sense in the long term, with regard to building the live crowds.
70 Here the audience delighted me every night by laughing, unprompted, at the deliberate display of what the alt-right call ‘virtue signalling’.
71 This is a joke about Mel and Sue’s now forgotten decision not to follow the Bake Off money from the BBC to Channel 4, for which they were praised.
72 Sky’s lawyers did do this, but the fact that the story was demonstrably true, and that we had the paperwork to prove it, headed them off.
73 This strategy of Sky’s, weirdly, doesn’t seem to be working. Some great comedians go and do shows for the channel, but no one anyone knows ever sees them.
74 Call-back. Nice!
75 This joke exploits the unfair stereotype of long-distance lorry drivers being murderers.
76 For over a decade, writing two £60 record reviews a week for the Sunday Times was my most dependable source of income. But my editor left, and the childcare for my newborn cost more than I’d earn writing reviews, so the decision to step away from the paper was made for me before writing for Murdoch would have become untenable for a self-professed snowflake in the Brexit era.
77 Here the on-stage character of Stewart Lee is talking about how he dislikes the on-stage character of Stewart Lee. Lee will eat itself.
78 This was a line that appeared over and over again, coming out of Russell Howard’s face, in the trailers for his 2016 Comedy Central series, Stand Up Central. To be fair, it is possible it was snipped off the end of a very good routine, as often happens in these cases. I suspect it also related to masturbating, rather than defecating, as I have pretended to assume, but the edit the show’s producers (Avalon) have chosen to use to promote the product leaves both interpretations possible, presumably to work the twin defecating and masturbating markets.
79 I had one or two mithering young comics in mind here, many of whom are involved in unacknowledged Oedipal struggles with me, but the main inspiration for this bit came from where we used to live, in Stoke Newington, in the ’00s, two doors down from a shared student house. The students used to have parties and would send all the neighbours invites to ‘come and boogie the night away’, like we were going to do that at our ages. And I don’t think the disabled ninety-year-old lady who lived underneath them was especially keen on continuing to rave until six or seven the next morning. I went out one time to try and calm things down, as our babies were weeping and could not sleep, and saw a man through the window DJing while wearing a motorcycle crash helmet with the visor on. I had come straight from my bed and was naked except for a dressing gown and walking boots. A young man was in the street, shouting the name of another young man up at the window over and over again. ‘Da-a-a-a-a-ve. Da-a-a-a-a-a-ve. Da-a-a-a-a-a-a-ve.’ I lost my temper and found myself asking him how old he was, the implication being that standing in the street bellowing was immature. ‘How old are you?’ I said to him. ‘I’m twenty-six, mate,’ he kept saying, over and over again. ‘I’m twenty-six, mate.’ It was the ‘mate’ that really made me lose my rag. I wasn’t his mate. It’s the kind of thing Rod Liddle would call you on a panel show to needle you. The next week, at my kid’s Saturday-morning football, one of the other dads, a university professor, said his students had said the comedian Stewart Lee had abused their friend in the street the previous weekend. The annoying student was who I had in mind for the speech patterns here, and the incident also became the basis of my contribution to an improvised piece, ‘Crash-Helmet DJ’, on the 2018 industrial-jazz album Bristol Fashion, by capri-batterie and me (Dirter Records). It was a fun bit to do live, and panned out differently, and at different lengths, and with different levels of intensity, every night, despite being based around only a few words, repeated ad nauseam.
80 An old routine inspired by Howard’s admittedly impressive charity work, and the way it was used to market his products by his PR people, grew so long live that it was eventually split over two episodes of the second series of Comedy Vehicle.
81 Here I am setting up the end of the show to fail on purpose. It can’t possibly match the hype.
82 This is increasingly not true, though it was once. My step-father is a digital subscriber to The Times, and so sees some positive press, and even though my mum wasn’t a Guardian reader type, after her death I found a scrapbook where she had stored local, and some national, clippings about me. It is awkward for family members, though, to have to deal with the fact that someone they genuinely don’t find funny at all is getting press saying he is literally the world’s greatest living stand-up (I am not saying I am, by the way; I’m just quoting The Times). Family can be relied upon to humble us all.
83 My mum, who always worried that I had wasted my life, started to get what I was doing a bit more towards the end of the ’00s, when younger workmates or the children of friends told her they were excited about going
to see me. She came to the If You Prefer a Milder Comedian … tour twice: the first time with her partner, where she read the inbuilt struggles and micro-managed deliberate failure as real and clearly pitied me; the second with a younger friend, where she saw all the same apparent failings play out again and realised it was an act, and that the people who were laughing understood that. It can’t be fun, I suppose, to watch the child you have nurtured fabricate an apparent breakdown. She used to love Les Dawson’s deliberately bad piano-playing, though, which is the same. I wish she had lived to see me succeed in terms that would have been easier to understand. I feel like I let her down and betrayed her trust, and the choice she made to scoop me up out of the Lichfield orphanage cot in December 1968.
84 In the mid-’90s, I remember my gran, astonished, saying she literally could not believe people paid me to do what I did.
85 This sort of patronising conversation is usually followed, all stand-ups will tell you, by the relative asking if you have played Jongleurs, as they went to a works do there, or if you will be appearing on Have I Got News for You. When you tell them how little HIGNFY pays and how all the acts on it use writers, they kind of glaze over and can’t process it.
86 This brother-in-law is a composite of various relatives. I don’t have a brother-in-law who fits this description.
87 This was actually said to me at an eightieth birthday party, not on the phone.
88 I usually worked this ‘five-star show’ bit in somewhere near the top of the show, and then did a crowd-pleasing call-back to it at this point, but somehow, on the night of the recording, I forgot to do it and had to cram it all in here in one splurged bit. Amateur.
89 My ex-brother-in-law had only ever seen one band live, and it was ’80s Scottish soft-rockers Deacon Blue. He couldn’t remember their name, but I managed to work it out by a process of elimination. Had I set out to find the perfect joke band to be the only band an imaginary ex-brother-in-law had ever seen live, I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect one than Deacon Blue, the one my ex-brother-in-law actually saw. The great thing about Deacon Blue for comedy purposes here is they are actually a pretty good version of the thing that they are, and they wrote some great songs, so it isn’t fake-sounding, like if I had chosen a more route-one comedy option – Bucks Fizz or Nickelback or Kajagoogoo or something. Deacon Blue frontman Ricky Ross’s 1996 solo album What You Are is a solid power-pop set and features the guitar-playing of Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, of ’60s Boston psychedelic group The Ultimate Spinach. Skunk’s computer skills, oddly, led to him becoming a defence consultant and chairing a US Congressional Advisory Board on missile defence in the ’80s. Bizarrely, a re-formed Deacon Blue were leap-frogging us around the country, so punters in the theatres had usually passed posters for their reunion tour on the way in.