Stewart Lee Meet the Author

Stewart Lee's comedy act fills the biggest venues.

He's been doing it for more than 25 years.

He's one of the biggest successes in stand-up.

He says he's a comic who investigates that territory

between what's acceptable and what's shocking and it's the same

in his writing.

He says his five years of collected newspaper and magazine pieces

in Content Provider, the new book, are meant to make

you smile and then to be used for lining a cat litter tray.

But they do also bristle with all his passions.

Welcome.

Stewart, dealing with a live audience is one thing.

You're playing with them, using them, feeding off them.

Writing for the page, this is a collection of newspaper

and magazine pieces, is quite a different thing.

Do you find it easy to adapt?

I don't find there's anything that I write for stand up that I can move

across to newspaper columns and I don't find there's anything

vice versa in newspaper columns that I can move across to stand up

because the thing is so different.

What is interesting though is the idea that in some ways

stand-up is a live art form and as such, you're shaped

by the audience response and the funny thing about writing

for papers now is there is this audience response.

You can look at the below the line comments, audience feedback,

and you can interact with them.

You can change the character to aggravate or patronise even more

the people that are reading it.

You can't do it in real time but you can do it over years.

You raise some interesting points there.

You're a polemical guy.

Anybody who reads anything you write or response to you or listens

to you on stage will know the people for whom you have contempt,

let's put it like that.

Or the things going on in the country you don't like.

I want to ask you something about that.

Isn't there a problem in this country at the moment

that all the people who do your sort of job,

well, 90% of them, have the same political opinion?

Yeah.

That they'll take the skin off anybody as long

as it's not Jeremy Corbyn?

Why isn't there anybody who'll take him apart?

I think a lot of the mainstream media is doing that job

perfectly well on its own.

That's a copout.

It's an interesting problem.

Certainly, I'm not sure what to do now because,

like you say, most people who work in the arts probably

have a particular view politically, the majority of them...

Well, I'm thinking about stand-up comics particularly.

There's a general view...

People say that but I don't know that that's the case.

There seems to be more...

You read in the Daily Mail that these people are left-wing

comedians and I don't necessarily see it coming

through in their lifestyle choices or the work they do.

I think it's just a sort of, a way of dismissing them

to the audience of that paper, so I'm not really, I certainly don't

see where this imaginary...

There doesn't seem to be that kind of content being created with that

political angle in the volume that people imagine it is.

Maybe you've got something there but I think just

reading your collected pieces and knowing your view,

particularly of the present government and its predecessor

government, which is a fairly poisonous view,

which you're entitled to, of course, it just strikes me that,

let's take what people call the Corbyn revolution.

There is no one looking at that with the same

critical eye in that form, as a comic art, or at

least if there are, theu are not very well-known.

Yeah.

And that's a very one-dimensional way of making ourselves

laugh at ourselves.

Well, I did half an hour on press attitudes to Corbyn

on TV in the last series, which was a sixth of the series.

And I wrote a column three weeks ago about the train thing, so...

Well, that is a comic episode.

You're perfectly entitled to have a go at the media in general

or indeed at the government in general.

I'm just surprised that, since we're talking about Corbyn,

he seems, as far as many comics are concerned,

to be off-limits.

You can't make fun of him.

Why not?

I think that it is covered.

The problem is that it's not as funny.

It's not as funny or as likely to inspire you in a passionate way

as the things that are happening on the other side of the house,

which you could argue, given the chaos that the country's

descended into in the last few months, as a result of people, many

of whom are still in government, has actually got off incredibly

lightly, because broadcasters are very worried about appearing

to make fun of it in too definite terms because of the extent

to which their future is beholden to the people on that side

of the house.

If you look at our present condition in this country,

what bugs you most?

What bugs me most?

It's difficult to know how to move forwards,

doing stand-up or sort of funny columns, because everything

is so influx at the moment.

There isn't a clear plan forwards post-Brexit.

We don't know what our international relationships are.

We don't even know which politicians are going to rise or fall

in the next six months.

It's very unpredictable.

So, now, I've got to file a column for Sunday.

And the worrying thing is you could put something

in on Thursday and the person you've written about may have

lost their job by Saturday.

Also, the public mood seems to swing back and forwards very quickly now

depending what information is given to us.

It's very hard at the moment to know how to write in opposition.

It's hard to know how to take a comic position against an accepted

truth because it's not clear what the accepted truths

are because we know the country is split 50-50.

It's an interesting point that, that you think people

don't have a settled view of where we are going.

Do you feel that sense of uncertainty quite strongly?

I do and the interesting thing now is I'll be going out on the road

in the autumn with a new show, partly out of my genuine beliefs

but partly as a comic position.

My role on stage is the sort of metrosexual, slightly out

of touch liberal.

But I know now that 52% of the country have taken

a kind of political stand, broadly speaking, against

the values of that class.

So it will be interesting to see how that plays around the place.

Obviously an audience going to a theatre on some level,

it's been thinned out or there's a filter on it,

but it's an interesting time to be a content provider.

I didn't really think about how...

That name was a bit of a fluke as well.

It was a sort of catchall title for the book but now

there is a question about what sort of content do you provide

to the country?

Are you one of the people who always likes to be in a minority?

Would you ever be worried if most people agreed with your political

position and you weren't in the minority?

Well, I think it would make doing stand-up harder because it's nice

to occupy an opposition position because I think,

on some level, all comedy is about tragedy.

The stand-up is a clown on some level and the clown for me,

the tragedy of it is that his ideals or hopes are continually defeated

by reality, so it would be problematic if you suddenly found

yourself on the winning side.

Then I think it would feel like you were the cheerleader

of some horrible rally rather than this tragically

frustrated figure railing against the dying of the light.

So I think there's an interesting thing in that.

Stewart Lee, thank you very much.

Thank you.