There’s an idea kicking around that “woke” is killing culture. According to elder statesmen of the arts, from John Cleese to Sean Penn, do-gooders and virtue-signallers are suffocating the life out of comedy, music, books and film. Jerry Seinfeld recently blamed “the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people” for what he sees as a current dearth of great comedy.
Stewart Lee is having none of it. “I don’t have sympathy of any sort with Seinfeld,” he tells me. “A man of his ability, if he’s not able to think a little bit around whatever he imagines are these current restrictions are then he’s not a very good comedian. It’s pathetic and ungrateful and unimaginative.”
The “woke” debate is nothing new. For Lee, who started standup in 1988 aged 20, a product of the alternative comedy scene, “woke” is just a new term for political correctness, the latest way for conservative voices to attack progressive ideas with “it-was-better-in-our-day”-style griping. But as a self-proclaimed member of the “metropolitan liberal elite”, Lee would say that.
Born in Shropshire and now based in north London, Lee, 56, doesn’t make life easy for admirers of his work. His shows over the last decade often see him portraying his fans as pretentious, smug bores. They’re the kind of people, he jokes in his latest show Basic Lee (currently on Sky/Now TV), that are prone to saying things like “Stewart Lee is a genius and so am I because I like him,” or that what he does is not so much comedy as “a jazz of ideas”.
Although he mocks the pretentiousness of his fans, Lee does like to play up to the notion on-stage that he’s an esoteric genius, and he admits he likes to stretch the boundaries of what comedy can be. “Increasingly, I think I’ve got as much as I can out of comedy as an influence, and I think more in terms of film, music, particularly jazz and improvised music, and theatre,” he says. “I’ve been struggling with the new show I’m writing. But I saw Complicité’s Mnemonic at the National Theatre recently and that unlocked a lot of things for me in a way watching more standup won’t.”
Lee is more likely to repeat the same phrase or even grunting noises for five or 10 minutes than to tell straight gags. “When a painter does a piece of abstract art, people say they can’t draw,” he tells me. “I can do the tradesman’s work of this job, but I’m trying to do something else with it. There was a woman in Dublin who wrote her thesis on me in 2007 or 2008—I read it and there was all this stuff about Brechtian alienation and stuff that I didn’t really know about. I read it and thought “Oh yeah, I do do that”, then I kind of doubled down on it.”
Lee’s new show, Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf, will run at the Leicester Square Theatre in London in December and January, before he tours around the UK throughout 2025. He will perform one half of the show, he promises, dressed in a werewolf costume. Among other things, he’ll be talking about Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle and Jordan Peterson—men, Lee suggests, who’ve mastered the art of monetising anger, outrage and the denigration of minorities. “It seems to me that there’s a kind of comedy that does very well, which is deliberately inflammatory,” he says.
He’s particularly interested in the irony that comedians presenting themselves as edgy free speech warriors are often mainstream acts with incredibly conservative views. “It’s disingenuous. You get people saying they can’t say anything. But a lot of them are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix. Jimmy Carr carries on despite the idea he was cancelled for his joke about gypsies. Ricky Gervais would love to be properly ‘cancelled’, I think, but,” Lee breaks off into a chuckle, “he doesn’t seem able to say anything actually controversial enough to be as controversial as he’d like to be.”
Lee’s experienced real controversy. Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he directed and co-wrote the libretto of with Richard Thomas, received more than 16,000 Ofcom complaints after it aired on TV in 2005. Right-wing evangelical organisations picketed shows, causing some theatres to cancel—a bruising experience that, he says, made him very little money, despite the show having a “turnover of millions”. He considered leaving comedy. But, instead, he re-focused. “It made me realise, because of all the protests, that it’s an incredible privilege to have a voice, and that you needed to be saying something that was worth saying. From that point onwards, my standup usually had something about politics or ethics in it. It also made me realise what I wasn’t good at, which is working with loads of other people. I’m not a team player. I’m a loner.”
Lee still performs around 250 shows across the UK each year. He’s approaching 60 and has health issues (heart, knees, hearing), and he’s frustrated that critical acclaim and Baftas don’t always help him get TV projects off the ground. But he’s enjoying his work more than ever. “I feel like I’m getting somewhere with standup that no-one else has. I’m not a boastful person but I will say that no one else could have written and performed Basic Lee. I reluctantly accept that I’ve been very influential. There are two reasons why I want to stay alive: one, for my kids, and two, because I’d be really interested to see what I’m doing at 75.” He cackles. “I’d like to see that.”
