Top 35 Stewart Lee Quotes

I went to a hypnotist to learn how not to use drinking a pint before you go on as a way of giving you the confidence to just fly at it, irrespective of the fear. That’s not a long-term strategy, when you do as many gigs as I do.

I think a comedian has to be low status on some level; that gives you the right to do all sorts of jokes about all sorts of different kinds of people.

Things that I do tend not to work out commercially.

The only reason I look back is to check if I’ve been doing something wrong. I look at things from even three years ago and think, ‘I wouldn’t do that now.’ Your life changes.

Oh, I can’t sleep, whatever – it’s a huge problem. The comedian’s thing is you self-medicate with alcohol and knock yourself out – but obviously, that’s not a long-term strategy.

I don’t think I’d want to be a comedian today if I saw it on the telly. I wouldn’t think it was a thing for weirdoes and drop-outs; I’d think it was a thing for squares who wanted to be famous.

Sometimes, I read that I’m this leftwing comic who just goes on about politics the whole time. Other times, I read that it’s just surreal nonsense about crisps. It’s both of those.

I read in the ‘Daily Mail’ that I’m one of these ‘foul-mouthed comedians.’ But I’m much cleaner than the people they like. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to think that a 70-year-old – particularly someone like Alan Bennett – would like it, because they’ve seen a lot of stuff.

Personally, I don’t have a Twitter account. I like to be in control of the way the stand up of Stewart Lee is perceived, I don’t want to have to engage with individual people. Also, when I do look at it, loads of factually inaccurate things about me are written.

The me you see on stage is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most annoying, my most petty, and my most patronizing.

Lots of stand-up showcases on TV are made by production companies that also represent acts as clients, so there tends to be a demonstrable bias towards a certain group of people.

Controversy seems to be a by-product of what I do, rather like offence is the by-product of a dog urinating on the pavement. It just happens.

I think Russell Brand’s books should be criticised for being rubbish – but it is true that there’s a professional class of opinion-former who has a financial interest in their job not being taken away.

Stand-up is more of an organic process. An imagined dialogue with the audience.

Normally, when I write a tour show, it’s got a title that means something – a beginning, a middle and an end – and some kind of storyline and ideas going through it over two hours.

If a gig goes badly, my main worry is, ‘Will these people come back?’ Because that will affect my ability to pay the mortgage – but nowadays, I don’t really mind what happens, as I think if it all goes wrong for real, you still have to go with it.

I really, really love being on stage now.

If I had grown up in London, I wouldn’t have been as keen to become a comedian or a writer. I’d have been able to see a lot of good films and music and comedy. I’d have been distracted. As it was, I had to make it.

It’s difficult to write anything at the moment, as every week there’s a seismic shift in world events.

It’s interesting to me that apparently distasteful comments from the Right against weak targets tend to draw a lot less media fire than apparently distasteful comments from the Left against hard targets. That’s one of the threads that runs through the show and that people hopefully pick up on.

I’m very grateful to my adoptive family. My mother sorted my life out.

I thought it would be a funny concept to publish a book about stand-up comedy with Faber, the poetry publisher, and to apply to stand-up the same sort of weight of annotation that you would to a classic work of literature, an epic poem. I thought that would be funny.

I’m in this for the long haul, I want to be doing this until I die. I am a standup comedian. I know a lot of people say I’m not, but I am.

You get annoyed about things in real life, and then the tragic thing is that while you are moaning on the awful injustice and suffering of something, something grimly comic will then strike you about it, like a parasite feeding off the misery of the world.

I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.

I don’t know where the ideas come from, and it’s terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I’d walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I’m just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

When I started on the London circuit in 1989, nationwide there were about 150 to 200 people that were what you could call alternative comedians – that weren’t club comics. Now, last year when the Laughing Horse chain of clubs held a new acts competition, a thousand people entered. So, there are 800 people more.

I’ve now got a 35,000-word document of quotes from people who hate me, a lot from the ‘Guardian’ comment threads. Mostly, I’ve managed to get myself into the mindset where the criticism is quite affirming.

Now I’ve got kids, you wouldn’t want them to suffer because of a perception of you. I try to be very careful where I do things and make sure I know why I’ve done them. I wouldn’t want them to be stigmatized.

I don’t mind causing offence when I intend to, but I don’t like causing it accidentally.

There’s an assumption that my audience is all these bearded twats from Dalston. But actually, quite a lot of older people go. For them, it’s like pre-alternative comedy, when there was Dave Allen or Jackie Mason or someone. Also, weirdly, because I don’t really swear, they’re not scared off.

I am not comparing myself to great artists, but when you see conceptual artists at work, on some level it’s reassuring to know they can paint figuratively. Likewise, when you listen to the ’50s jazz people who do these vast solos, you buy into it more if they open by playing a tune.

When I did ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera,’ there was a big fuss, largely centered around the misrepresentation of its content. Had Twitter existed then, that would have been over in a week because people who had actually seen it would have been able to get control of the story through social media.

I wasn’t the classic comedy type; I wasn’t bullied or extrovert. I was more the ambitious literary one who wanted to write clever little plays.

I’m forever reading on the Internet that I apparently cultivate this audience and never go badly.