Author: This is a book about the Comedy Cellar, a comedy club in New York. Do you care about the Comedy Cellar in New York?
Stewart: Well, not really.
It’s 8 June 2018. The author’s interviewing Stewart Lee in the Hawley Arms, in Camden Town, London.
Author: I want to ask you about the broader debates that are going on, which you’ve talked about loads and loads, so I’m sorry if it’s boring for you, I hope you don’t mind, but this club, the Comedy Cellar in New York, was opened in 1982 by an Israeli immigrant called Manny Dworman.
Stewart: Yeah.
Author: He’d been a folk musician.
Stewart: Yeah.
Author: And he smoked pot every day.
Stewart: Yeah.
Author: He wanted to cultivate the Comedy Cellar as this place of debate.
Stewart: Right.
Author: And free speech.
Stewart: I think I’ve been there but I can’t remember, because in two thousand and …
Author: Four?
Stewart: Four or five, I did about a week of seven-minute slots in New York clubs and they’re a blur because they all look exactly the same. They all have a brick wall thing at the back.
Author: The Comedy Cellar’s got a brick wall at the back and a Middle Eastern restaurant upstairs called the Olive Tree.
Stewart: I probably did it.
Author: So this guy started it and wanted everyone to debate. He had some right-wing views.
Stewart: A Libertarian.
Author: Exactly. So he hired Arab and left-wing staff and comedians to sit around the back table of the Olive Tree and argue, like a salon.
Stewart: But he tried to manufacture a salon, and normally they grow organically.
Author: Right, but he started a book group and handed out reading material, most of it, like, pro-Israel.
Stewart: Yeah, yeah.
Author: So that’s what interested me, but when I ask if you’re interested in a book about the Comedy Cellar, like most people, you don’t give a shit.
Stewart: Yeah.
Author: So I want to frame the book with this conversation, showing that what it’s about are the values he cultivated, such as open debate and free speech, and when I get to free speech you’ll think I’m an arse, but I’m just trying to get answers.
Stewart: Well, I think free speech is a really difficult term now because these things move at incredible speed don’t they, due to social media and the internet. Now the free speech debate seems to be monopolised by what you’d call the alt-Right.
Author: Which makes it an uncomfortable place to argue from.
Stewart: Which makes it an uncomfortable place to argue from.
[After thirteen minutes]
Stewart: They’ve got this night at the Backyard club in Whitechapel where you can go and say the unsayable and all these things that you’re not allowed to say anywhere else, and I always thought on the circuit you could sort of say it anyway. I mean, there wasn’t a stranglehold of political correctness, but what was good about political correctness was it made people think they might have to justify what they were saying.
[After eighteen minutes]
Stewart: They accused us of trying to be blasphemous and I thought, if you were trying to be blasphemous, why would you write this rather thoughtful thing which suggests we don’t live up to the standards of God? And also suggests that the Bible portrays the same sort of emotional struggles between its very human characters as you see in a Jerry Springer show? To me that wasn’t blasphemous. I thought, if you were being blasphemous you’d do this wouldn’t you, you’d vomit into the gaping anus of Christ, but still, if you’re a half-decent person, you can’t just do that. It has to be about something. What I tried to do was write something which on paper would sound terribly blasphemous, vomiting into the gaping anus of Christ, but hopefully make it meaningful and moving and funny, and not just shock horror.
Author: Because political incorrectness can’t be a thing in itself?
Stewart: It has to have a reason, yeah.
Author: So I was looking at the criticism some of these American comedians were getting for what they were saying, and I felt very strongly I should defend free speech. I’m a writer, so I thought we should be able to write what we want or say what we want on stage. Then, about two years into writing the book, I started worrying about Bernard Manning. My dad went to see Bernard Manning and liked him, but I didn’t like some of the things my dad said, and I thought, would I have defended Bernard Manning’s right to go on stage and say the word ‘paki’, you know?
Stewart: Well, I’ll tell you another thing that’s changed is this, right, you might be able to defend Bernard Manning’s right to go on stage and say the word ‘paki’ in front of a load of people who have made some sort of informed choice of whether to go through the doors of that venue to see a man who is known for saying the word ‘paki’. What’s different now is that YouTube and social media and whatever else propel offence like that into places where it’s indiscriminately spewed out.
[After twenty-three minutes]
Author: You talk about the character of Stewart Lee, and lots of comedians say things they don’t really mean or push in one direction when really they want to snap back in the other direction.
Stewart: Yeah.
Author: And I think you said Paul Provenza told you the stage should be treated like giant inverted commas, and you talked about Bouffon clowns, where you drew a circle around yourself on stage. That all seems to say this is a stage.
Stewart: Yeah, but that doesn’t work anymore because the circle’s been punctured by YouTube and Twitter, and the stage is being filmed from an angle on someone’s camera phone that removes the inverted commas.
Author: Right.
Stewart: It’s difficult.
Author: So now comedians have to be more careful as a character, or when saying things they don’t really believe?
Stewart: Yeah, I think so. It’s sad. It’s a sad situation. But I don’t think you can afford to take a reactionary position for comic effect in a world where that reactionary position can be stripped of your intent and broadcast all over the place without your control. And I’m surprised to hear myself saying that, but I think now your intent has to go through every layer of the act as clearly as the word ‘Blackpool’ in a stick of rock, so it can be snapped at any point and you would still know what you’re trying to achieve. Isn’t that sad? But I do think that, because you don’t control the point at which the act is snapped anymore.
[After twenty-seven minutes]
Author: So that thing when people say, ‘It’s just a joke,’ you don’t think …
Stewart: No, I think a joke is a powerful thing. I don’t think you can say it’s just a joke, no. I don’t think you can, because it’s harmful ideas. They can harm people. And some of the ones I tell I do intend them to harm people.
[After twenty-eight minutes]
Author: One of the things I’ve done is interview people who were in the audience at the Comedy Cellar and complained about things including race. One person said she didn’t want to hear that stuff on stage even in character because it emboldens people who really believe it, particularly since Trump came in.
Stewart: Yeah, I understand. Again, Trump’s changed everything, as has Brexit. I mean, Brexit has sabotaged the Pub Landlord.
Author: Al Murray’s character?
Stewart: Yeah. When the character is the same as the people that led the campaign to leave Europe … It makes more sense what the Landlord says than things that some of the people in Vote Leave say.
Author: Yeah.
Stewart: You can’t be ironically anti-PC in America when the bloke in charge is saying let’s build a wall to keep the filthy Mexicans out, and has had, like, Born-Again Christians who believe the apocalypse is coming doing speeches in Jerusalem. You just can’t. If you imagine you’re satirising some liberal, PC cabal, well that cabal is not only powerless but is irrelevant now.
Author: Is it powerless?
Stewart: Well, the guy in charge of the country is saying for real … What can you say that’s more mad than the things he’s saying for real? It’s difficult, and I think a few of them have felt it’s changed. I know the ex-husband of quite a famous American comedian. He said she was struggling after Trump to do her mock-offensive schtick because you’ve got a genuinely offensive man in charge. I don’t know. It’s an interesting time to have this discussion because I think it’s all up in the air. I don’t really know. I’ve probably written and said things ten, fifteen years ago about freedom of speech in comedy that I’m not sure I’d agree with now, because there’s this rocket-powered accelerant behind stuff which means you lose control of the context.
Author: You go through the cuttings and you can see your views changing with events, which is the way it’s supposed to work though, isn’t it, I think.
Stewart: Yeah.
Author: You also had this great quote which was, ‘If you try to control what people can say through legislation or intimidation or threat, then they’re going to push against the boundaries’, and I think it pushes people to the Right. I think that has happened in America and the UK.
Stewart: Well, this is exactly what the writer of Jonathan Pie is saying, Andrew Doyle, who I used to know actually.
Author: He was criticised a lot.
Stewart: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I agree with him. He said the reason there’s … That Tommy … He keeps changing his name doesn’t he, the EDL bloke, he led a march for freedom of speech through London, and Andy Doyle’s point, I think, was that this has been caused by liberals telling them what they can’t say.
Author: What do you think?
Stewart: I don’t know.
Author: See, I thought you’d take a much stronger line against him saying that.
Stewart: No, no, I don’t agree with him. I think a lot of things have caused the rise of the EDL and I don’t think liberals is near the top of the list.
Author: The English Defence League seem like an extreme case, but those who are around the middle … Like, I’ve got some relatives who are Conservatives, you know, and I see them shifting to the Right in their views.
Stewart: I got in a cab the other night. It’s always good talking to cab drivers. And the guy goes, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And I went, ‘I’m a comedian.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, it must be difficult now with all this political correctness?’ And I went, ‘Well, I like political correctness, I’m a big supporter of it.’ He said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘Makes your job difficult though doesn’t it?’ And I went, ‘No, it made it better, because you had to be more creative and think about what you’re doing.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, it’s gone mad though hasn’t it?’
Author: He did not.
Stewart: And I went, ‘Well, I don’t know about you, I don’t want to go back to the days when you could say “Paki, nigger, wog, coon” and put “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs” outside your pub, and the British football team … The English football team went to see the Black and White Minstrel Show for their Christmas trip, and the black kid in my school in 1983 was called “the black spot”, and we did Ten Little Niggers as the school play,’ and I kept saying ‘nigger’ and ‘paki’ and ‘coon’ to him. I wanted to see … And he goes, ‘No, you don’t want to go back to that.’ If you confront them with it … ‘Do you want “nigger” written everywhere? Is that what you want? What is it that you want to say that you’re not able to say?’ And apparently they wanted to say that all these Muslims were raping people in Rochdale. That’s said now and it’s said by their own community. That wasn’t caused by political correctness.
[After fifty-one minutes]
Stewart: Have you ever seen Kunt and the Gang?
Author: No.
Stewart: Well you can’t now, he’s given up, but he’s fucking hilarious, right. He knew that he couldn’t ever do what he did on a mainstream platform, but in the room he created this sense of … He was such a cheeky character. It was like a bloke playing a Casio keyboard, but a cheeky Essex bloke, and his songs were the most disgusting songs. But it didn’t matter because we were all in this room. We were in this room where it was like normal rules had been suspended. He had this song called ‘Paperboy’ and it was about when he was little and fancied this girl, but he never got it together with her, and then when he was old, like in his thirties, a little paperboy starts delivering his paper who looked really like the girl he’d been in love with when he was little. So he starts to really fancy this paperboy, and this really happy chorus was, ‘Paperboy, paperboy, I never thought that I would rape a boy …’
This is a book about a room.
It starts with the return of Louis CK.