Why Stewart Lee got back into stand-up

Stewart Lee says he was compelled to return to stand-up after being accused of ripping off Ricky Gervais.

Lee had all but given up on stand-up when Gervais starting performing his own shows in the mid-2000s, with a similar approach to material and delivery

Lee describes his epiphany in his new memoirs, How I Escaped My Certain Fate – extracts from which are being published exclusively on Chortle from today.

He wrote: ‘The first time I was informed I had copied Ricky Gervais… a mother and her daughter, who had clearly enjoyed my set but never seen me before, said that I was “clearly influenced by Ricky Gervais”, with the implication they had rumbled me and I really ought to find my own shtick. Then it happened again two or three times.’

Lee then went to see Gervais at the Bloomsbury show and said he was ‘dumbfounded’ by the similarities.

‘It wasn’t that Ricky was the same as me,’ he wrote. ‘He wasn’t. And I’m not saying that he had copied me. There wasn’t a single line that duplicated anything I had ever done. But Ricky had the calmness, and the way of offering contentious ideas as if they were nothing but idle thoughts, that I felt was a hallmark of my work, and which had always made it such a difficult fit for mainstream audiences at populist clubs.

‘Now Ricky was such as big name, I can understand why the casual viewer would mistake me for an imitator of his approach. I hadn’t realised how much my stand-up mattered to me until I considered the possibility of never being able to do it again.’

Lee added that he experienced a rare pang of jealousy that night, as Gervais was playing to 500 people who were loving material ‘not dissimilar’ to what he did, while in the ‘dying days’ of his former stand-up career, he was being critically ignored and playing to handfuls of people.

Determined not to become an influential but largely forgotten cult figure, Lee made the decision to throw himself back into stand-up. And he even got Gervais to provide a quote for the poster of his comeback show Stand Up Comedian: ‘The funniest, most cliché-free comedian on the circuit.

Lee’s book How I Escaped My Certain Fate is published next Thursday by Faber & Faber. Click here to read our exclusive first extract, or here to pre-order it from Amazon.

Published: 28 Jul 2010