How to Adjust to Life on the Moon
Isis, Michaelmas 2003

Jerry Springer - The Opera was a West End sensation. Its writer, former Oxford Revue performer Stewart Lee, talks to Dan Harkin about comedy beyond stand up.

“Got a quid, or anything?” Someone has come up to us proffering a copy of The Big Issue. Lee doesn’t have any change and I have the sum total of twenty pence. Resignedly, he scoops together what change we can collectively muster. “Here, have that.” The retailer trundles off. Lee offers me a Marlborough Light and I wish I knew how to smoke. Certainly now. I’m some four weeks past the deadline of writing up this interview and I’m ignoring phonecalls from someone who sounds remarkably like Ray Winstone, demanding his copy.

Researching for the interview extended to reading his novel, The Perfect Fool, on my way to meet him. I fell asleep on the train at the point where a character imagines a giant pig spunking all over a city. I promptly had a nightmare and screamed myself awake to the consternation of the man in the leather jacket beside me. Needless to say I feel like a loose latch when we meet. And I can’t stop thinking about porcine lovejuice.

I have asked him what his favourite food is. “I can’t really cook.” I then went for the kooky tactic; what’s the definition of ‘Ass-Vogel’? “What?” he stares at me. Ass-Vogel? “What’s that then?” Dunno, saw it on the back of a van when I was coming up on the train here. “I dunno what that is. It means a donkey-bird doesn’t it?” I tell him he looks a little like Mark Lamarr. “I’m always being mistaken for other people. I think it’s because our shows that we did on telly, were sort of at a level which you would watch by accident, not really know what they were; so I always had a kind of residual familiarity without anyone knowing who I was.”

Like anyone you meet off television, there’s less colour to Lee. The sharp features that once keenly distinguished him from his comical-type partner, Richard Herring, have now eroded slightly. Indeed, he has stopped appearing alongside Herring as both may now be comfortably described as “the fat one.” He is in his mid-thirties and says he doesn’t really know what he think about lots of things. “It’s much harder to have an angle on anything. In my twenties I was angry about lots of things, I sort of knew who I was and what my point of view was. It was easy to generate stuff because everything that happened to you, you knew exactly where you’d fit into it.”

Mediocrity permeates Lee’s output. Two of the main characters in The Perfect Fool rot away in a post-ironic, mediocre hell. “I’d write that book very differently now. When I started writing it, I was living that kind of life. And I was thinking, ‘How would you communicate a sincere idea?’ Their problem is that they can’t, they’re sarky about everything, and they don’t believe in anything. It needs this stupid thing for them to actually emotionally invest in something.”

These seem strange comments from the man who’s comedy typifies deconstructing the mundane, or chipping away and emasculating anything of value. Is he utterly dissatisfied with his life, then? “Doing stand-up enables you to carry on living a student life. I feel I’ve drawn a line under all that now. I think [Jerry] is just what I needed. I do find it quite moving in a way that nothing else I’ve ever done has really affected me before.” And affecting it certainly is. The most touching moment comes when an obese, sluttish erotic dancer sings about loneliness and how she just wants to dance. It’s the kind of pathos you can only find in a comedy selling itself on its own vulgarity, and inverts the whole dynamic.

I wonder what has changed in him, is he more sincere? “It’s really easy to be funny in a cynical way. I love cynical humour, and questioning humour, and miserably depressive anti-humour. But lately what’s intrigued me is how do you do something that was nice, but was also as funny as something nasty.”

Lee is talking about shunting Jerry Springer – The Opera across the water into ever more prestigious venues. It’s already been extended twice during its run at the National, prolonging the phenomena of middle-aged heffalumps humming along to “Chick with a Dick,” “Cunty-Wunty,” and “Talk to the Ass,” down the south bank. The director and co-writer of a hit opera, isn’t exactly where you’d expect Lee to be. A stand-up from leaving university and half of Lee and Herring, which saw various incarnations on BBC 2, that the Beeb felt it had to thwart at every given opportunity.

Lee’s disenchantment with stand-up has led him to write a novel, a play, and now, an opera. He started doing stand-up in his second year at Oxford. “It was good in that there weren’t that many shows at the Fringe and there was a tradition of people going to see student comedy. It was bad because the alternative circuit was growing, and they had a huge hostility to the Oxbridge hegemony that dominated comedy in the seventies and eighties. You got a load of agro. By the time I got to London, I think Oxford was a disadvantage.” It is perhaps why he described the Oxford Revue as a “poisoned chalice.” “The last show I directed was described as the Worst Show on the Fringe 1989.”

The idea of a comedy opera came out of doing Club Zarathustra with Simon Munnery. “Richard [Thomas, the composer] had met an opera singer called Lauré Lixenburg – who’s in Jerry Springer – and they wrote twenty heckle put-downs, but sung in an operatic way. When Simon was being heckled, he would call a number and they would belt one of these out. The idea was you could do anything – except stand-up.”

Jerry grew out of Richard (composer and co-writer) Thomas’s assertion that the TV show was a load of fat people yelling incomprehensibly and fighting with each other. “And that’s exactly what operas are like.” But Lee insists it has gone beyond that, there’s something more simple and touching behind the show. “I think there is. And that’s its redeeming feature for me. Otherwise it would be like a sketch off DeadRingers. It’s sort of about of pain and forgiveness and I hope you still think that when you come out at the end.”

He pauses.

“But it’s also about swearing in operas.”