STAND UP & BE COUNTED
The Scotsman, March 3, 2007
JAY RICHARDSON

STEWART LEE IS, TO QUOTE THE title of his novel, the perfect fool. A shamanic yet displaced figure in British culture, still struggling on the live comedy circuit and the fringes of Edinburgh, he scribbles at the margins of rejected television scripts, in a seemingly quixotic quest for success. Through critical acclaim and disregard, popular indifference and the kind of religious persecution not witnessed since the Spanish Inquisition, or at least since The Life of Brian, Lee's drolly cynical yet life-affirming humour offers breadcrumbs of consolation to those who would be gay ducks in an ocean of conformist penguins.
He answers the door to his London flat in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. It's 4:30pm and three weeks till he performs March of the Mallards at the Magners Glasgow International Comedy Festival, the first look at what should become his next Edinburgh Fringe show. He has yet to begin writing. But as with all his creative commitments, he probably never stops.

Lee and his wife, comedian Bridget Christie, are expecting their first child next month and he concludes our interview in his Mini, dropping me en-route to the hospital. Doubtless wary of the Christian organisations that listed BBC executives' home addresses online after the channel's decision to broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2005, he has declined to be photographed at home. Judeo-Christian themes run throughout his work, but in conversation, he dismissively alludes to these organisations as "mad people", bitterly resentful of the Springer theatre cancellations that cost him "a life-changing amount of money".
While he makes tea, I survey his domain. A huge white bookcase contains thousands of CDs, the legacy of a parallel career as a music journalist, which sustained him from 1998 to 2000 when he couldn't make a living in stand-up. A beautiful, 1972 purple Wurlitzer jukebox, so big it had to be winched through a window by crane, crouches in the corner with a guitar beside it. Beneath a print of the sign welcoming you to Las Vegas, the plastic figure of a Native American clown stands erect, a souvenir of his time on the Hopi reservation in Arizona, shortly before he abandoned live comedy for three years. The character embodies the idea expressed in The Perfect Fool, that "man can never be perfect. [The Hopi clown] teaches us how man clowns his way through life, and hopes that this knowledge will lead man to a sense of right."

Nine months previously, after the penultimate performance of his previous stand-up show, 90s Comedian, which featured an intense, hallucinatory finale with Jesus in his mother's bathroom that left him feeling physically ill - "the whole point of that was 'what's the worst thing you can think of and can you make it charming?' " - Lee casually informed me that for his next show, he planned to do something "silly with ducks". Now, he's ready to, but it's hardly Bill Oddie territory.
"It seemed to me as I watched an American version of March of the Penguins that what they were making out was conventional, moral majority morality was supposed to be self-evident, because the natural world, in the shape of the penguin, behaves in the same way," he explains. "It's broadly monogamous, caring towards its children and has a sense of tribal community. Yet you could have equally chosen any animal. Mallards reproduce by gang rape. They are the only bird known to carry out necrophiliac sex. And there's a 25 per cent instance of homosexuality in males.
"March of the Mallards would show that what the American moral majority believe is utterly wrong is self-evident in the natural world too. I think you have to be very careful about drawing such conclusions and I'm going to use that idea as a framework for looking at 'what is good behaviour?' "

LEE'S PREOCCUPATION WITH waterfowl almost crossed over into television. He co-wrote two episodes of Richard Thomas's Kombat Opera, currently showing on BBC2 on Sundays.
"I was going to write a third about ducks," he says. "But in the end, they just couldn't afford it. I wanted the set to be built to scale, so you'd have this massive pond and people in giant It's a Knockout costumes feeding them bread."
The image triggers his cackling laugh. "But the head of BBC2 got overexcited about wanting to do it with CGI," he sighs. "And an accountant said that wouldn't be possible, so it never happened."
He has a difficult relationship with television and is frustrated that the BBC dropped plans for a six-part showcase of his stand-up without explanation, plans that prevented him writing a live show for last year's Fringe, where he directed the play Talk Radio.
"Doing something for TV is just an insane lottery, where there seems no relation between a good idea and it getting broadcast. Occasionally, something like The Office gets on, but only through the law of averages. I'm involved in two pilots right now, but I've emotionally distanced myself from both. If they're made, great. But I'll write them for the money. It's a way of subsidising other things."
The first is a sitcom about the Brontë sisters, written by a cadre of female comedians, that he is script-editing.
"Typically, being the best script I've ever worked on, it'll be turned down," he cackles.
The other is his own sitcom about the Norse god Thor.

"My dad died a couple of years ago and I started thinking about writing a father-son relationship. Like Steptoe and Son and Porridge, kind of," he says. "And the ultimate one in Western Europe is Thor and Odin, the pre-Christian mythological template of all father-son relationships. What's interesting is that they're both immortal, so they've also got that feeling of being imprisoned together too. I'm trying to think of things that actually happened between me and my dad that are analogous to Norse mythology.
"Thor, for instance, has a chariot driven by goats and Odin's got one with bulls. And that just reminds me of my dad criticising my Minis. 'I'm sure they're really impressive goats, but they're goats nonetheless ...'"
If, as he maintains, "he's the best comedian most people have never heard of", Lee has nevertheless established his place in the stand-ups' pantheon. Fellow comics are near unanimous in their praise of his live performances and in my experience, unstinting in their regard for him personally. He, in turn, has chosen to work with an incredible variety of them while retaining his distinctive voice. A week ago he was in Manchester, writing a new play with Johnny Vegas. Before that he shared a double-bill with the playwright Mark Ravenhill in London, performing his monologue What Would Judas Do?

The projects he's most excited about, though, are a forthcoming one-man show about the angel Gabriel and the challenge of developing March of the Mallards for Edinburgh.
"There's only two ways of satisfactorily recreating Heaven. One would be to spend a million quid and do something like no-one ever imagined. The other would be to get loads of people in the dark, in a room with no seats and make them close their eyes, while you walked around whispering Heavenly descriptions, so they have to create it in their imagination."
Picking up his guitar and strumming, he adds, "I'd like to do something impressively difficult for Edinburgh, with slide guitar so people go 'wow!' And maybe some clowning too. I don't really like musical comedy and I'm not much good at physical comedy. So I'd really like to try dressing up in a costume and falling over."