Stewart Lee

And so if you're suddenly running a room and bossing people about, it unbalances it a bit.

So you have to hand the power back to the heckler or to the person that's joined in.

I try to make them get... It's increasingly difficult, actually, to involve the public because there's a certain kind of comedian now... And again, I blame the internet...

who wants to manufacture conflict on stage, ideally film it on a camera phone and then get it on the internet.

And there'll be a 30-second clip called Steve Norman Destroys Heckler.

And then millions of people watch it and thousands of people go and see them live and haven't got an act and they don't go a second time.

It's a kind of thing now.

And I think audience members are often quite reluctant to join in with you now because they're worried that they're going to be attacked.

Whereas I try to...

I try to give them the power and let them get the laughs.

And I try to feed them stuff that I know will set them up for things.

It's one of the reasons I never liked panel shows, I realise, in retrospect, that if you are on a panel show and you think of it the good of the whole and you try to feed people lines or set them up for things, that's viewed as a weakness because then they get the laugh.

But if you think of these things collectively, like an improvisation, and again, it sounds pretentious, but I watch a lot of improvised music, and those people are not stars.

They work as a unit.

They make space for each other in a free jazz trio.

Are you laughing?

Because I thought we'd go to free jazz at some point.

Well, you can't escape it once you start thinking like that.

It's sort of a philosophy for life, you know.

I've got a great bit of paper that Evan Parker gave me in the 90s.