Stewart Lee

I'm really proud of it.

And no one...

will probably ever do anything like that ever again.

I don't think the opportunities will exist to develop that kind of work in that way for younger people.

Also, they won't have the start in life where you could spend 10 years living in cheap housing and doing temp jobs while you worked out what you were trying to do.

That window has collapsed.

Yeah, but it'll be different.

There's something about working things out in rooms...

They're not sterile, they're organic.

Where Jimmy is right to say the audience are a genius is my audience are my double act partner.

A good audience can intuit where a routine's going so you don't have to finish it or you can strip detail out of it and allow them to imagine the detail and you can see them laughing as they guess what you're describing or where something's going.

My audience have an oppositional relationship with me where they love me because they come to see me.

They sort of hate me as one thing.

I'm a ridiculous character.

They enjoy my failures and I like to set them up to enjoy them.

They control the timing of things.

I allow space for them to discover things for themselves and their responses are an important part of moving me on to the next bit.

And in fact, some routines

if you don't get the response you need at the point where you get it, you're a bit fucked.

With Jimmy, it wouldn't really matter if the audience were there or not because it's like a machine.