He may be one of the most respected comedians of his generation, but Stewart Lee says wouldn’t become a stand-up if he was starting a career today.

Although he finds the stage his safe space – ‘a means of escape from the world… a controlled environment’ – he says he would hate the other aspects of building a career comics now must engage in. 

‘You have to generate internet content and be a personality and interact with people. And I don't want to do that,’ he tells Louis Theroux on a new episode of his podcast out today.  

He also believes the internet has been detrimental in other ways as it ‘wants to manufacture conflict on stage’. 

‘Someone will film it on a cameraphone and there'll be a 30 second clip called "Steve Norman destroys heckler". Then millions of people watch it and thousands of people go and see them live and they haven't got an act and the [audience] don't go a second time.

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

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

Instead, he said, he would prefer collaboration saying: ‘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.’

Lee also spoke about how being  hard of hearing ‘was the making of his act’, telling Theroux:  ‘Before I realised I was deaf, I was not hearing as much as I wanted in the rooms. So I went on the attack about the audience not getting it and not laughing enough.’

He added that it also made him ‘indifferent’ to the audience, saying: ‘It changed my tone. I never thought anything of it, but it always seemed to me that people on the far left [of the audience rather than the political spectrum] were particularly bad at laughing.

‘That's a good thing about stand-up, is everyone's problems should be able to become an advantage. Everything that's difficult for you, you should be able to weaponise it in some way.’

Lee has also mentioned that he had a speculative autism diagnosis, but ‘kind of regrets’ that revelation now. ‘because it looks like you're trying to jump on that ship… it's a kind of thing now, isn't it? And I don't really want to get caught up in it.’

His doctor suggested he might have the condition following a 40-question test, but the comic declined to have a full diagnosis, saying: ‘I don't really need to, it doesn't make any difference. It's too late.’

But Lee told Theroux: ‘I was on a helpline to Microsoft the other day and the man actually suggested, after an hour, "we do have a special outline for people who have disabilities or who are perhaps neurodiverse, if you would like to call that". And to me, that's a better diagnosis than the NHS. He has clearly been trained how to broach this subject very diplomatically. 

‘It really made me laugh. I told my son – he was laughing his head off.’

However Lee said he had found it ‘helpful’ to know he was on the spectrum as it explained ‘how I've annoyed lots of people without intending to.’

Those people include Robbie Williams – who walked out of his show at the Soho Theatre ‘about 20 years ago’ – when  David Walliams brought him along. As he left the former Take That star told the usher: ‘That bloke is so boring. He should do the voiceover for relaxation tapes’.

Lee also spoke about how his relationship with Jerry Sadowitz had cooled.

 ‘I used to be a support act and it was a fascinating time,’ Lee explained. ‘Then he stopped speaking to me.

‘He also asked me to stop going to see him, he said that "it's not you, it's me. I'm paranoid. If you do something that's similar to something I've done, I'll think you've copied it and I'll hate you, but if you haven't been in the show, then I'll know you haven't copied it". 

‘I thought, fair enough. I bought a ticket for him once. I was in the queue, he walked past. He said, "Are you coming in to see this?" I said, "Yeah, I bought a ticket". He said, "I don't want you to come in". I went, "Well, I won't then". And he went, "You've bought a ticket though". And I went, "It's all right". That was the last time I saw him.’

When Theroux said: ‘That must have been quite emotional’, Lee replied: ‘Yeah. I hope he's all right.’

On the other hand he said he remained on ‘reasonable terms’ with Bridget Christie as their divorce papers are ‘about to go through’ – indeed, they are both on the same bill at the Teenage Cancer Trust comedy night at London’s Royal Albert Hall next week.

Talk inevitably turned to the rise of the anti-woke comedians with big Netflix deals, the inspiration for Lee’s current stand-up tour Stewart Lee Vs The Man-Wulf, in which he adopts a werewolf-style alter ego to mimic their stance.

He said: ‘As someone from the 1980s liberal alternative comedy tradition, we were encouraged by what you now call wokeness to think about the validity of our targets. Whether those people deserved it, they used to call it political correctness. And I'm politically correct, you know? I try to be politically correct. 

‘But the Netflix comedian doesn't have to think about that. In fact, there's a positive financial value to them not thinking about it, because if they create offence, it creates interest. 

‘It tends not to lead to cancellation, although they like to think that it does, it tends to lead to an inflation of your market value. So it's really great writing the nasty werewolf set and being able to sort of do anything.’

But he says many on the right 'don't understand comedy’ – specifically speaking about Elon Musk. 

‘He was explaining to Joe Rogan the other day, what comedy is, and that comedy's purpose is to disrupt things, apparently. The Grok AI will explain to you why Elon Musk is a better comedian than Seinfeld because Musk's memes disrupt social norms, whereas Seinfeld is about commonly understood little truisms. 

‘I think Musk knows on some level that humour’s just not in his genes. And you get with a lot of people on the far right, it seems to be just something they can't really do. They're not playful in that way. So I think it becomes a sort of frustration to him that he just isn't that kind of person. So he tries to talk a lot about how he is.

‘He [Musk] was explaining to Joe Rogan the other day that he's invented an AI which will do roasts… The AI will start doing insults to you and you can set it, Musk was explaining, to different levels of vulgarity.  So he understands humour as a kind of system and he thinks its purpose is to cause offence and to disrupt.

‘It's important for him to want to be seen as funny, like calling the bloke that was trying to save those kids from the cave, a paedo. It's just pointless. The problem is with Rogan operating as a kind of gatekeeper for comedy in the States, now the best people are being shut out and the worst people are being brought through by him. 

‘Marc Maron's very good on this actually, and he's probably made himself quite unpopular by systematically explaining what the problems are creatively of allowing Rogan to become a kind of gatekeeper for American comedy.’

• The Louis Theroux Podcast is available now

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