...but it will make material for his next show

Stewart Lee has revealed that he was a victim of an attempted mugging – which was made worse because of his experience as a comedian.

The stand-up said that one of the two parts of his next live show, Snowflake/Tornado, will be built around the incident, which happened last November.

And he reckons he underestimated the danger of the situation due to the 'false courage' comedians develop on stage 'because we suppress panic’.

He also admitted that he was thinking about how the attack could become material while he was being threatened. 'Even as it was happening, I found myself thinking 'what will this become?' he told Sofie Hagen on her Made of Human podcast.

Elaborating, he said that 'we are put, most days of the week as stand-ups, into situations that most people would avoid. Normally a person's fight or flight mechanism would say "don't stand in front of all those people speaking, run away".

He said that when heckled, 'I normally deal with it really calmly. I don't do putdowns, I sort of ask them what they want. I try to play like I'm mad and don't understand why anyone wouldn't like it.

'As the situation was escalating to the mugging, my brain thought I was in a gig' he added, recalling thinking '"so why do you want to do that, what's that going to achieve?"' as his would-be assailant menaced him. 

Laughing as he remembered the incident, he said: 'So I think I that made it worse because it's like you're passive-aggressive. God, I'd never do it again'.

Lee reckons his detachment began at the hostile university gigs he performed early in his career when in his double-act with Richard Herring - they had to ignore abuse and complete their contracted time in order to get paid.

He said that as a younger man, such an attitude was useful for confronting anti-social behaviour. 'The confidence from doing stand-up. It's a dangerous thing in life. It's great when you're young because you think well, I've been in worse situations than this.

But 'I now look like a little old man with a beard in a woolly hat, I don't look like someone that you wouldn't mug. So it was weird to realise as it was happening, though I completely misread the situation, I was no threat to anyone. And that was quite an eye-opening thing.'

Fortunately, a passer-by intervened in the mugging, 'as it was going to weapons I think … they were threatening to get stuff out. And the passer-by, just someone saying something, evaporated it.'

Elsewhere in the chat with Hagen, Lee admitted that he was undecided about the value of trigger warnings for comedy. And he suggested that having children affects his writing, because 'you have to fabricate a glimmer of hope on their behalf'.

He began laughing as he shared examples of when he's taken guidance in his writing, saying 'if there's something I don't understand where it sits politically or how it's perceived by young people or people from ethnic minorities or whatever, I just email Nish Kumar and I ask him for advice and he tells me what I am supposed to think and I do that'.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 16 Mar 2019