How I Escaped My Certain Fate

by Stewart Lee

literature’s loss became stand-up comedy’s loss also.

Back then, under the shadow of an unattainable ideal of ideological purity, nobody, not bands or stand-up comedians or comic-book creators, wanted to be seen to ‘sell out to the Man’ by doing an advert or appearing on Top of the Pops or achieving any level of commercial sustainability.

I’m just confusing the thrill of being young with the notion that the era in which I was young was in any way especially creative or remarkable.

though lots of the material people baulked at in 1990 has proved a perfect fit for twenty-first-century audiences who love the fine line he now walks between hilarious obscenity and criminally prosecutable obscenity.

harmless as flies, but with less hope of careers in radio.

I arrived and left in darkness, with little to show for my trouble either financially or creatively. It seemed like a metaphor for my career. Creatively, I was in Dundee. By now, I’d hoped at least to be in St Andrews.

Now that I had been ladled with theatrical accolades, previously puzzled critics had to assume that my apparent inability to write and perform stand-up properly was in fact the result of positive artistic choices, rather than an indication of a basic lack of ability, and they adjusted their star ratings accordingly.

There was also sound creative logic in adopting this approach, for, as Cicero said, ‘an indecency decently put is the thing we laugh at hardest’.

That said, I am happy to use ‘cunt’, for example, as a swear word, as long as there is no risk of confusing the use of the word with a reference to a vagina, i.e. ‘Richard Littlejohn is a cunt.’

I am sick of reading on Daily Mail message boards that I am ‘one of these foul-mouthed modern comedians’ when I am absolutely not. Honestly, who are these cunts?