S7 EP4: Stewart Lee on "Netflix comedians”, disastrous gigs, and Elon Musk

26:54Robin Reliance? Yeah, they used to have little specially adapted one-seater. Oh, did they? This would be better than them having money to use for their own transport. There's this kind of nostalgia for a simpler past. So what I did nail in that routine, and often that bit gets cut off, is people being nostalgic about the time before anything existed, when life was at its most simple, when there was no matter or energy or nothing. And I kind of think that that's the reduced to absurdity position of the far right is this kind of weird nostalgia for an imagined simpler past. Yeah, so that's the bit that everyone knows, I suppose, and the bit that people are sick of as well.

27:37One of the things, obviously, that you've become, I don't know, famous for, but certainly you haven't held back on, is calling out other comedians, right? Yeah, again, it doesn't... Right. And I never know, because another thing you've said is that on stage you're in character and you play the character of Stuart Lee, funnily enough. You understand this, you're in character when you're interviewing. You play a faux naïf when you're interviewing some of those people. Am I in character now? No. There's no need for it with me. You play a faux naïve and also you play up to an English middle classness in America which disarms those people.

28:16There's something in that. Yeah. But nevertheless, I would say I kind of go in and out of character and I do believe in, you know, may I say non-binary in a sense, like the idea of shifts, you know, tones. Tonal shifts. Tonal shifts, register shifts. So it's a fallacy, the idea like, I'm now in character, I'm going to call you a cunt. Now I'm not in character, I don't think you're a cunt, Stu. Do you know what I mean? Felt weird calling you a cunt, even though I was in character. Can you do that on Spotify? Can you say that? Yeah. Wow. The character of Stuart Lee is a jealous, delusional, bitter, arrogant person, anxious to give a good account of himself.

28:54Actually, there was a better one where you talked about him being sort of woke and pious and patronising and a scold. It's all the things that I am, which in normal everyday life, you check them. You check them and pull back on them. And they're useful traits to amplify. We were talking about it's funnier to be more aloof, more arrogant, owning your worst qualities. Yeah. but also about the fact that that's involved

29:33casting shade at, or whatever the phrase would be, other comedians. You've sailed quite close to the wind on that. Famously, perhaps this might be one of your most famous jokes, where you talk about how you kept hearing that James Corden was a fan, and it was starting to get up your nose. Every time you would say he was trying to be a fan, he was a fan, he was just trying to seem intelligent. It was a running gag of yours, is that people come to your comedy to prove that they're intelligent, to sort of seem elite. Well, that's because that's what critics would say about it. So I thought, well, I'll own that.

30:02You'll own that, that it's sort of six music listening, Guardian reading, you know, your own yoghurt types. Anyway, and you say, like, imagine James Corden watching one of my routines. It's like a dog listening to classical music. Well, the reason I did that about James Corden was because I was kept being told that James Corden was a fan and James Corden would turn up at little tryout gigs that I was doing. And I had to think, what would the character of Stuart Lee... I don't mind him. I don't know anything about him. But unfortunately, the character of Stuart Lee would be a snob about him. So I had to say that.

30:41I had to ruin that. And sometimes I have to say things that I know will make my life worse and more difficult. I once sabotaged a gig at the Royal Albert Hall because it's what he would have done. What Stuart Lee would have done. Yeah. It'd be helpful if you had a different name for that person. No. I've done the Teenage Cancer Trust comedy night at the Royal Albert Hall twice. The first time I did it, Noel Fielding curated all the acts. So I kind of fitted in quite well on that night. Quirky offbeat comedy. Quirky offbeat, it's fine. The second time, John Bishop did it, and John Bishop likes me, and I think John Bishop was a very good comedian.

31:23Very funny, Liverpool, working-class comedian. But he's very different to me, and all the other acts were of that kind of world. And I came out, and all the other people had been picked up on a big screen at the back, right? And when I came out, the screen went off. I went, oh. I said, they've turned that off, you know. Well, they're not filming me. What's going on? Now, my audience would have immediately started laughing, choosing to do that at the Royal Apple Hall. but they weren't they were thinking they didn't know who I was they didn't know who I was they were thinking who's this bloke so I went the irony is I'm the most critically acclaimed act on I mean a lot of you won't have heard of me but I've got I've been called the world's greatest living stand up by the Times and of course they were getting they hated it those people they didn't know who I was and I was lecturing and I was going can this be sorted out you know and it's such a wrong thing to do at the Royal Abbot that can play with that technology and then I thought oh I've misjudged this it's not my crowd they don't know who I am they think something's gone wrong They think I'm being arrogant and snagging everyone off.

32:17So I had to just dig down on it. You kept going? Kept going. And then... Did you start calling them a bunch of morons? Probably, yeah. I can't remember. It was like I was above watching myself in this place. Objectively, it was bad comedy. It didn't work. But from another position, it was one of the best things I've ever done because that's what would happen to him if he went there and did that. And then when I came off, Sean Walsh, God bless him, was on his knees laughing his head off and going like that because he understood the decision that I'd made to make something of it. I'm doing it again in March.

32:56How did that feel, though, for you? Actually. Majestic, mortifying? Again, when I was on, no problem. What I said about the feeling of utter safety. Yeah. Because he would do that, so he did it. But when I came off, you know, if you nearly have a car accident and you just about get out. You're jittery. Yeah. Whoa, came to pieces afterwards. It was terrible. Really? Yeah, I felt absolutely, I felt like I'd just gone to silence in front of 4 ,000 people at the Royal Albert Hall, which is what I'd done, or maybe more. So I'm doing it again, actually, in March, with what Robert Smith from The Cure has curated it, and I'm in a much better, I'm on a bill where it'll be fine.

33:35I'm really looking forward to that. So, great. But it's interesting that it did affect you afterwards. Yeah. But not during. No, but afterwards. Yeah, afterwards, yeah. Why? Because you were back to normal Stuart. Yeah, yeah. And normal Stuart cares. Yeah. Well, which is a good segue into, so what did normal Stuart feel about comedy Stuart being so rude about James Corden? I feel sorry that he might be upset about it. But if he really liked me as much as he said, he would have understood why that had to happen. Another thing that I did was, in between, they were always reluctant to recommission comedy vehicle, even though it was winning BAFTAs.

34:15This was your BBC Two show that you got in 2008, was it? Something like that, yeah, seven, eight. And I remember in between one series, maybe series two or series three, somebody said, look, the problem is you're not a personality, you're not on other things. We need you to do more stuff. Do panel shows. Yeah, they said, well, maybe, so I'm not doing panel shows. The bloke goes, well, maybe you could present the culture show. And so I wrote a routine about why I, not only why I would not present the culture show, but why the culture show should be about me every week because I've done operas and all sorts of things.

34:47It should just be a programme about how I embody culture. So I kind of burnt my bridges for that completely. I didn't want to do the culture show, but the Stuart Lee would be offended that he should be, and he would also think the culture show was lowbrow shit. He would think it was not even... Do you think that? No, it's all right. It's not on anymore anyway, is it? No. But everything, all the things that we moaned about, and now everything's so terrible that you look back and you think, wow. It's gone and never coming back. No. But you know what else, though? I really love comedy and I watch loads of it.

35:26So the people that I admire enormously outweigh the tiny minority that irritate me. And even those people, when push comes to shove, like when Farage this week was saying that he's the same as Bernard Manning, he's going, you know, it's just a joke. Well, we should help people out. Okay. Nigel Farage has allegedly made anti-Semitic and racist comments as a teenager at school and as an 18-year-old at school. And his justification when somebody from ITV News tried to pick him up on it was that ITV had Bernard Manning on in the 70s, which it did. We should also say it wasn't just one or two people, I think it was 20.

36:0420, get on for 30 people. 30 people who were students, pupils alongside him have recollections of feeling... Of some pretty full-on stuff. And I thought, well, it's not the same as Bernard Manning because Bernard Manning didn't go to Jewish people, Hitler was right, and then make the sound of a gas chamber, right? And also, Bernard Manning, whether you like him or not, he operates in the magic circle protected space of the theatre, you know. And people have kind of made a choice to go in there, whereas it's not the same as Nigel Farage allegedly saying to a black student, what country are your family from?

36:44There's the way back. In fact, if Bernard Manning did that on stage, it would be quite funny. He'd go, where are you from, mate? Oh, well, that's the door. You know, you can sort of see how that would work. So I obviously don't like Bernard Manning, but I'm not going to have a member of the public, I'm not going to have a non-comedian misrepresent him. Do you not – so you don't really care that much. You're willing to sail close to the wind on putting people out there. I don't want to make too much of this, but it always strikes me that you're – you've got an appetite. Is it a thick skin or is it you've got an appetite to – Look, I don't know why it's such a big deal.

37:26I mean, I saw Russell Howard on telly doing a joke about how that old lady that won Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle, was ugly. Yeah. I thought, well, that's not on, really, coming from a man who spends all his life in a gym. I just thought it was kind of... So all those people have a go at people. They have a go at harmless celebrities or people they consider naff in some way, you know. And I'm not interested in that world. I'm not interested. I don't even know who those people are. I'm interested in politics and comedy, mainly. My stand-up is about a stand-up comedian who's trying to do shows.

38:04There's no artifice in that way. Whereas someone like Lee Mack, who's very good, comes out and he talks about everyday life. He's like your friend who's somehow on stage. Whereas I'm not your friend and I'm not pretending to be... I'm a bloke who's a comedian who feels a bit hard done by and is on tour all the time and talks about putting the shows together and the business of that a lot of the times. That's why the jokes are about those people, because that's his world.

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41:31I've read your book, which I thought was really interesting. You're a terrific writer. Which one was that? How I Escaped by Certain Feats. Well, it's very kind of you. I'm very proud of that book. I liked Dave Allen as a kid, and a book came out about Dave Allen, and I wanted to read it, and it was all about Dave Allen's life and playing golf and whatever, and there was nothing about how he developed material. And I thought, well, I want to read a book about a comedian. It's not about their celebrity, but it's about their process. So I thought, well, I'll write that book about me. It's very much that.

42:03And also it's about an eight-year climacteric, if I can use that word, in which you kind of have a crisis based on not doing very well on stage for various reasons, being heckled and then a drunk. You handle a heckler by getting the drunk heckler to get on stage and then you're made to be in the wrong and you're like, the audiences are dwindling for obscure reasons. Well, I couldn't make a living either because I was with Avalon and it was difficult because the economics of their touring models were not very good. You put Avalon out there. You're quite careful not to name them in the book. You make them sound pretty horrendous.

42:39Christmas parties with dwarves running around. Dwarves. Carrying drinks on their heads or something. I mean, who does that? What a tasteless thing to do. Although the dwarves like it, you know, because it's seasonal work. That's what they say. I asked the guy, do you like doing this? He went, we're seasonal workers, he said. And then it follows you through your famous Jerry Springer, award-winning Jerry Springer of the Opera. We have to always mention that was the idea of the composer Richard Thomas, who did the majority of the creative work on it. And the concept was already up and running when I came in.

43:10I tried to plot it into something, really. It won an Olivier. It was going to transfer to Broadway. It was derailed by an orchestrated, but I think nonetheless sincere campaign by Christian evangelists who found it deeply offensive. But I had an amazing thing on tour, and I hope she won't mind me talking about this, but his family, the family of Stephen Green who led the campaign against Joey Springer, the opera. Stephen Green's also actually one of the people that the Tufton Street AstroTurf pressure group Restore Trust have tried to put onto the board of the National Trust. because they think it's got too woke.

43:47And he's a man who believes it's not possible for a man to rape his wife. Anyway, I was doing a gig on this tour and his daughter came up at the end and introduced herself. And it was one of the most overwhelming things that has happened to me. Wow, it's making you a bit emotional thinking about it. Yeah, it was because, you know, we put years of work into that show and at the point where it should have settled into a viable thing, it was stopped largely by him. And it was so great to see her and I was really not for six by it and I thought it was very brave of her to come and say hello. So, yeah, it was great.

44:35You appreciated it. The issue for them was that Jesus is depicted in a cheeky way. He wasn't really. I remember seeing it. He's wearing a nappy? Well, he wasn't wearing a nappy. He was wearing a lungi. In the first half, okay, basically my contribution to the opera was to copy the plot of The Wizard of Oz, whereby if you remember in The Wizard of Oz, all the people that Dorothy meets in her everyday life re-emerge as fantasy caricatures of themselves in the dream sequence, which is the journey to Oz. That's right. So all the people that Jerry Springer met in the first half re-emerge in the second half in the fever dream that he has in the moment between being shot and dying.

45:18They re-emerge as analogous religious figures whose stories in the first half, that the squabbling couple come back as Adam and Eve, the sort of father figure, bigamist bloke, comes back as God. The man who in the first half was wearing a nappy because he was a coprophiliac, comes back as Jesus in a loincloth like Jesus wears in all the paintings of Jesus. He is specifically not in a nappy. It's like a nappy and that's why he thinks of it because he's in a nappy in the first half and Jesus, the most famous images of Jesus are all those crucifixion paintings where he's in a loincloth. So that's why that was that.

45:58And it wasn't a nappy, it was a loincloth. But the story became that it was a nappy. But also with Stephen Green there was a very specific agenda which is that you wouldn't have done this about another religion, specifically Islam. And actually you wouldn't have done it. Now the reason I wouldn't have done it about Islam was that you wanted something that was commonly understood, right? And in the West, whether it's Milton or Nick Cave, a commonly understood trope is the Christian religion. It's a commonly understood thing where you can use elements of those stories to tell a story. Islam's not commonly understood.

46:35Of course, what became immediately clear sometime later is another reason you wouldn't have done it about Islam is because some supporters of that religion would have taken violent retribution on any representation of it. Although I think the South Park depiction of Muhammad is still knocking about somewhere. But the people surrounding Christian Voice had a whole ragbag of things. They were homophobic. That was Stephen Green's outfit, Christian Voice. Yeah, they were. Is he still knocking around? Well, he did. I mean, Tufton Street tried to get him on the board of the National Trust three years ago, so he's still knocking around.

47:07The Daily Mail always used to read him out for a quote, and they stopped. I think he got a bit too hot for them, you know. So when it transferred, it showed on BBC, right? Yeah, that was what caused all the trouble, really. It was the most complained about transmission in history? Yeah, but again, it's kind of meaningless. That's quite a feather in the cap. It's a little meaningless, though, because the internet was starting, so it was easy to mobilise complaints. and most of the people that complained about it wouldn't have seen it. It was 50 ,000? I think it was 60 ,000. It almost felt imitative.

47:38Like at the time it was a bit like, well, if radical Islam can go around mixing things up, intimidating people, we're going to show them what we can do. That's what Stephen Green said. He said, the Muslims have stolen a march on us, he said. That was his quote. He felt that in the economy of offence they were being outperformed. by other religions. Was that the phrase he used? Yeah, that Muslims have stolen a march. Not the economy of offence. No, I just made that up. It was like that. It's like, well, why can't they do cartoons of Jesus? Yeah. Well, I think it's different. It is slightly different because there's not a tradition of depicting Muhammad, as I understand it, and also even within the Christian faith, if you think of the mystery plays from the Middle Ages, there were fairly robust depictions of Christian religious figures in those that were used to do social satire about contemporary issues of the times.

48:34I think they've always been kind of quite flexible to us as artists and writers in Christian cultures. We've always been able to play a little bit fast and loose with them to tell other sorts of stories. But they're not that useful anymore, unfortunately, because most people don't really know anything about the Christian religion anymore. And there are some good things about that. you can't necessarily use it to win a moral argument in the way it used to be enough to just say, the Bible would say, don't do that. But what it does mean is there isn't a framework for telling stories, which I think is a shame that it's gone in that way.

49:13Or for understanding, you can't understand the greats of Blake and Milton. You can't understand that without initially knowing your way around the Christian religion. You have to... So I think other things will start to fade into meaninglessness because we don't really understand that. I also think it means a lot of people are offended by things without really understanding them. I mean, Tommy Robinson is telling the Church of England they need to put the Christ back into Christmas. So it basically means the religion is misunderstood enough to be appropriated by the far right. So they're in it.

49:52I hadn't seen that. Put the Christ back into Christmas, yeah. So... Is this the sort of thing you talk about normally? I talk about anything. How are you talking about personal stuff? Well, I don't like to do that, really, because I think personal stuff invariably involves other people, and those other people haven't necessarily consented to be a bit player in your self-indulgent psychodrama. So there's a couple of things bubbling under that I would do a show about at some point. Go on. Well, the one I can't possibly talk about until I've got everything in line. And then a lot's come up about being adopted lately.

50:38But I think I should do a show about that. Dara O 'Brien has done two shows about being adopted. So what I might do is a show about Dara O 'Brien being adopted. I thought that would be quite a funny way of doing it. Sounds like you're avoiding something. I remember when I read your book, I was like, this is great, but I also thought there was a reference to you being adopted. I thought, that's really interesting. You also, then later on I read that it was the first two years of your life you were in care, right? So we don't know, you know, you don't know anything about that. You don't obviously remember that.

51:11You were adopted. Then go on, what are you going to say? Well, you know, why it's sort of come up is when Bridget, my wife, was pregnant, which is, you know, 19 years ago now, I thought, oh, it's quite hard being pregnant. I should say ex-wife. Yeah, well, yeah, we are. The paperwork's about to go through, but we're on reasonable terms. But, in fact, I'm on the Royal Apple. We're on the same bill. She's a comedian as well. Yeah, she's very good. Bridget Christie. Yeah. But I thought, well, it's difficult being pregnant. I expect it was quite a big deal for my mother, you know, which I'd never thought of.

51:49So I thought I should find her and tell her that I'm all right. Because I imagine if you'd gone through nine months of a pregnancy, you'd never forget that. I really hadn't given it much thought, to be honest. So growing up, you weren't massively preoccupied with who your birth parents were? No, not at all. Knew anything about them? I had a form that my mum gave me when I was little, which said some basic facts. You had their names? Not names, no. Did you know what they did? I knew that my mother was a 19-year-old nursing student and my father was a 21-year-old trainee hotel manager, although that turned out not to be the case.

52:26And they weren't in a relationship maybe? Not really, no. And I knew what part of the country it was and I knew a lot more about the mother because the language of the time, 67, is all the details of the father, the form says details of putative father. So the assumption, there's a moral assumption there, it's quite interesting that you don't even know who the father is really. So eventually I ended up meeting various people that I'm related to and I have a very good relationship with my two half-sisters now. In fact, I saw them last weekend. Okay. And they persisted with me to become a part of my life.

53:11I'm not very good at keeping up with people, you know, but they were very determined about it and they're great. so that was one, that's sort of been around but then a few years ago, about 18 months ago I went to the GP about something and the GP decided that I should take advantage of a scheme where there was free therapy for people that had been in care sort of in that time because it was decided I think as a result of a class action by a group of women who thought that being put into the care of a non-regulated religious charity was not necessarily the best outcome for them. There was six weeks of free therapy to discuss what effect coming into the world in that way at that time may have had.

54:01And, you know, it's statistically provable that everybody that went through that has a higher parenthesis than normal towards certain states of mind or conditions or dependencies or whatever. So it was interesting. so you know eventually I'll write something about that but what I don't want to do is I would like to sort of make it a kind of a parody of those here's my story feel my pain kind of shows you know but it won't be for a while because the next show 2028 which I will tour between my daughters GCSEs and hopefully our A-levels is going to be very specifically about nationalism I've got loads of ideas for it and I think I need to land it before Farage gets in in 2029.

54:46You think Farage will get in? At the moment, yeah, if there's a vote tomorrow, yeah. How do you like Elon Musk? Well, I think that if he was to disappear from public life it would be better for the world. I think he's an absolute unmitigated disaster and that he's going to destabilise European democracies. The speech that he did in Trafalgar Square was insane. What was it? I didn't see that. That was part of the Tommy Robbins Yeah, he said, you know, it is coming and you will have to fight. Oh, yeah, he did. He said you're going to have to fight to defend yourself. He also made a, I think it was elsewhere on a podcast maybe, where he did the Tolkien bit.

55:23Did you see that? Yeah. Where he's talking about the hobbits of... Borg, something. What he's talking about, his accent's different, isn't it, because he's South African. He goes, the hobbits of Middle Earth had to defend themselves. They needed strong men to defend themselves. Yeah, although in some Scandinavian countries, you know, the Lord of the Rings is very popular with the far right. They see it as a kind of creation myth for white Europe. So it's an amazing thing. They always did. I'm going to sound so crazy woke. Go on. It always bothered me a bit that as a child of the Star Trek generation where they were always careful not to align racial types with ideological types, whereas I'm not saying Tolkien was a fascist.

56:04In fact, he's on record as being an anti-Nazi, but there's an inescapable, there's good races and bad races in Middle Earth. Yeah. Right? And I've said this before on this show, like, humanise the orcs. I made a joke out of it. You know, and actually, maybe it's ridiculous, but you can't help noticing that the orcs go around saying, like, you know, mate's back on the menu, boys. And you never, you know, if Gene Roddenberry had been in charge of the Tolkien adaptations, he would have, like, Lieutenant Worf in Next Generation. They'd have been a good orc. They'd have been a good orc. Yeah. And I know that probably would have made it maybe less interesting, like, oh, so predictable.

56:43Maybe it's interesting, more challenging, certainly. I do love that about Star Trek. And I wonder, people like Elon Musk will say, or people like us, we're woke, liberal, libtards, whatever. But we grew up in a time where the popular culture was liberal. You know, like the Star Trek, like you say with Gene Roddenberry, you know, first interracial kiss on American television, The empire that was thrusting out into the stars was very benign. It wasn't exploitative of the people it met. And then, you know, Marvel Comics. I always think about it. I love Marvel Comics in the 70s. And they were written by working-class Jewish autodidact anti-fascists and LSD taking hippie dropouts.

57:20And their agenda was very progressive. And it's really weird to think now that they're owned by those massive corporations that play lip service to Trump. Do you think, I think maybe, but well, Disney, I think Disney's not quite been that. Not quite. In fact, they got into a lot of shit with Ron DeSantis because they had like a special day for gay people, I think. And I don't know, I think. But either way, if the guys that wrote Marvel comics in the 70s were writing them now, Spider-Man would be in Queens fighting the ICE agents to protect the immigrant community. Yeah. And Captain America would have hung up his shield like he did when Nixon was in and gone undercover.

58:00You know, that's what would be happening if those people were writing them now and they daren't do that. What would you say? Because I think Elon Musk would say, no, you're the elitist. You're attempting to piously preach to people, instill in them these sort of regime values that don't reflect how people really want to live. You know, the populism is called populism because it reflects something about people. Right. I'm pushing back on you. What do you say to that? Like, actually, the sort of quote-unquote liberal establishment's been guilty of kind of curating a slightly fake, centrist, woolly, you know...

58:43I'd say it's better than the alternative, you know. But that it doesn't reflect how people really are, right? The idea that there's a liberal establishment, it may have been true in some areas of society. But if we look at the whole of, say, Britain today, the majority of the press is owned by billionaires with offshore accounts who have a particular interest from maintaining a right-leaning status quo. Television stations, why is GB News even on? If Ofcom was doing its job, it wouldn't be on and it wouldn't have Farage being allowed to present a programme on it. and the social media which is where the majority of people are getting their ideas from is skewed to the right and owned by people like Elon Musk so the idea that there's liberal values and liberal establishment are in massive retreat and if you take the states as the bellwether as the canary in the mine liberal arts establishments are being closed down universities are being hassled about what they can and can't teach with the threat of the withdrawal of funding for them freedom of speech is not being fact checked Now, a broadcaster has to be, you know, the BBC has to be fact-checked.

59:53When I do stuff on the BBC, which I don't very often, but all my jokes have to be fact-checked. I have to tweak them a little bit just to make sure that there's not a generalisation being made. I can make an exaggeration in the punchline, but the set-up has to be factually accurate. None of that applies to Joe Rogan on Spotify. He's not fact-checked. He can say what he likes. It doesn't apply to anything on Twitter. It doesn't seem to apply to most American news outlets. No one fact checks Trump about his claims to have ended 50 million wars or whatever. You know, it just goes on. So they need to get rid of facts.

1:00:23So the freedom of speech is about ideas. It's not the same as just being able to say things that aren't true, that are factually not true. There aren't alternative facts. There's alternative theories, but there aren't alternative facts. So we're in trouble, you know. Did you think Trump didn't deserve that FIFA World Peace Award? I think Trump deserved a FIFA World Police Award. I think that is the award that he deserves. Were you disappointed that Robbie Williams performed at the event? I'm disappointed in Robbie Williams generally, irrespective of the event. Robbie Williams was brought to see me at the Soho Theatre about 20 years ago by David Walliams.

1:01:04What a night out that must have been. And he left about 20 minutes in. Which show was that? 90s Comedian? Really early. It might have been, yeah, something like that. And then the usher said, oh, are you leaving? and he went, yeah. He said, that bloke is so boring, he should do the voiceover for relaxation tapes. Robbie said that. About you. To an usher, yeah. How do you know that? Because the usher told me. Really? That's funny. Yeah, what a mad bloke. Weird. Elon's apparently a big fan of comedy. He says he is, but he doesn't understand it. He loves Monty Python. Well, he was explaining to Joe Rogan the other day what comedy is, and comedy's purpose is to disrupt things, apparently.

1:01:45And actually, the grok AI will explain to you why Elon Musk is a better comedian than Seinfeld. And it's because Musk's memes disrupt social norms, whereas Seinfeld is about commonly understood little truisms. And so 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 was explaining to Joe Rogan the other day that he's invented an AI which will do roasts, you know, with the American tradition of the roast.

1:02:30But this AI, you'll come into a room and the AI will scan you and work out that you're bold or something. And then it 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. And they're all like this, the tech guys, aren't they? It's all about disruption and shaking us out of our complacency. So I don't think he really understands it. I think on some level he understands that he doesn't understand it and that frustrates him. So it's important for him to want to be seen as funny.

1:03:06like calling the bloke that was trying to save those kids from the well, from the cave, a pedo. It's just pointless. That's just like their... Pedo guy. Pedo guy. Yeah, it's just not something they're good at. And 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. And Mark 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.

1:03:42In the end, it will go into a death spiral. Would you find Theo Vaughn funny? Don't know him. What about Shane Gillis? Don't know him. Really? No. I'm not on the internet, so a lot of things that are... If they've got a funny 15-second bit on TikTok, I don't even know how you get on that, so... Jimmy Carr says the audience is a genius. I don't know what that means or why he would say it. Did he say that or did someone write it for him? Who knows? Burn noted. Because I've heard you say before, like, if comedians use writers, do you regard that as a dereliction? Well, look, I'm old enough to remember when alternative comedy started.

1:04:27I was a teenager, you know, and the idea was that the working men's club comics that we saw as stand-ups as kids had this common treasury of material, which they were able to put an individual stamp on due to their regional differences. And George Roper, for example, always mentioned Wellingtons in his jokes. So he'd do the same joke as Bernard Manning, but the main character would be in Wellingtons. So they all had their own little... But the great thing about alternative comedy was it was people were the authors of their own material. And so I suppose why I was able to think I would want to do that is because they were like auteurs, like writers, as well as...

1:05:07And I saw myself much more as a writer than a performer. In fact, I tried to minimise the idea of performance for the first 20 years of doing it. I tried to not perform, really. So that was a really important part of it. So a little part of me is always disappointed when I know people use writers. Sometimes you can sort of tell, because I think at one point Frankie Boyle was using so many different writers that he didn't have a consistent tone of voice. He would do some stuff that was what we would call woke or progressive and other stuff that was reactionary and it didn't always all fit together.

1:05:41So I do think it is an important thing that people are writers, but I'm aware that I'm from a different age. I'm from a different age that doesn't exist anymore. I think that's partly why people like to come and see me. It's a bit like seeing some dying blues guy. all of us of my age we saw sean hughes in 1990 be the first kind of british or irish comedian to put together an hour-long show that had a through line may you rest in peace yeah and and and uh that was very inspiring then kitson came along writing these daniel things that were like one man plays but were still punchy and in your face like stand up and could and so we we all aspired to make shows that were a finished piece.

1:06:23And that's what I... Every show of mine is a finished piece, and it's quite difficult often to take bits out of it and do anything else with them, whereas now people are trying to generate little bits. And then when you see their shows, there are a load of little bits stuck together. They don't often... And in fact, some of the theatre managers have been saying this to me on this tour. They go, that was really refreshing to see a finished work because we get these people coming in. it's just lots of bits there's lots of bits for 50 minutes and then it stops you know so but that is from the past it's not going to be the way that people write comedy in the future is a kind of little blip because people are generating those little bits people see them in little bits so i think the idea of the comedian as a auteur as the author of their own thing it's probably not as important to people as it used to be but it was important to me and it made me feel One thing I share with the character of Stuart Lee is I'm a kind of intellectual snob and I think I wanted to feel that I was working in a valid art form.

1:07:27That's why I ended up going to the southwest of America, to the deserts, and trying to see the Native American clowns in Taos or the Hopi Reservation because I wanted to see comedy that had a purpose and a function and was on some level sacred. I think it was important to me to feel that I was in some kind of tradition that was worthwhile as I'd become so disillusioned. So that's why being a writer part of it was important to me, I think. But whatever other people want to do, it's up to them, really. I'm not the police. How's your health? A lot better than it was. I've been on high blood pressure medication for about 10 years.

1:08:15What's that all about? I don't know Bad diet in the 90s Bad diet in the 90s I never sleep before 4 in the morning Because I've spent so much time on stage That my adrenaline levels are all wrong I've lost about 3 stone in the last couple of years You're looking good Well a lot of it is from doing your werewolf every night Because I run around in that costume for an hour I watched your Robert Lloyd documentary And you look like a garden gnome That was me at my absolute worst Of health wise and also It's not a bad look by the way Yeah, yeah. You could be in Middle Earth. That film was at the Margate Film Festival on Sunday and I watched it again.

1:08:49I thought, wow, yeah. A documentary about an obscure... Birmingham punk band. Birmingham punk band leader called Robert Lloyd. Robert Lloyd, yeah. He was sort of a less successful Mark E. Smith. That's exactly what he was, yeah. But, yeah, I watched that again and I realised what a low ebb I was at at the point of doing that. I mean, look, another thing that I did, and I'll say this, because, you know, over the sort of 15 years that I was doing Comedy Vehicle, I mean, I wrote about 20 hours of stand-up of a high quality. I can see when I watch those shows how tired I am, you know. And I think my life, relationships and health really suffered during that period of producing all that work while the opportunity was there and being on the road all the time.

1:09:43I'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's all. That window has collapsed. Well, they won't do it on iPlayer, but they'll do it on YouTube, won't they? Yeah, but it'd 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 or my double act partner.

1:10:24A 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, but they sort of hate me as well and think 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.

1:11:06and 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 he could actually he could film a show in a theatre with no one there that's not quite fair because he does do crowd work yeah but okay but without the crowd work you could kind of do it look a famous comedian was recording a video at the Hammersmith Apollo, and there was a transport strike. But most of the audience couldn't get there. So they filmed it with no people, and I'm not telling you who that was.

1:11:46And then they cut the audience responses in. From a different show, a different night? Probably, and it made no difference.

1:11:58I feel like you're riding high at the moment, though. What kind of spaces are you filling? Well, I've got hearing aids, as you can see, and so I could do bigger rooms. The biggest rooms I do are the 3 ,500-seater Edinburgh Theatre, the same size in Glasgow, and I do those two or three times each on this tour. 3 ,500? Yeah, but I also do 500-seaters. I basically will do between 200 ,000 and a quarter of a million people on each tour. but I will do it in manageable amounts which is why I end up being on the road for so long. You wouldn't really want to do the O2, like one of these 12 ,000 seats?

1:12:41Well, one of my ideas is to do a stadium tour and to double down on all the things that are bad about it. For example, in the early days of spoken word in those kind of venues, before sound was digital, it would sometimes take longer to get to the speakers in different parts of the room so things were out of sync. So I'm wondering about exaggerating that so that different parts of the room are getting the speech later, significantly later. Oh, my God, that sounds like a disaster. And then, you know, they film them, don't they, the comedians, and project them. So I'd like to have on stage a little grasshopper or something with a mic stand in a glass tank, and you film that and project that, and I do with a voice or something to make it.

1:13:28And you wouldn't see you at all? Well, you might do later, or me to be on stage, but in a motion capture suit, right? Like Gollum has in Lord of the Rings, the actor. So that on the screen is a younger version of me, right? That's interesting. Yeah, and also to have... Or it could be Jimmy Carr. Or it could be Jimmy Carr, yeah. And also in stadium gigs, arena gigs, people are always wandering in and out, aren't they? They never can concentrate. They go to the bar, they do piss all the time. To have loads of people just on the move all the time through it. and then to have people selling things because another awful thing about those kind of shows is those kind of acts often have insanely overpriced merchandise and to rip off the working classes that go to those kind of venues, to have really aggressive selling of absolutely shit things in the aisles all the way through it.

1:14:15So to sort of take the arena gig and amplify all of its worst aspects and have a horrible night, I think, could be really funny. It sounds like an art piece. Yeah. Well, what's wrong with that? Yeah. Yeah. Down the line, I might do that. What? You stern face you made at me. No, no. I feel like I've taken a lot of your time. It's all right. I've got loads. What am I doing today? Nothing. Are you all right? Yeah. I've got a cycle to Bethnal Green. I've never seen Daniel Kitson. Does he still perform? Oh, yeah. You've said he's the best stand-up you've ever seen. Yeah, but Kitson really is. Is he still performing?

1:14:52Yes, he is. And he turns over a variety of different types of work. And what's interesting about him... Never does TV. No, he doesn't even like being filmed particularly for anything or documented in any way, which I understand. But he sort of... He did a show in Edinburgh a couple of years ago where everyone that came in was given a script and a number and he was in a dialogue with the entire audience and everyone had their line. It's just... It was so fantastic. It was like an act of magic, you know. At the end, everyone was breathless to have been through this thing. Incredible. See, here you are.

1:15:36You're saying that I, you know, that I don't, that I slag off comedians. At least three times during talking to you, I've been almost moved to tears by memory of the brilliance of a thing. So, I mean, it's just a... That one really affected you. Oh, God, yeah. It's just superb. And the silly sod, you know. He just does it 40 times himself, doesn't film it, he'll never hear of it again. It's the kind of thing, you could give it to Keanu Reeves and he would do it on Broadway for 10 years and everyone would think he was a... You could give someone that idea, that script, and they could do it. Slightly random pot shot at Keanu Reeves.

1:16:11I like Keanu Reeves, I'm just saying. I just thought of him. Hard to imagine him doing a kitchen routine for 10 years on Broadway. I know, yeah, he wouldn't do that. Six months then. Alan Bennett said of you, do you know this one? Yeah. He's fearless, undeterred by an audience's failure to respond. Even welcoming, I'm jumping off the impression, even welcoming it so that you can analyse it, tracking down the missing laugh until the audience laughs at itself. It's austere stuff. Yeah, I love the fact that he totally got it, Alan Bennett, and he's the best person that's ever written about me. He's the JL, this is the last bit of the quote, he's the JL Austin of what is now a rather sloppy profession.

1:16:56Yeah, well, it's great. I had to look up JL Austin. Yeah. Do you know who that is? Yeah, I did. In fact, I did a routine about exactly that, about JL Austin and the other linguistic philosophers. He's a linguistic philosopher? Yeah. I looked him up, I couldn't really understand what he was on about. But Alan Bennett is, you know, I've been really, really lucky with some of the people that I've met. I'm so glad that I met him and that he liked the work. I'd like to just reflect on the strangeness of the compliment that Alan Bennett gave you, though. It's austere stuff. For comedy, austere seems as strange.

1:17:33Well, adjective, I mean, I get it. I think he means it's theoretically rigorous. Yeah. Right? You know, I occupy a position and I hold on to it and I don't compromise that position just to get laughs. you know isn't that weird just to get laughs as though that would be beneath the dignity of a comedian to go for laughs well it's easy to get laughs is it? yeah once you work it out it's just little tricks little linguistic tricks and attitudes and moves sometimes you can't get laughs you do jokes but you sort of do them either grudgingly or you do them in order to notice that you're doing them and that they're beneath you I kind of know how to get laughs now after all this time I didn't when I started out The trick is, every show I like to put something in that people wouldn't normally have seen.

1:18:24Stand-up can be a great Trojan horse for smuggling in things from art that a normal person wouldn't want to see, or wouldn't think they'd want to see. Like in the Snowflake Tornado show, I basically did 10 minutes of free jazz vocal improvisation as an impression of Ricky Gervais saying the unsayable. so I exposed people to kind of an avant-garde technique but under the cover of it being an impression of someone. And if they said, well, I like the show except that bit was a bit boring. Yeah, they might say that, yeah. And then what would you think about that? Well, for every person that says that, there's someone that would say it's the funniest thing they'd ever seen.

1:19:02That's the thing about the extreme stuff is it's either the people's favourite bit or they hate it. But I think they kind of come along expecting there to be a bit they can't stand. And then some of the bits they can't stand, Suddenly, five minutes in, they find it the funniest thing. We've all had that, haven't we? You hate something and then it clicks for you and you think it's great, you know? And I think that's where I've ended up. I'm working in a populist genre that has rules and it's supposed to be people's night out. It's supposed to be the fun thing they do. But it's flexible enough that you can do high art in it.

1:19:41You can do politics and you can do all sorts of things in it and they don't always notice that they've had that happen to them. And I think that I've not really begun to get where I can get with it. And I think it gets funnier as you get older because it's unexpected that a person in their 60s or 70s would still be pushing forwards like that. He who is not busy being born is busy dying. Yeah. Quoth Dylan. Quoth Dylan. you reference in basically the possibility of a diagnosis being on the autistic spectrum yeah I mean I kind of regret having mentioned that because it was the doctor it's a good bit though well the doctor said it he did the spot test where they do 40 questions and then he said you can either go on an NHS waiting list or get it done yourself and I thought well I don't really need to it doesn't make any difference, it's too late it's been quite interesting reading about it but why I regret having said it is it looks like you're trying to jump on that ship.

1:20:46It's a kind of thing now, isn't it? And I don't really want to get caught up in it. But I was on a helpline to Microsoft the other day and the man actually suggested, he said, after an hour, he said to me, we do have a special helpline for people with disabilities or who are perhaps neurodiverse, if you would like to call that. That, to me, that's a better diagnosis than the NHS. He was clearly been trained at how to broach this subject very diplomatically. It really made me laugh. I told my son he was laughing his head off. So you haven't found the idea of you being on the spectrum especially helpful?

1:21:27I found it helpful. You have? I found it helpful to understand how I've annoyed lots of people without intending to. Do you feel like you have annoyed a lot of people? Yeah, in retrospect, yeah. And also why it's difficult for people to live with me because I have systems, you know. What kind of systems? Well, systems for organising things, you know, that are... my sister's around at the weekend and my one of them's boyfriends started talking about the highest pub in Britain in England I went oh that's on the front of the third album by Backdoor the early 70s British jazz rock band and I went and got it and there's thousands of records in my room and my sister said how did you find that in five seconds I said British jazz it's in the British jazz section under B you know I know where I have systems and That's almost like a cliche of kind of garage man, isn't it?

1:22:28Yeah, but also... And immediately my mind was, what? So you alphabetised your CDs? Yeah. But I wondered if it went further than that. Well, it's also this, right? Which is, Michael McIntyre is very good at what he does. And his act, and the act of a lot of comedians, is we all do this, don't we? We do this, I do this, you do this, we all do this thing. And everyone goes, yeah, I do that. Yeah, his famous bit was the messy drawer, wasn't it? The man drawer. The man drawer, wasn't it? My act is, I do this and you don't. Why are you all like that? You're all wrong. I understand this. Why don't you understand it?

1:23:05That's what it's like. People like that think they don't understand why the world isn't moral. They don't understand why it's not logical. They don't understand why it doesn't make sense. They don't understand people's feelings. Who are you talking about now? Me. Stuart Lee, the character. and people that are told that they've got these conditions. And it's hard for them. Greta Thunberg. Yeah, but that's why when she sees Trump, she doesn't see the President of the United States, she sees a man who doesn't understand climate change and is lying. They just call it out. What about you? Make it about you.

1:23:44Well, I think that if I were to follow this up with a diagnosis properly, it kind of doesn't matter really because just reading about those ways of looking at the world, I recognise it and I think it's actually given me an angle in stand-up. It's given me a lot of problems in life but that's probably why I like being on stage most of all because when I'm on stage I don't have to be on the phone to Microsoft or talk to people. Yeah, negotiate intimate human relationships. Yeah, or anything. There's a great Australian songwriter, Dave Graney, who's got a song, Rock and Roll is Where I Hide. I completely get that.

1:24:32Again, I've talked to you, I've said, oh, I do all these smaller venues because it's about size and maybe I just like having to work more. I think so. Yeah. You're up there hiding. Yeah. Isn't that wild? I think we're good, you know, we've been going a long, But, you know, I do want to say one thing, though, which is it's striking, and you've said this, and I wish I'd seen the show, but I will see it. I guarantee it. There's two weeks at Ali Pali in the theatre at Alexandra Palace in London in February. Weekends have gone a lot, but the weekdays are still there if anyone wants to go. And it'll be great in there because it's an old gothic-y looking building and it'll really suit the horror aspect of the show.

1:25:07But you've said that actually the funniest part is probably the bit where you do the reactionary Netflix comedy stuff as a werewolf. Well, this was a quote from your interview with Krishnan Guru Murthy. Oh, yeah. It's such a surprise that the nasty reactionary Netflix bit is kind of the best bit of the topical stuff. Something is clearly attractive about callousness and cruelty. Yeah. At this point in history, although I think you could take out at this point in history, but in general, right? The bullies at my school were the funniest people. If we're to believe that nearly 30 people that have described Farage's behaviour at school.

1:25:46He's occupying two positions simultaneously. First of all, he says he doesn't remember it and he denies it happens. And then he says it was just banter. It was banter. I don't think there is such a thing as harmless banter. Certainly not outside the codifying effects of a theatre space or of a close group of friends can sometimes be callous to each other. In a way that's enormously liberating, actually, and bonding. And some comedians can create that atmosphere in a room where the audience feel like they're in on it. Sadovitz can do that sometimes. Jerry Sadovitz, the Scottish comedian. Not always.

1:26:29And in fact, it's more difficult for him now because things get decontextualised. You know, he's never filmed. He never has allowed himself to be filmed. And in fact, there was an allegation that some of the workers at an Edinburgh venue found his material offensive and he was cancelled for them. Yeah, well, I think what happened there, and difficult, because I don't really like to talk about shows that I didn't see, you know. But Sadovitz started in the 80s when there was a liberal orthodoxy and he took a position against it for comic effect. He took a position against everything for Comic-Con.

1:27:04And his famous line was to go out and open with, Nelson Mandela, what a cunt. You lend some people a fiver and you never see them again. What's different now? Which is challenging. His other one, because he was half Jewish, half Scottish, wasn't he? He says, my Scottish half buys drinks that my Jewish half won't pay for them. Yeah, he's allowed, isn't he? But I think the difference is now that if he's doing racist material about hating immigrants, he's doing it against a backdrop where that's a mainstream political position now. So it's sort of that material he was doing about Islam, which I didn't see, would probably have read differently to young Muslim men who perhaps come from a new into the country and weren't aware of the history of Sadovitz's position as opposed to in opposition to an 80s liberal consensus.

1:28:01so it's a difficult thing I've never seen him but he's got in pictures strange insectile almost homeless presentation and a perpetually bleeding scab on his nose which has led for since I've known him in the 80s I used to be a support act and it was a fascinating time then he stopped speaking to me for some reason I don't really know why he wouldn't speak to me if we were in the same venue and he also asked me to stop going to see him because he said that it's not you he said 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 have you got 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 it doesn't I'll go.

1:28:59And then the last time I saw him... That must have been quite emotional. Yeah. I hope he's all right. The last time I saw him, my son was about 12, 13. He was going to a party in Finchley. And I said, oh, I used to come here a lot because Sadovitz used to live with his mother in a council flat here. But I haven't seen him for 10 years. He's coming up the escalator. Stop it. Like you say his name. Wow. Coming up the escalator. I went, when that's in there? Luke goes, that's a guy I was just talking about. I was coming up the escalator, he was going down it, talking about, isn't it amazing? Why does it say ear on your hand?

1:29:37Because this morning, why does it say ear on your hand? Because I had to remember to go to the hearing specialist this morning. Ear on one and ears on the other. Why on both? It gives me twice the chance of being reminded. And you had to do what? Go to hearing specialist at 9 o 'clock this morning. Did you? To get them what? Rinsed out? Well, and to have my hearing aids checked up on, because I've got these ones that are calibrated to how bad your hearing has got. If it's got worse, then they change them. What's behind that? I always assumed it would have been noise damage due to having lived a reckless life.

1:30:16But when I finally went to the NHS about it, the curve showed that it was just progressive deterioration and there were no spikes of damage. And in fact, the first time I ever met my father, anyone that's ever heard the interview would have heard this, the first thing I noticed about him was that he had hearing aids. Your birth father? Yeah, yeah. And the first thing I said to him was, oh, look, you've got hearing aids. And the first thing he said to me was, yes, everyone in your family goes deaf and you will as well. Really? So there you are. That was the great inheritance that I had. All I inherited from him was deafness.

1:30:52I was not hearing as much as I wanted in the rooms. I never thought anything of it, but it always seemed to me that people on the far left were particularly bad at laughing. And actually that's just where there's a problem in that side for that. Cochlear. Yeah. Isn't that funny? So everything, that's a good thing about stand-up, is everyone's problems should be able to become an advantage. You know, everything that's difficult for you, you should be able to weaponise it in some way. Thanks for coming by, Stu. I think we cover a lot of ground. I mean, I could keep going, but Millie's got to edit this thing and it probably...

1:31:29How are you feeling about it being on Spotify? Fine. You sure? Done it now.

1:31:51So, what a great chat, I have to say that. but it was and I yes I went and saw Stuart's show it was an odd one because I got the day wrong so I'd been comped for like a Friday and then for whatever there was I got the wrong not for the first time the wrong date and I turned up on a Wednesday had trouble finding the right door and my name wasn't on the door and then I just sort of they look they it was like there's a very confused elderly Louis Theroux at the door we better just find him a seat anyway and what it really was I totally recommend it if you're a 55 year old irrelevant cringe old man then you are you know who sort of still feels like a bit of a holdover from his student you know sort of WOMAD era granola munching why can't we all just get along actually that isn't fully me but I have part of that in me and I really loved his willingness to do what?

1:32:54Tell funny jokes and entertain the audience. Since taping, I've released my own related piece of work called Louis Theroux, Inside the Manosphere, exploring the same thing of what is our responsibility to entertain versus the urge to, I guess, uplift or provide insight to cultivate our good side as well as recognise the darker sides of our personalities. That's on Netflix. Yes, I'm plugging myself. That sounds a bit obscene. There are still tickets available across the UK for Stuart's show throughout the rest of 2026, and check out his website for more info. Legal note, we spoke about the allegations that reform leader Nigel Farage made racist comments to his peers while attending Dulwich College during the late 70s, early 80s.

1:33:48Farage has denied the allegations made against him, but in a BBC documentary with Farage from last month, he said, quote, if teenage boys together in an all-boys school haven't been brutal in some ways in the late 1970s, I'd be very, very surprised. No, no, no, no, no. That was me at the end. One of his contemporaries called it a non-pology. No, no, no. That's all I've got on Farage. That's it for this week. Oh, apart from the credits. The producer was Millie Chu. The assistant producer was Hugh Sheehan. The production manager was Francesca Bassett. The music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira.

1:34:28The executive producer was Aaron Fellows. This is a Mindhouse Studios production for Spotify.

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