Dog Ear Feature – Interview with Stuart Goldsmith

Stuart Goldsmith is an award-winning comic, podcaster, and business speaker. We first became aware of Stuart after discovering the Comedian’s Comedian Podcast, which to date can boast of over fifteen million downloads. The ComComPod is not primarily a comedy podcast. Rather, it is about the craft of writing comedy. And has served to inspire several would-be-comedians to become working comics, some of whom have gone on to have successful careers in their own right. Stuart has spoken to over 350 comedians and consequently the podcast is one of the most respected among comedians themselves. In addition to Stuart’s work, interviewing other comics, he has forged his own comedy career which has roots in street performance and circus school, Stuart is an Edinburgh Fringe regular and featured across a number of international comedy festivals, including those in New Zealand and Melbourne

Stuart:

Thanks for having me. I was going to say I didn’t know if we were talking about poetry specifically. But I always like talking about comedy.

TBS:

We will touch on poetry, and as a fan of comedy I think there are some correlations and between the two arts. I am interested to hear your perspective on this. A good place to start, I think, is your relationship with literature, such as it is? Do you have a history of reading? A favourite children’s book perhaps. Or something else?

Stuart:

I feel like I read a lot as a teenager. Today, I suppose I feel a bit guilty about my relationship with literature because during the cultural upheaval moments of the last few years I have become painfully aware that everyone I read is a white man. Obviously, I’m a huge fan of Neil Gaiman. Obviously, I’m a huge fan of Terry Pratchett. I read lots of sci-fi as a kid, I used to read The Stainless-Steel Rat books, and I really enjoy tales of derring-do, thrillers effectively. But what I love about Neil Gaiman is that he seems to just kind of regard all of narrative as being there for him. Same with Alan Moore. Same with Terry Pratchett in a different way. But it just introduced me to so many stories and so many archetypes of story that I just get really excited about. I really have a particular thing for when you sense something archetypal arising from a story like, in a short story or a folktale, maybe something mythic, when the character would take an axe and swear to kill the first person that they see and then they walk down a tunnel, and at the end, there’s a mirror and those are the kind of things I’m rereading. I’m actually reading to my son at the moment. I’m reading the Br’er Rabbit stories or Enid Blyton’s versions of them, which don’t feel like the originals. But they do capture the tone very well. I love those mythic, trickster-oriented tales. And I think what Neil Gaiman does brilliantly is weave narrative together, piling story on top of story, so that you can enjoy it on several levels, you can enjoy the story element and the thriller element. But you also have that lovely mind-expanding quality of going, ‘Oh, there’s an entire world in here. Each made up of separate little pocket worlds.’ I think of the comics I’ve read most recently, probably Saga is the best example, by Brian K. Vaughan, in which again, the storytelling unfolds so quickly. I want character to be based on story. And this is why me and my wife can find very few films that we agree on, because she loves character to be suffused in a kind of feeling. Whereas I want, and this is this is the only literary allusion I’ve got, what David Mamet says about the fact that character is plot. So, when you’re an actor, for all your highfalutin ideas about ‘What does this mean? What would my character think about this?’ All you have to go on are the actions that your character takes, that’s who they are. I really enjoy plots that surprise me and that kind of rocket along. I suppose in saying all of that, I’m also trying to excuse what I see as a big failing of mine, which is that I don’t grapple with and I don’t engage with big, heavy, serious literature. And I think it is to my detriment, I just think that I didn’t, and it’s too hard to start now I’ve got two children. And I’ve spent all my time panicking.

TBS:

I think you’ve made some quite interesting points about the layering of story and intertextuality when you were discussing Pratchett and Gaiman, and that weighty literature. I’m particularly interested in this sort of age-old debate between elitism and populism. Part of our ethos here at The Broken Spine is about the democratisation of poetry, challenging and upsetting that canon, arguing that just because something is popular, doesn’t mean it isn’t of any worth. It certainly is and should be celebrated and given a platform. So, to ask you that question, and for you to come back and not say ‘Oh, well, I’ve read Austen; and I have read Jane Eyre.’ But to come back to me with those comics and for you to see them as literature. I think that is really important. Recently, we started a Twitch stream, which is interested in video gaming and viewing video gaming as literature. And today I am sat talking with you about comedy as art.

Stuart:

I’m a big believer in that, it’s one of my core principles I suppose that art can be both a tool to be used as well as be an artefact to be admired. And I love a broad understanding of what art is and the people to whom art is important. Just mentioning video games there, one of the best books I’ve ever read is the video game The Last of Us. It isn’t a book, but in terms of the depth of character and the depth of the construction of the plot… Yes, there are really exciting bits when you personally are playing as someone having to hide behind something like a zombie. Sure. But it genuinely reaches out and makes you feel something and it genuinely resonates. And it’s one of those things I think, wouldn’t it be amazing to go back to a time before I had enjoyed this and get to enjoy it all over again the first time? I expect those things are to be found in Austen and Dostoevsky. And those are the only two I can think of. But I feel like I don’t have the staying power. I wonder if it’s in the same way I find it extremely hard to watch black and white movies which infuriates people I know, but I can’t take the slow grinding pace and like get to the point. And that is even now reflected in my son who can’t watch a live action thing. Anything other than a cartoon moves too slowly for him. I don’t know if there’s some kind of cultural singularity approaching where everything is just one action beamed in a microsecond. And that’s all it is. But I’m not proud of the fact that I cannot or don’t really grapple with literature, I suppose I can. But I wonder where I am on that spectrum of kind of going, ‘Hey, definitely video games and comic books can be art.’ But I also think I should push myself a bit harder, because if you look at the Harry Potter books, right? If you’ve never read them, and you don’t know about (I don’t want to spoil anything), if you don’t know about the resolution of Snape, which I think is one of the best things in storytelling. That’s what I love! I love storytelling, not literature. If you don’t know about that, and you engage with it, that’s one of those things you’ll remember for the rest of your life, that feeling of grappling with that and realising the things that one realises in that narrative. It’s just an incredible piece of shadows on the wall of the cave storytelling. And I don’t know that things are necessarily better because they’re longer. But then, you know, I’m sure all of those moments that we love in the literature that we love, in the cultural artefacts that we love, I’m sure they are, if you’re capable of getting deeper and richer and more resonant kind of feelings. I was listening to the Boars, Gore, and Swords podcast today, talking about The Sopranos, which I have never seen (I’ve always been saving it for a rainy day) and they said, the thing about Tony Soprano is that he sees himself as a sad clown, but actually is incredibly vicious and always jokes at other people’s expense. And I did remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a lot more richness to a character. He sees himself. That’s a good point. Have any characters I have written or read do that? Do they see themselves in a way that is different to how I see them?’ Because that gives you a whole other level of stuff. And you probably only get that once you’re a couple of chapters deep into something verbose. And having said that, to bring it back to comedy, that’s one of the things I enjoy doing most on my podcast, challenging comedians on their preconceptions of themselves, whether it’s their real selves, or they’re the personas they’ve decided upon, the personas they’ve unearthed. I really love it when comics say, ‘Well, I’m like this.’ And I ask, ‘But are you because here’s the proof that I think something else?’

TBS:

You have said some interesting things about storytelling, which I suppose, without it  being too much of a heavy shift, akin to those of old oral traditions of storytelling which are akin to the poet performing, or the comedian performing now. The storyteller, the poet, the comedian, they all offer, as I see it, something of a skewed perspective. The question I’m working my way round to asking is, if the storyteller, the poet, the comedian, have that skewed perspective – does it follow then that the roles and responsibilities of those people have verisimilitude? That is the appearance of being true or real?

Stuart:

I think that I’m interested in the idea of the responsibilities of a comic because one of the things that excites me about comedy is that it is so democratised. It belongs to Michael McIntyre. And it belongs to me. And it belongs to my son, making up a funny name for something; or my two-year-old daughter this morning. We read the Br’er Rabbit story of Mr. Lyons’ soup, and she started shouting, ‘I pooed in the soup!’ But that’s comedy. It really made me laugh, and it made her laugh and that belongs to her. So, do we mean the responsibilities of people who are sort of assuming a mantle of responsibility? Saying, ‘Well, I am your truth telling sage’ in a way that Bill Hicks might have done, arguably. But people do not tend to do that quite so much these days. Comedy is very capitalist, really, it’s all about beer sales at the end of the day. Maybe it is not all about that, but it is partially about that. So, you would need to be a pretty highfalutin comic – and they do exist – to say, ‘I the artist, have responsibilities.’ I can expand that example. Me, my son, Johnny famous comic, my daughter, also memes. I’m obsessed with the idea of memes. And how memes are the pub jokes of today. Memes are a thing that belong to everybody in a way that I think stand-up comedy itself is hopelessly outdated. I mean, I love doing it. And it still works, but I can’t see it working forever. Because now everybody can just craft images and put things together. Who are these people that create memes and then give them to the world? They are sorted and selected by virality, or choice, or kind of sharing. I suppose I do not know that a comedian has any more responsibility than my daughter or any more responsibility than someone knocking up a meme and putting it out there. Because it is simply on one level, at least, it is simply the amoral smashing together of ideas. This thing and this thing don’t fit, but we smash them together and it tickles that kind of crazy reaction out of us. Now, I think to assume there is some responsibility involved… Well, yes, the individual can go, ‘I am an artist, and it’s my job to make people…’ I’m going to reference Tom Parry here from Pappy’s Fun Club. I’m not suggesting he’s a pretentious artist at all, far from it. But I remember him saying to me, ‘The problem is a lot of comedians today need they think that their job is to make people laugh and think, and it isn’t. Our job is to make people laugh and feel.’ So, that is a kind of a responsibility. Do poets feel responsibility? I mean, look at political comedians. I mean, Mark Thomas is still working, he was the big political comedian when I was a teenager; he is a big part of the reason I could never vote conservative, because I’ve just kind of grew up on a diet of his worldview. Even then, I don’t know that he would suggest he has a responsibility to create comedy in a certain way, or to make art in a certain way. I think he’s just doing what appeals to him, I guess.

TBS:

The Mark Thomas example that you gave is quite pertinent to me personally, because I know that I grew up having my moral compass shaped by bands, like The Specials or by artists like Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan and that was my introduction to poetry as well. I was quite strange child who would carry around lyric books, remember them from CDs, in my school pocket, even at primary school. I suppose the question was more, does that weigh on you? Rather than do you do it to that end?

Stuart:

It doesn’t. It doesn’t. I feel responsibility to myself. I feel responsibility to my idea of being a successful artist. But I don’t feel a kind of responsibility, I don’t feel that I… Do I? I don’t know. That’s a good question. The thing is, I think to be like an artist kind of comic, you have to be really unreasonable. You have to really not mind upsetting people. And I care too much about upsetting people. I had a bit of material in a show I released on Spotify and someone got in touch with me; a listener, a fan sent me a private message saying, ‘I was listening to that album with my friend who is trans and we heard this bit and we thought, ‘That’s incredibly transphobic.’ I was like, ‘What?’ That’s important to me personally and I also want to engage with that. So, I said, ‘Well, which bit?’ I listened back to it. And I went, I think they’ve misunderstood I was doing a joke about the staff in Wagamama, and how they all look like incredible sort of polysexual aliens, and without wanting to go back over the bit and reopen a can of worms, I said something that kind of dehumanised the staff, because the line I was trying to draw was that they were like an alien. And the person who was upset by it, had thought that I was suggesting that their gender was unclear, and that consequently, they were unhuman. And that is not what I meant at all. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, if you could take it like that, then someone else could take it like that.’ So, I took the album off all the platforms and edited that joke out, burnt it, and put it back on.

TBS:

Is that self-preservation?

Stuart:

Well, it’s partly self-preservation, because I’m very personally affected by this. I have a sleepless night about it, and I’m very anxious anyway. So, something like that. That’s a particular thing for me, the idea of disapproval. Now, that is a real trigger for my anxiety. And is part of the reason I’m not that good of an artist, I’m sure. I am too worried about not upsetting the status quo, but upsetting individuals. Now, a lot of people that consume culture can be frigging horrible people. If you say anything remotely political on Twitter, say, you will get a complete division between the ‘I believe in you.’ And the ‘Oh, here we fucking go…’ And you think who is this person? So, I tend to default to a kind of politeness. For example, in the Facebook group associated with my podcast, I do let people stay in there, even if I oppose their political views. But the rules are, you can’t come in there and call a comic shit. You have got to be polite. You can say, ‘I disagree with them and I find them disingenuous and I don’t believe them’ – you can say that. But don’t go in there and go ‘This bloke is a woke wanker’ you know? I end up defaulting to a position of, well, let’s just say the rules are you have to be polite in the hope that that will get rid of anyone who wants to be an arsehole. But I’m aware that that’s not really me staking my flag and saying, ‘I personally am left wing, and this is a left-wing group.’ It isn’t. It’s supposed to be a group for comedy fans, the listenership of my podcast. I make choices, whether they’re deliberate, or whether they’re accidental that reflect my own worldview. And I hope that my worldview is empathetic. I hope it’s kind. I hope it’s caring. I do not slag anyone off, but I’m aware that that in itself is kind of a self-preservation refuge, as much as it’s a policy for trying to be a good person.

TBS:

The idea of editing your yourself is one I struggle to grapple with. I am sure many other artists will struggle to grapple with. I quite often write what I call vignettes. If you are familiar with Edward Hopper, there’s lots of looking through windows and though letter boxes. Quite often I will start a poem with ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’ because that’s what the scene dictates, and I’m struggling to grapple with that, because I feel that perhaps I should be more representative in my work. So, that self-editing, does come into play. Do you feel similarly?

Stuart:

People like to sort of lazily say, that every joke has a victim – not every joke has a victim. But often there is the reversal of status in something or knocking down of it, you know, punching up or whatever. In truth, I’m often the victim in my own work, because if there is a victim in a joke, it has to be me. Partly because I am inherently risible. I have a wonderful life and I cannot seem to enjoy it. I am obsessed with how I’m seen… Like who am I? My life would be like the guy from the Platoon poster (that dates me) kneeling down, throwing his hands in the air, and going, ‘Who am I?’ I am just constantly having a crisis of self-identity, so I find that often I end up being the butt of the joke. My material that I am most excited about at the moment, is sort of head exploring material where I’m like, ‘Okay, here’s how I get angry in a queue if I’m forced to queue for a long time. Here is what I do.’ I’m the butt of the joke. I don’t necessarily lose the encounter. But I hate to go ‘These people piss me off! I can’t stand these people!’ Because I worry that those people will be upset – I’m this awful equivocator. I put myself in mind of a sort of, if not benevolent, at least a kind of emotionally neutral version of, well, there’s good people and bad people on both sides… No! There is a right and a wrong for sure. But I am just not the kind of abrasive, attacking comic who likes to trade in that, you know? Someone tweeted yesterday about… No, I won’t get into that. See, I will not even get into that. If you’re familiar with my podcast, I want to be a platform, I want to choose people who I think are good and benevolent, right? And wonderful artists who I can learn from and I want to give them a platform, I am not the guy to do a takedown. I’m just not that guy.

TBS:

Does comedy have to be presented as truth?

Stuart:

I think so, there is a type of joke I write where halfway through the writing I’ll be like, ‘This is all well and good, but who cares?’ I cannot help but approach comedy as if there is this rapacious void that I have to fill. I’m sure some people think ‘I feel so strongly about XYZ so I’m going to write a show about it.’ Whereas I feel I have to write a show, so what can I talk about? That is often the starting point. But when I’m proud of myself, I write a show to solve a problem. I was freaking out about the possibility of becoming a dad and knowing that I would have to give up my very easy and pleasant lifestyle in order to become a dad like I have really adventurous, fun, globetrotting lifestyle, and I knew that I would want to have and would not want to be an adventurous, fun, globetrotting dad. I wanted to be settled somewhere… So, I wrote a show about that. I’ve written a show about the fact I’m good in a crisis but at no other time. I’ve written a show about the fact I was so desperate to be interesting and had to accept really that I am sort of a sheep in wolf’s clothing… Circus school and street performing was all born of a desire to prove that I was not just another boring guy, you know? I write shows to a) make money – they do say the most important thing in comedy is to get paid. I also write comedy to resist having to have a real job and then to make people laugh. But also, underneath those things to try and solve a problem for myself and often I think it does solve that problem… and part of the reason I’m going mad at the moment is that I just have lost my job along with everyone else – or converted and pivoted – and I’ve kept myself afloat very nicely and worked hard to do that… But what I haven’t done is turnover loads of new material and feel like a comedian. I feel, of comedy, that it is vocational; it makes sense of me. It completes me. As a comic it makes sense to me that I’m a comedian. When I became a street performer I felt like, ‘God, this is who I am! Thank Christ!’ It resolved that question and then I got bored of it and frustrated with it in certain ways and moved on and discovered comedy and went, ‘No, this is who I am!’ It satisfies me. You know, it’s been a year now where I haven’t… It’s not just the lack of live gigs and green rooms, the applause and laughter and stuff like that (I’ve been achieving variations of that online). It’s the making of stuff. It’s the needing to catch a thought that is spinning around my head and pin it down and pull it apart and turn it into a joke and then turn it into something valuable so that it stops buzzing around my head. At the moment I haven’t been able to do that properly for a good while. Loads of people have been doing great new material online, but I’ve chosen not to. I have chosen to have a break from it and now I’m realising it’s not just that my bank balance suffers if I don’t do comedy, it’s that I go mad, you know? My anxiety is just off the charts at the moment (just the personal charts), you know? I am not on any medication and I don’t have anything clinical as far as I’m aware, but I am really struggling and I think… Oh gosh! Yeah, I am really struggling at moment… And I think, I hope, because if it is true then there is a solution, that it’s because I haven’t been making enough stuff.

TBS:

So, we’re saying, or you’re saying that your art, your writing, your being on stage serves as catharsis for you?

Stuart:

Yeah, I’m sure it does, and it’s as selfish as anything. It’s like an extreme sport, you know? It’s like one of the things I enjoy most onstage is soon as I get a bit that definitely works (yeah, it’s fun to do it) but I get bored of that. So, I really like going out with nothing and just kind of free falling. I see myself on stage flapping about thinking ‘What else have I got?’ Those moments provide an extraordinary, sensory aliveness – that is the thing I get most out of it. I was talking about victims and making myself a victim… Sometimes I do not know how healthy it is. But I think, ultimately, it does help me get into the guts of something and realise I’ve been thinking that, you too? Laura Davis gave the most exquisite description of what comedy is. She said it’s like picking out a piece of yourself – like a bit of glass out of your heart – and holding it up to the light and saying to an audience, you too? That to me is what it’s about and I’m just missing it desperately.

TBS:

When you speak about going on stage without that safety net, and having to think of things in the moment – to what extent do you think that stand-up comedy is an example of composition in performance? Does it have correlations with professional wrestling or contemporary dance perhaps?

Stuart:

Well, the first thing I thought of was Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which I did badly for a short amount of time, has more to do with it as it’s real. The thing about professional wrestling, real as it is, and I have enormous amount of respect for it is… Yes, maybe it does have something to do with that too. But it’s also not the realness or unrealness of it that is the issue. With the tiny amount of BJJ that I’ve done, I know there is a real combat going on, you want to win and you can lose. Whereas with professional wrestling [express other opinions here and get emails from angry wrestling fans] but you know that it is to a certain extent predetermined. If you’re in on it and you’re watching it, that doesn’t matter, because you’re watching. But with comedy, it is real. They laugh or they do not laugh. It does feel combative… It feels genuine. You might crash; you might die; you might feel awful for days. So, the risk is really real. Now obviously in professional wrestling there are other risks. Sorry I went off on a tangent, you gave other examples…

TBS:

Contemporary dance? Or another situation where you are responding to things in real time?

Stuart:

It has parallels with all those things, but I think within comedy there are people who write perfect jokes and deliver them perfectly. There are people who improvise every word – Russell Hicks improvises every word and never uses the same approach twice. Ross Noble will, if he finds a bit works, take it apart again. I love that! I love that so much. It is everything, you know? Sarah Millican’s stuff where everything is finely tuned and a sort of bear trap disguised as a bunch of flowers. Or the iron will of Sindhu Vee, you know there are so many different versions of what comedy is. I love how broad of a church it is. I go through different stages when I think I’m like this or I think I’m like that. Like this version or like that version. For me, the name of the game has always been trying to take all of the obstacles away between an audience and me honestly being myself. Sometimes I feel like I achieve that in tiny little flashes. Your comic voice isn’t something you contrive. I think I have tried to contrive it thinking, ‘Oh well, I’ll try this.’ But actually, it’s a lifelong process of going ‘Who am I really?’ Such that when you see someone who has been doing it forever and has nailed that aspect of it – that thing when you see someone and you think ‘Oh that’s 100% who they are!’ Arthur Smith, or Boothby Graffoe, or someone like that… When just the way they are is funny. Bob Mills… Spencer Jones’s eye contact when he walks onstage and he just looks and we’re all like ‘Oh, there you are!’ That’s what gets me really excited – seeing the reality of someone. I’m far more interested in that than I am in a beautifully structured joke (although I like those as well) but I’d much rather someone is like, ‘Oh, you’re really you, saying this beautiful surprising satisfying thing.’ With reference Bob Mills and Spencer Jones, I’m talking, very specifically, of the access that they have found to a true element of their personality. They’re not doing an impression of a version of themselves. That’s real. That’s who they are to their friends. Spencer doesn’t necessarily behave in the pub as he does on stage with props and what have you. But the realness of that is stage persona is evident. That’s not someone’s idea of how they thought it would be funny to behave.

TBS:

So, do you feel that life is always a performance, beyond the stage? And might that be why we see amplified versions of the self on stage, more of an artist is, them turned up to eleven?

Stuart:

I’m sure that does happen. What was the question? To what extent is all of life a performance? That really makes me think of Jason Todd, ‘Of course, all life’s a game.’ Is all life or performance? No. I once did a clowning course with a guy called Marcelo Magne and he did a thing where he said, ‘You’re all naughty clowns. You’re all clowning students, and you’re all naughty clowns. I’m going to leave the room. No one’s allowed to say any bad words.’ And he walked out the room and everyone just started swearing. And he rushed back in and he looked at me and he said, ‘Who said naughty words? Was it you?’ And the object of the exercise, as I understand it, was to provoke out of oneself the most natural, honest reaction, because that is perhaps the funniest. And when he said, ‘Was it you?’ I went, ‘It was him.’ And everybody laughed, I didn’t contrive it. I didn’t think what would be funny, I just panicked and blamed the person nearest me. And that’s me. That is really who I am. It’s not that all life is a performance to a certain extent, it’s that the funniest thing is the human thing, the immediate human thing. Performance? Sure, in the sense that everyone is looking at it, but not necessarily performance in the sense that you’ve chosen or heightened the thing. It’s the most obvious human thing. You know, it’s someone’s instinctive reaction when they you know, that like, coming back to the internet and videos that do the rounds of some kid’s reaction to something, And it’s a funny face and you laugh. You’re laughing because it’s honest. That’s the honest reaction. That is why that works, they tap in you go, ‘Yes, I feel like that. I recognise that!’

TBS:

I think what you have said there taps into, what is perhaps my favourite joke, one that John Cooper Clarke told about a young boy who visits a circus and has an awful experience with the clowns and is sent back by his mother with his uncle who says something which I shan’t repeat here. That is a joke about truthfulness, which what you are alluding to, the real you, the honesty…

Stuart:

Yeah, I think so. I do not know why I care so much about that. It is probably down to this big crisis of identity is probably why I feel like, ‘Why does anyone do comedy?’ And I think for me, it’s just I’m just desperate to be liked. And that is a reason to motivate oneself and it also hamstrings me as a comic because my most immediate reaction to something might be the funniest. But, for me, it’s compartmentalised into the time when I’m on stage, I find it too risky to be to spurt out an angry tweet about something that’s happened and have a sort of funny, angry reaction to something because I just feel too observed. I feel like it’s unsafe. I feel like I need to protect myself. It’s that sensation, which I have particularly identified within me, is the sort of thing I need to fight against. And I don’t know whether I am ever going to be able to actually succeed because that does just come back to clowning. I think that the thing you need to be able to do as a clown is to shit your pants and admit it. And I just cannot ever see myself admitting that. I would lie to the death. Maybe there’s a joke there, ‘It was him that shat his pants!’ Maybe there’s humour to be found there. But I think the central ability to own one’s own failure like that… Eddie Izzard said the ‘job of a comedian is to get up there and tell people as honestly as possible, what a terrible person you are.’ I don’t know if that’s a quote or someone paraphrasing or whatever. I misunderstood that for a long time. But I think that is what they are potentially talking about is to be as honest as possible, to let everyone know, ‘It was me. I farted in the lift. It was me!’ and just inhabit that guy. I was having a conversation with my therapist the other day; about the reason I am often late for things. And she said ‘What would it feel like to admit that you were late?’ I just burst out laughing because I just had the idea of being late for something and just being able to say to someone, ‘I’m late, for no reason. I looked at the clock and I saw the minutes tick by and I just on some level decided to be late.’ I couldn’t say that to anyone, but it’s the truth. So, for me I’m edging closer and closer to that, ‘I farted in the lift’ – ‘I was late for no reason’ – ‘I’m a terrible person’. And for me, that is all about finding and somehow looking after this poor little boy version of me on the inside that is terrified people will think badly of him. I think a lot of people will have heard about the broken clown that gets therapy and isn’t funny anymore. But I feel like I’ll probably get funnier, the more I’m internally healed, because I’ll be more able to go ‘Yes, it was me.’

TBS:

One final question. What do you think the comedy reveals about the society that creates it?

Stuart:

What does comedy reveal about society? Would I be the same comic in Britain as I would if I grew up in Russia? People culturally laugh at different things, and I would come to different discoveries about myself. That would suggest that it [comedy] does reveal something about a society. Look, look, I’ll tell you what it reveals. Look at Twitter, just look at Twitter, the way people use Twitter; the way a thing happens in the news, and the virality that explodes around certain things. Bernie Sanders wearing mittens in a chair at the inauguration that became so popular because it spoke to someone on some level. They loved the idea of this cantankerous old man and everyone thought it was funny enough to share the fact that it was a huge event and he was just sat there in his mittens, he did not give a shit. It told us the truth about Bernie. So, that’s what it revealed to us. The reason it became popular as a joke was because it spoke to everyone and said that’s who that guy is. That is exactly what I was talking about. So, what it reveals about society is the honesty of reactions. When Derek Chauvin was convicted and found guilty on all three counts his face was on the front cover of the newspapers. The shock on his face when he looked up, and people on Twitter were slamming him. This was funny. It was funny that this murderer was not expected to be caught and was caught and that is its own darkness. That’s still humour. You go ‘Jesus!’ That’s a horrible visceral effect. But also, it’s being shared because it’s funny, even if it is funny in an aggressive kind of a way – we can laugh at this man because he’s revealed the truth of who he is. So, comedy itself, I still think is amoral, but hopefully, it will reveal more positive things than not.