Trivia / Stewart Lee

• Artist Disillusionment: He quit doing stand-up for a period between 2000-2004, having found himself gradually losing enthusiasm after playing rather dismal gigs in front of audiences who just didn't get what he was trying to do.
• Creator Breakdown: Parodied, all the time. "41st Best Standup" is deliberately based around him supposedly having one of these. To the point that he ends up standing in the audience yelling without a microphone about how he wasted his money on a insect costume for a TV pilot that wasn't picked up.
  • At the end of "Milder Comedian" he has a minor one over a pear cider advert.
  • "Carpet Remnant World" has him slowly descend into anguished desperation because his life is so mundane that it hasn't provided him with any material.
  • And yet again in season 4 of Comedy Vehicle where he blames the audience for the suicide of famous comedians. In one of the extras, he says he once did this set and got into a verbal fight with one of the audience and had to end the bit as he worried it would become violent.
• Creator Couple: Averted with his wife, Bridget Christie, who although a successful and respected comedian in her own right, does not work with him. They appear in parodic form in each other's work, she in his as a weird devout Catholic who makes him sleep on the toilet, he in hers as an unreconstructed male chauvinist pig who hates feminism. She lampshades this by referring to him in her comedy as "my fictional husband."^note He notes in his book How I Escaped My Certain Fate that when he was first going out with her, she witnessed an early version of his notorious "vomiting in the gaping anus of Christ" routine, and critiqued it on the grounds that Lee made Jesus submit to a whole load of horrible abuse as part of his critique of religious oppression, whereas Jesus would have willingly invited such abuse as part of his solidarity with the oppressed. Lee took this on board and rewrote the routine accordingly. Christie also has a credit in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle for "Monk joke", meaning her description in her own show A Bic for Her of Andrew Lloyd Webber as looking like "a monk in a wind tunnel".
• Doing It for the Art: He's an 'alternative' comedian in the old-school, literal sense of the word. A lot of his routines centre around making fun of and deconstructing more commercial and mainstream forms of comedy, and he's freely admitted that he'd much rather perform for a small venue of people who really get what he's trying to do rather than massive arenas and venues if it means he has to sell out his own interests.
• Money, Dear Boy: The reason for his string of Panel Game appearances in 2006 - something he has said he normally dislikes doing - was to pay for his wedding.
• Screwed by the Network: This Morning with Richard Not Judy was jostled around a bit and at one point the show was moved from its normal Friday slot to Thursday, only nobody at the BBC told anybody involved in the making of the show about it and the episode wasn't yet edited to be shown. So Lee and Co had to rush around to find an editing suite to get the show done in time.
  • Also there is the infamous failed BBC show. That was commissioned and given the green light for a pilot. Then the BBC had a change of heart and required the pilot first before the series would get commissioned. Before finally being rejected a year after being commissioned with no pilot filmed.