Stewart Lee has talked about the possibility of doing stadium stand-up shows one day, but in his own unique meta-comedy style.
In a wide-ranging in-depth podcast interview with Louis Theroux he talked about subjects ranging fromt Elon Musk and "Netflix comedians" to the current stand-up scene, singing the praises of Daniel Kitson in particular, and revealed his future tour ideas. At the moment his plan for his next show is for it to be about nationality. He is aiming to debut it before the next General Election in 2029.
But he also had some innovative ideas for a show after that, as he explained to Theroux.
The biggest rooms I do are with 3,500-seater, Edinburgh Theatre, the same size in Glasgow. And I do those two or three times each on this tour. 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."
"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, you know, 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 significantly later.."
"And they film them, so I'd like to have on stage a little, like, grasshopper or something with a mic stand in a glass tank, and you film that and project that, and I do it with a voice or something, like to make it. You might see me later, or for me to be instage but in a motion capture suit, like the actor who plays Gollum has in Lord of the Rings, so that on the screen is a younger version of me...Or it could be Jimmy Carr."
"And also, in stadium gigs, arena gigs, people are always wandering in and out on me. They never concentrate. They go to the bar, they do a piss all the time. So I'd have loads of people just on the move all the time through it. And then have people selling things. Because another awful thing about those kind of shows is those kind of acts often have insanely overpriced merchandise 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. So take the arena gig and amplify all of its worst aspects and have a horrible night. I think it could be really funny."
Theroux said: "It sounds like an art piece" to which Lee replied: "Yeah. Well, what's wrong with that?"
Listen to the full interview here and at other places you get your podcasts.
