Stewart Lee once ‘sabotaged a gig’ at the Royal Albert Hall and ‘came to pieces’ after finishing set

A set at the Royal Albert Hall took a nasty turn for Stewart Lee, the comedian confirmed, when he “sabotaged” himself in the lead-up.

The veteran comic, who is set to continue his Stewart Lee vs. The Man Wulf show, confirmed a performance at the venue in 2007 had been such a massive misfire he “came to pieces” after coming off stage. Lee, speaking with Louis Theroux, shared the decisions leading up to the performance had been a misread of the room, and that he came across poorly to the audience attending the stand-up show. The show did not hit well with the audience, though one comedian backstage saw what Lee had been trying to do and found the experience side-splitting. Lee, however, suggested he had misinterpreted how his set would be received.

He told Theroux: “I once sabotaged a gig at the Royal Albert Hall because it’s what he [Stewart Lee comedy persona] would’ve done. I came out and all the other people had been picked up on a big screen at the back. And when I came out, the screen went off. I went, ‘Oh, they’ve turned that off’

“You know, ‘they’re not filming me. What’s going on now?’ My audience would’ve immediately started laughing, choosing to do that at the Royal Albert Hall. But they weren’t. They were thinking, who’s he? Those people, they didn’t know who I was. And I was lecturing them, I was going ‘can this be sorted out?’

“And it’s such a wrong thing to do at the Royal Albert Hall, complaining about 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 slagging everyone off. So I had to just dig down on it.”

Theroux probed how Lee reacted to the minimal response from the audience and whether he called them morons, to which the comedian confirmed he had suggested the audience were moronic, telling the podcast host: “[I] kept going.”

“Probably, yeah. I can’t remember. It was like I was above watching myself in this place. Objectively, it was bad comedy and 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 [stage persona] if he went there and did that.

“And then when I came off, Sean Walsh, God bless him, was on his knees laughing head off, because he understood the decision that I’d made to make something of it.

“Mortifying. Again, when I was on it was no problem. What I said about the feeling of utter safety. Because he would do that, so he did it. But when I came off, you know if you nearly have a car accident. Yeah. Came to pieces afterwards. It was terrible.”