Somebody was complaining about how the management had fucked up booking one of his regular corporate gigs for him. The fee he had lost was more than I would hope to earn in a year.*

* Six months later I was in Nottingham, doing a benefit to raise funds for Daryl Martin, an enterprising local promoter whom all comedians feel duty-bound to come together and help whenever possible. I went out for a curry afterwards with Daniel Kitson and Sean Lock. Kitson managed to escape the Death Star Light Ent tractor beam of the Perrier Award he inadvertently won in 2001 by leaving his management, doing all his own admin through his own company and systematically carving out the cleverest and coolest audience in comedy, without ever doing interviews or television appearances of any kind. I asked him if he would consider being my manager, as my future plans consisted of just trying to copy his business practices anyway. He declined. Sean Lock, listening in mounting disbelief as he nibbled his naan, became furious with both of us, describing us as ‘two idiots wasting their time’. But I think he was irked anyway because I kept going on about his vagina-shaped-shit routine from 1990 all night, and asking him when he was going to do it again.

Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Chapter 5: 2005-7


Privately, the debate continues amongst comedians, ‘What is Daniel Kitson doing?’ Why, many wonder, does he do The Stand when he could do the big room at Assembly? Why does he insist on shaking off half the following he has established every couple of years by doing a sensitive story show? Why doesn’t he have a nice haircut – surely he could afford it now? But Kitson once told me that after his Perrier nomination, he was doing a run at the Soho theatre. Sitting in a toilet cubicle one night he overheard some of his audience standing at the urinals talking, didn’t like how they sounded, didn’t like them, and realised he would have to begin a process of refining his fan base.

Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Appendix II: English Hecklers in New Zealand