Stewart Lee

 "The first time I was informed that I had copied Ricky Gervais was in 2003" -- Stewart Lee about Ricky Gervais

From Stewart Lee's "How I Escaped My Certain Fate - The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian" (2010)

On the back of the success of The Office, Ricky was suddenly able to do his first full-length solo stand-up shows, to large and enthusiastic audiences. It was drawn to my attention that he always praised me and Sean Lock in interviews, and cited us as his main inspirations. Ricky was preparing his second live tour, 2004’s Politics, when I drifted back onto the circuit. I hadn’t seen any of his stand-up.

The first time I was informed that I had copied Ricky Gervais was at The Amused Moose in Soho, sometime in late 2003 or early 2004. A mother and her daughter, who had enjoyed my set but never seen me before, said that I was ‘clearly very influenced by Ricky Gervais’, with the implication that they had rumbled me and I really ought to find my own shtick. Then it happened again two or three times. And then I started to wonder why Ricky was always praising me to the skies in interviews, and so I took up an offer of tickets to his new show at the Bloomsbury Theatre.

I sat there, dumbfounded. It wasn’t that Ricky was the same as me. He wasn’t. And I’m not saying he had copied me. There wasn’t a single line that exactly duplicated anything I’d ever done. But Ricky had the calmness, and the way of offering up contentious ideas as if they meant nothing and were merely idle thoughts, that I felt was a hallmark of my work, and which had always made it such a difficult fit for mainstream audiences at populist clubs. And there was enough coincidental overlap, in terms of tone and subjects I might cover – Aesop’s fables, a long routine on ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ – to mean that now Ricky was a big name, I could understand why the casual viewer would mistake me for an imitator of his approach.