CityLife

Stewart Lee: If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One

By Marissa Burgess

Stewart Lee
The Lowry
November 29, 2009

BEFORE the gig starts, a man in the row behind muses on the fact that you have to produce a whole new stand-up set when such a large amount of your material has gone into six half-hour episodes of the BBC show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

Though it was Lee’s first foray into TV for a number of years, it seems he’s never had much trouble coming up with new material. Not just new material, but quality stuff - full of incisive comment and beautifully realised every time.

Stepping out to introduce his support act, Lee takes the opportunity to make some self-deprecating comments about his first performance of the night (an extra show slotted in at 5pm when the 8pm one sold out), typically playing down just how good the second of the night was to be.

Then there were twenty minutes or so of the marvellously offbeat Canadian Tony Law, with such musings as why wolves and not squirrels tend to nurture feral human young in the wild.

After the kind of rock ‘n’ roll entrance of the type that "belongs to a much younger comedian", Lee’s latest show begins with the delightfully ridiculous tale of a spat he had in his favourite high street coffee chain.

Relating the incident leads to a pathos-imbued breakdown, when a funny noise gets a bigger laugh than a carefully constructed pirate joke (complete with a call back).

Playful

The 38-year-old comedian Frankie Boyle has added to Lee’s ennui with his devil-may-care comments about over-40 comics having lost their anger. The 41-year-old Lee finds himself mildly disappointed by this.

As ever with Lee, there’s plenty of intelligent self-reflexive humour on the nature of stand-up. There’s a lovely deconstruction of the young angry comics on Mock The Week and a deliberately prolonged observational piece of the type oft used by comedians ('I know I look like…’).

Already having attracted some misguided attention from aspects of the press with his Richard Hammond rant, it transpires that his thoughts on 'the Hamster' play around both with 'ironic', un-PC humour; and notions of ‘truth' in what people say in stand-up.

Lee’s performance is wonderfully nuanced too, largely deadpanning his way through; and occasionally letting a playful smirk slip then tripping off into the crowd in an (staged of course) unhinged moment.

He rounds off with a magnificent rant about plagiarism (a persistent problem that is notoriously difficult to prove in the stand-up community and something that Lee famously speaks out against) - this time suggesting that a ludicrously unlikely saying his granny used to spout had been poached by a TV advertising campaign.

Sheer, inspired brilliance.

Reviewed: Mon, 30 November, 2009

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