This piece originally appeared on the Leicester Comedy Festival blog here and is reproduced on Stewart's own website here.
Stewart Lee, true to deconstructive, postmodern form, opened his show at De Montfort Hall on the 12th of February by explaining exactly what he would be performing and why. I’m going to take a leaf out of Lee’s book and do the same. I’m writing a review of Stewart Lee’s A Room with a Stew, a stand-up tour in which Lee is refining material which will become BBC Two’s Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Series 4. It doesn’t make sense to write a review of a piece of work which is incomplete. At the same time, the words ‘work in progress’ don’t feature in the show’s title and the tour already has over one hundred dates announced. So what I am writing a review of is the live experience of seeing Stewart Lee, not a finished show.
Lee performed three of the half-hour sets which will make up an episode each of Comedy Vehicle. No one was safe from Lee’s intricate satire; the UKIPs, the Daily Mail, Mock the Week, Russell Brand, Roy Chubby Brown, Jim Davidsons, Lee Mack, and the audience all took a verbal beating. The biggest joke, however, was The Comedian Stewart Lee. As always, a lot of the underlying humour came from the arrogance and frustration of Lee’s onstage character. He also continued to use this device to have his cake and eat it: making self congratulatory statements about being reasonably priced, performing for longer, and being better than other comedians in the festival. To adopt Lee’s own rhetoric from his infamous Top Gear routine: it is a joke. But coincidentally, as well as it being a joke, it does also happen to be true.
The show bares all the hallmarks of Stewart Lee’s idiosyncratic style. The nationalism half hour reminds me of the relentless scatology of 90’s Comedian, but Lee isn’t rehashing old ideas, he’s expanding them and pushing them in different directions. His constant assertions that various bizarre phrases are common place sayings in his family, seem to be a knowing nod to the ‘100% Pear Cider’ routine from If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask. Perhaps this will overtake ‘[blank] has let himself go’ and ‘you want the moon on a stick’ as the closest thing Lee has to a catchphrase.
Despite being one man with a microphone, Lee’s shows are always theatrical. He doesn’t prance around the stage with the tireless energy of the Live at the Apollo comedians he mocks, but his performances are populated by many characters. The Comedian Stewart Lee is a character, and he fills the stage with his interpretation of the audience’s collective voice, his caricatures of observational comedians, the voices of critics, and at one point an entire graveyard of dead comedians. This last part was a response to the ‘tears of a clown’ rhetoric which has been repeatedly trotted out to explain the untimely deaths of comedians. Lee uses his subtle blend of truth and fiction to mock the lazy journalism behind this notion in a tense yet surreal breakdown midway through his urination routine.
Lee’s work is already thickly layered with irony and subtext, and even more layers are piled on by the fact that he’s performing something in a live situation which is ultimately intended for television. Lee masterfully juggles the various contexts and plays them off against each other through the medium of insults and deconstructive explanations. In fact, it’s a reminder of how important the audience are to Lee’s performances. Lee doesn’t talk with the audience that often, and when one man does attempt a dialogue it briefly derails proceedings. The audience’s responses to jokes, however; whether they pick up subtext and call-backs, and the speed at which they do it, shape Lee’s performance. Overtly it may seem like Lee simply insults every audience, be they live or TV viewers – but it’s not as simple as that. Lee specifically insults his various audiences in very precise ways. He adopts his squeaky, whining audience voice to constantly interrupt himself, before telling us: ‘that’s what you think, you with your Leicester Mercury inner monologues.’
After the three half-hour sets, we were treated to an optional encore which Lee repeatedly insisted the Leicester Mercury not describe as ‘a disappointing ending’ as it was all material he had written that week. I will say nothing more than that it wasn’t disappointing and it was interesting to feel the dynamic change once more. It felt, because the jokes were so new and weren’t part of the structure of the show yet, more like Lee was on the audience’s side and was having fun with them. It’ll be interesting to see how the perspective changes once more when the material reaches our television screens, embellished with Lee’s to-camera asides and cut together with conversations with Chris Morris.
Whereas many comedians spend the entirety of their shows attempting to curry favour with their audience, Lee spent two hours lambasting his. Lee, however, is the only comedian I’ve seen who, after two hours on stage, was sat in the foyer of De Montfort Hall: happy to talk to anyone and sign anything.