Originally published on Panic Dots
There’s nothing quite like the toilets at a comedy club to fill you with abject disgust. While the urine soaked floor laps at my trainers I realise I don’t care; I’ve been a big fan of Stewart Lee’s since the days of Fist of Fun, so I would happily wade crotch deep through a WWI latrine just to catch him on stage.
As I look at the audience, it amazes me how much tweed there is on display, and I formulate a theory about Lee speaking to a generation that desperately wanted to rebel, but were pampered into submission by a sycophantic media and resigned to accept the path of mediocrity and suburban ennui set in stone for them since birth. Then somebody tells me it’s press night, and I feel like a bit of a dick. I’d be lying if I told you the guitar stand and rickety stool on stage didn’t fill me with a sense of dread. Surely he won’t have cause to use either of them? The front of house makes the two-minute call, and there’s still a queue at the bar. Bloody journalists.
The show is one of the most technically brilliant comedy sets I’ve had the pleasure to watch. Lee takes his deconstructionalist approach to comedy to the nth degree, signposting gags with visual cues, breaking down the elements of comedy until they’re stripped bare for all to see, giving the audience a post modern take on the classic stand up format. The show is also a big two fingers up to some of the critics who complained that he “doesn’t have any jokes”. Like a red rag to a bull, Lee inserts a number of truly awful gags into his set and tears through the repertoire of a legion of modern popular stand ups, really testing the audience’s knowledge of current comedy trends. While he doesn’t always mention the comics whose style he has decided to reduce to dust by analysis, he is a capable enough mimic, taking on the rhythms of speech, posture and, most important of all, subject matter, for the audience to know EXACTLY who he is talking about. His is not just a criticism of his contemporaries, but of us, the audience, for allowing these phoneys to become as popular as they are.
The audience is slightly unresponsive to a lot of Lee’s new material – at some points in the evening, only a third of the audience reacts. Lee uses this to his advantage, alienating the journalists who haven’t laughed, blaming them for the lack of atmosphere caused by their inability to understand his genius. If this sounds like a diva strop, it’s because that’s exactly how Lee is hoping to be perceived, and it’s these self conscious and completely purposeful tantrums that elicit the loudest laughs from the crowd. While they may not laugh at the right cues, the audience are definitely on his side.
t the end of the performance I mourn the fact that Stewart Lee isn’t as popular as he should be, but then I don’t think he’d be happy with the superstar status that’s afforded to people like Michael McIntyre. To quote the man himself: “If you didn’t laugh at that last bit, it’s not for you. Go and watch Jack Whitehall. Don’t ever come back”.
PS – he did end up using the guitar. And the rickety stool.