Stewart Lee: 41st Best Stand-Up Ever | Concert Hall | Reading | Friday 12 October 2007

AF Harrold’s review

According to a poll voted for by the public and screened on Channel Four in April 2007 Stewart Lee is indeed, without a shadow of doubt and with no word of a lie or room for dissent the 41st Best Stand-Up Ever.

The support tonight comes from a man who is according to some the 62nd best stand-up in Germany, a title not so eagerly sought after.

Henning Wehn, the German Comedy Abassador, is an example of a peculiar species, the German comedian.

He makes great light of this fact, playing on German stereotypes of strictness and efficiency and memories of the Hitler Youth, but is at his very funniest on his long digressions about the history of, for example, cardigans or zips.

In these gleefully invented cheerfully presented deadpan passages brilliant invention and silliness go hand in hand in a manner reminiscent of Paul Merton at his best.
Stewart Lee’s Edinburgh show is really very funny, but more than this it is well told.

This is the most striking thing about Lee his patient delivery: he doesn’t hurry, doesn’t gabble, doesn’t chatter; he speaks at a calm pace, leaving room to think and room to listen, which in an echo chamber like the Concert Hall is refreshing. Without giving away too much of the content of the show it revolves around the Channel Four poll mentioned previously and his mother’s preference for Tom O’Connor as a stand-up to her son.

In fact, an alternative title for the show could have been ‘Coming To Terms With Tom O’Connor’.

Through passages against television, about Weight Watchers, against religion, about the Celebrity Big Brother racism row, about a cabaret called Pestival at an entomologists’ conference, against listening to the public opinion and a coruscating assault on the Daily Mail writer Richard Littlejohn, which within the space of a minute shifts from being daringly, name-callingly, playground funny to being a very dark, hushed moment of heart-chilling sadness.

And this is one of Lee’s skills, to be able to turn a joke into a piece of serious observation, without either being afraid of talking without a laugh for five minutes or losing his connection with the audience, trusting them enough to go with him, and then at the most unexpected moment to become a comedian again, telling jokes.

The show ends on another daringly quiet moment, with Lee (explicably, though we shan’t say why here, in case you decided to see this highly recommended show) standing still and silent for several minutes, without fear and without shame (silence, of course, being both shaming and terrifying to most comedians) until the final black out.

A bravura piece of writing, which is deceptive in its simplicity, but filled with bravery, compassion, intelligence and comedy.

Matt Dyson’s review

Stuart Lee’s latest show was originally called ‘March Of The Mallards’ – based on the lurid, sexual activity of mallards. It was to be a defiant repose to Fundamentalist Christians, who have being using March Of The Penguin as a frost bitten, brain fact that penguins, and therefore nature is inherently monogamous.

Mother Nature, they say, is a puritanical, Victorian prude.

‘March of The Mallards’ was to use the brutal group mating activity these airborne, aquatic sex pests to prove that nature is , in fact , evil. The problem is, there is nothing else remotely funny about the Mallard.

It is this contempt for ill thought out ideas and stubborn refusal to let go, whether it is funny or not, which is the beating heart of Lee’s stand up. It is also what makes him so compellingly funny.

You see, he is, according a recent Channel 4 poll, the ’41st Best Stand Up Of All Time’. In this tour, Lee locks in on the dubious accolade like a pair of concrete boots to plunge into the depths of public stupidity and ridicule our national bad taste.
It is a show in which Tom O’ Connor is a theme. That’s right, him from Crosswits. A show where the ‘values’ of The Car Phone Warehouse are discussed alongside Marx and Buddha. And where the lumpen ignorance of lazy observational comedians are ridiculed through the analogy of insects.
Dressed as a grass hopper performing stand up to a room of leading etymologists might seem like a doomed pursuit but is it anymore fool hardy than voting Del Boy’s fall in Only Fools and Horses as the funniest moment of all time? Trigger might have pulled a face but gravity as a 21st century comic device, shouldn’t complete with Chris Morris’ Brass Eye.
Battling logic through bewilderment, Lee campaigns for a revote.