FROM THE TIMES, August 2005

**** The Times

I’VE BEEN doing stand-up for 17 years,” says Stewart Lee, “and I can tell when there is tension in the room.” There is indeed. Lee has long been one of the most skilful, stimulating comics in Britain — never more so than in last year’s exquisite comeback, a demolition job on the false imperatives of our sentimentalised society. This year, though, he has raised the stakes. Some people will clearly find it unacceptable. Others will delight in the free rein he has given himself. I found it a strikingly provocative, often extremely funny, slightly overambitious blend of the personal and the political.

The political first: Lee puts his personal woes in the context of the climate of extremism that led to the July 7 bombings. He compares the unachievable aims of al-Qaeda — the destruction of Western Judaeo-Christian civilisation — with the quainter, more gentlemanly bombers of yesteryear, the IRA: “Proper British terrorists. They didn’t want to be British, but they were.”

And those personal woes? A stomach that is eating itself. A career that is ostensibly fading. And, oh yes, the threats made against him by militant Christians after the BBC Two broadcast of Jerry Springer The Opera, the show he co-wrote and directed that depicted a gay Jesus in a nappy.

Hence the extended anecdote that dominates the latter half of the show. Lee, hiding out at his mum’s house, encounters Jesus — or is it merely his delusion of Jesus? — who then debases himself in order to alleviate the drunken suffering of Stewart Lee, former star of TV’s Fist of Fun.

The opening half is funnier. It nails the nonsense purveyed by gentler targets such as the comic Joe Pasquale or Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code. But Dan Brown leads to the Vatican — “I love Catholicism. It’s my favourite form of clandestine global evil” — and to the bloody-minded testing of limits that makes up the second half.

This may all sound earnest. Far from it: Lee’s dour, steady delivery belies one of the most playful spirits in comedy. His precision of language both highlights the muddle-headedness of his targets and creates gloriously vivid pictures.

The second half is in some ways a wrong turn, though. Lee could do more to bring out the personal sense of hurt that came with his hounding as a blasphemer. Without it, the bad-taste Jesus anecdote is too long to sustain the ideas — of freedom of expression, of the mutability of religious icons — that it supports. So sometimes, yes, it does seem a bit much. But, once again, Lee is out there pushing the form like nobody else. This is awkward but thrilling stuff.