SUCH SMALL PORTIONS
Stewart Lee
with Alistair Barry and Andrew Maxwell

• Maxwell’s Full Mooners, The Comedy Store, London
• 29 March 2007
Lee all killer, despite the filler

The obvious problem with post-midnight comedy in a licensed Leicester square venue is that you can count on the place being packed with a largely undiscerning, inebriated horde. The night becomes as much about the filler as the acts. There was a D.H. Lawrence spoof – (a chance for two men with wobbling tummies to get naked, wrestle and leap about in the delighted crowd); a fumbling chap called Tim who blustered though (non) repartee with the compere, Andrew Maxwell; and a rousing song from resident warbler Lady Carol of the Moon, who outshone most

Luckily the acts themselves were worth the padding.
Stewart Lee likened performing at the Full Mooners to a game where "you don’t know the rules and you suspect it may be a trap". But of course, he knows the rules – all of them; sideways, backwards and inside out.
His strategy is simple and devastatingly effective: beautifully timed pauses, emphasis and judicious repetition: an endoscopy, a lubricated anus, and floral print nightgown. He also executed a lengthy hatchet job on Joe Pasquale for stealing other people’s jokes; never self righteous, just clever, cool and understated.
Lee sees the ridiculous, and points it out with unpretentious verve and while most of his material was Edinburgh 2005 verbatim, it didn’t really matter. His art is to make you laugh at what’s coming, and if you know what that is, then so much the better.

Maxwell promised the baying crowd that Alistair Barry was more sloshed than any of them, but Barry was still sharp enough to discourse on a litany of British themes - gun crime, tornadoes, Empire and pissed awkward sex - with just the right balance of energy, anger and charisma.
We don’t usually mention the compere, but since cape-wearing young Dubliner Andrew Maxwell spent so much of the night on stage, it should probably be noted that, while clutching a beer and howling at fellow pissed-up ‘full mooners’, he managed to trot out the usual cliches about inebriated weekends, the IRA, illegal African immigrants and nuns having orgasms.
Mary Fitzgerald