Self-billed ‘90s comedian’ and ‘41^st best stand up ever’– Stewart Lee – returned to Salford’s Lyric Theatre on Saturday afternoon with A Room with a Stew. His distant, arrogant, passive-aggressive onstage persona culminated in him declaring to the audience, “no one is equipped to review me”. This is because no one can fully understand the nuances of a performance of “high risk Brechtian theatre”. The routine consisted of half an hour of “Islamaphobic observational comedy” (in response to public demand), half an hour on urine, 45 minutes on UKIP, and finally, the Stewart Lee staple: the state of comedy. The state of comedy ‘bit’ was accompanied by the customary mental breakdown.

John Coltrane’s 15 minute avant-garde jazz interpretation of ‘My Favourite Things’ was played on repeat, and at full volume, in the half hour before Lee’s arrival. The show then began with a 15 minute introduction outlining the structure of the show and ridiculing two latecomers in the front row for buying their tickets on Gumtree for £80: “It’s not worth 80 quid, this. It’s barely even worth the 21 quid everyone else paid.”

Lee also displayed antipathy towards people bringing friends and lovers – an action that was seen to compromise audience quality. He described his ideal audience as one which responded to every joke with, “well, it’s a complex issue”, and one which had passed a history exam on arrival at the venue. As Lee stated in his TV series last year: “I’m not interested in laughs. I’m interested in creating a temporary liberal consensus that bursts on contact with air.”

As “the Lee Mack of cultural relativism”, Lee delivered his signature mix of Ted Chippington-style lowbrow and multifaceted highbrow. When north of the Watford Gap, Lee deliberately constructs an onstage persona of ‘social difference’ – in which the audience are comically treated with utter contempt. At the Lowry, his core following of “liberal Guardian readers” represented less the norm and more a diaspora. Furthermore, he suggested that all the young people present in the audience should leave, and return to their hobbies of Minecraft and bondage sex.

The show’s funniest moment came when the latecomers were asked to name an obscure country carrying no cultural stereotypes. The Gumtree customers chose Qatar – the choice was reluctantly accepted. Twenty minutes on his friend Lesley only recently discovering he was in fact Qatari followed. This was in spite of the fact that Lesley had participated in stereotypical Qatari traditions all his life – for example, setting fire to a puffin in a peddle bin, the ritual of pouring 19 month old beakers of urine while humming ‘Three Lions’, listening to Qatari radio under the bedclothes in the 1970s (this included Lee making goat noises for 5 continuous minutes), and nailing a fez to a llama’s head.

Harking back to his own satirical categorisation of satire as “anything with animals in it” in last year’s Comedy Vehicle, the hilarious UKIP routine revolved around his cat, named ‘Paul Nuttalls from the UKIPs’, and included 200 mini England flags and no toilet paper. Stew lives in multicultural Hackney – a London borough he describes as “like Jerusalem but more violent”. His three closest ‘neighbours’ are a 70 year old Rastafarian, an 85 year old Pakistani, and a 95 year old Jew – all of which were featured in the UKIP section.

After accusing comedy audiences (“like you people”) of murdering “all the dead comedians” due to inconsistent reactions to jokes, a heckler smugly suggested ‘Stew’ take his own life. Ten seconds of genuine anger from Lee followed.

Despite this moment of antagonism, A Room with a Stew was a hilarious and hugely entertaining show. I urge anyone reading this to wade through Stewart Lee’s brilliant back-catalogue and to tune in to Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Series 4, to be aired on BBC 2 early next year.

Published in The Mancunion