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41st Best Standup Ever!Guild Hall, Preston

By Chris Hopper in Lancaster Guardian Posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

There may be little point to Channel 4’s endless (and endlessly repeated) The 100 Best… shows but they have at least provided Stewart Lee – the man behind Jerry Springer: The Opera – with a title for his latest stand-up tour.

Lee is, he’s happy to tell you, the 41st best stand-up comedian of all time. He’s hardly the 41st most high profile comic in the world but this show – sold out last year when it debuted in Edinburgh – does give you some idea as to why he’s so respected.

It’s no surprise that Lee, who withstood howls of protest over the “blasphemous” Jerry Springer, borders on the political, but – and this is where so many “serious” comedians go wrong – he is hilarious too.

He may be highly rated by Channel 4 but his own mother thinks Tom O’Connor is funnier. And he may be one of the top 50 best comics of all time but (he says with some bitterness) the BBC tore up its contract for a six-show Lee series and he can’t even sell out his Guild Hall gig.

He’s no observational comic (thankfully) and the laughs here come from the sincerity and the humour he injects into stories.

In fact, Lee is best on satirical ground and one of the biggest – if most unexpected – laughs of the night comes from his take on the Ipswich deaths, currently the subject of a crown court trial. A Daily Mail columnist was appalled by some newspapers’ tendencies to refer to the victims as “women who worked as prostitutes” and not simply “prostitutes”. But to what lengths would he go, asks Lee, before suggesting the columnist might head to the victims’ graves in the dead of night to change their tombstones.

If it all sounds distasteful, then Lee is not for you. But he didn’t become the 41st best comic of all time by playing it safe.

Written by Chris Hopper in Lancaster Guardian on 20th February 2008. Filed Under: 41st Best Standup Ever!, Reviews
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