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41st Best Standup Ever!Stewart Lee – Preston Guild Hall

Stewart Lee is a very clever but very disappointed man.

By Judith Dornan in LANCASHIRE EVENING POST Posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Stewart Lee is a very clever but very disappointed man.

He rails bitterly against the world, against the reviewers that have gone from describing him as a “crumpled Morrissey” to a “squashed Albert Finney”, “against the parents who “think it’s a big joke” that he’s a comedian, against the invisible forces that make his life into a series of heroic failures.

It’s a humour where the observational breeds the surreal, a comedy of layers, weaving various central threads in and out of each other and revisiting them time and again.

There’s the strange half-plaudit of being named 41st Best Stand Up Comedian Ever in a Channel 4 poll, the fact that the funniest thing his mother has ever seen is cheeky Scouse Crosswits host Tom O’Connor telling a bad joke about sardines on a cruise ship and his hapless appearance at the entymologists conference “Pestival” doing stand up dressed as an insect.

He’s always pushed the boundaries of accepted comedy, experimenting with wordplay and mental imagery, questioning the essence of what we find funny and getting laughs with it.

Here he plays ever more recklessly with the rules, forcing your comfort zone by dropping the mike and roaming into the audience, ranting as if in the grip of a nervous breakdown, turning his back to stare out of the window and finally balancing a woollen giraffe on his head and staring mutely as they titter increasingly awkwardly.

It’s a portrait of a man and his disappointed hopes, a cerebral, but angry form of humour – and it’s in the hands of an expert.

Written by Judith Dornan in LANCASHIRE EVENING POST on 15th April 2008. Filed Under: 41st Best Standup Ever!, Reviews
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