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90s Comedian90s Comedian ★★★★

The Scotsman Posted on Saturday, August 13th, 2005

REVENGE, they say, is a dish best served cold. I have never seen a more cold, calculated, utterly fearless and totally brilliant in-show riposte to anything than the last 25 minutes of Stewart Lee’s set. Lee, having spent much of the year being threatened with everything from lawsuits to death; having seen any commercial viability of the brilliant Jerry Springer: the Opera destroyed by fundamentalist Christianity, red in tooth and claw; and having been comprehensively publicly demonised, is embracing that demon for one breathtaking half hour.

It is like watching Bruce Banner become the Incredible Hulk.
But quietly. With focus.

The material is ruthlessly, fabulously and cleverly blasphemous to a height wholly unscaled and a depth completely unplumbed.
It is exhilaratingly and wonderfully appalling. Lee is like an angry young man trapped in the body of a mature and hugely intelligent one.

That is a killer combination. He then wraps it up by brilliantly and irrefutably justifying everything he has just said. And adds a little belly-laugh as a coda. This is comedy as an ideologically lethal weapon, in the hands of a crack shot. That’s not all you get in the Belly of the Beast (as it were).

There is some funny, jolly stuff about the IRA, and charming personal anecdotes about Lee’s endoscopy. Lee is one of the finest exponents of the art of analysis as a comedic tool: analysis of what people say, of what he himself says, and of what we in the audience do; a kind of comedic reductio ad absurdum.

Just so that Jesus doesn’t feel picked on, Lee expertly puts the pan into deadpan on the subjects of Dan Brown, Joe Pasquale, the Americans in Iraq, Catholicism and Jimmy Carr. Lee is a comedy technician, delivering his material with Pinteresque pauses that a Christian fundamentalist could get three death threats into, and using the power of repetition to almost agonising effect. All this comes from a man who radiates “decent bloke” like the glow round the manger on a Christmas card.

This is a once-in-a-career show. See it, for Christ’s sake.

The Scotsman on 13th August 2005. Filed Under: 90s Comedian, Reviews
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