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Basic LeeBasic Lee review — sarcastic, satirical and very funny

By Dominic Maxwell in The Times Posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2022

If someone says they’re going back to basics, can they be trusted? When Stewart Lee tells you he is going back to basics you sniff only fresh mischief in his chortlingly bold smush of sarcasm, satire, self-commentary and alternately lugubrious and exultant flights of fancy. It is hard, Lee tells us, to try to be funny in these days of frenetic social and political change. So he bookends this new show, which he wants to stay relevant until its tour ends in 2024, with a reworking of a routine he first performed at the start of his career in 1989.

Self-plagiarism? Actually, Lee could profitably spend the rest of his career rejigging old routines, much as Miles Davis was able to find endless new takes on Stella by Starlight. His embellishments and extrapolations and footnotes and asides are at least as important as the kernel of the routine. The details of a first half that includes topical jokes will change, you suspect, but the constant will be his desire to berate his audience and other comics for not being up to his standards. At his best, as he delivers a comedy show that is a kind of lecture about comedy shows, he cheeks the crowd so surely that the effect is insulting yet intimate.

The second half is dominated by his artful overreaction to the idea that Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag was all that pioneering in doing what comics have always done by addressing the audience directly. Lee dances between the sincere, the scholarly and the ludicrous. And if you are the kind of guy (yes, usually guy) who likes to bang on in those sorts of highfalutin terms about Lee’s style and importance, he has a horribly accurate take-down of you to offer too.

Basic Lee is actually one of his more pretzel-shaped evenings. If its inner logic isn’t always easy to grasp, who cares when something is rendered with this much wit and verve? Sure, sometimes backing his contrary instincts means failing to edit himself. He has about a 50:50 hit rate with his wilfully overextended act-outs: the impression of a Tory MP lampooning Keir Starmer goes on for about eight hours too long; the closing segue from mental health issues to a depiction of workplace social niceties goes on and on and on to glorious effect. What’s it all about? It’s all about two hours long, it’s all very clever, but, basically, Basic Lee is very funny.

Written by Dominic Maxwell in The Times on 28th September 2022. Filed Under: Basic Lee, Leicester Square Theatre, Reviews
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