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Carpet Remnant WorldReview: Stewart Lee – Bristol

By Fawzi Abou-Chahine in Inter:Mission Posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012

The title of Stewart Lee’s latest show – Carpet Remnant World – is anything but easy to comprehend. He loosely ties it very carefully as a punch line towards the finale. In this manner, he demonstrates his style of comedy, taking a form which is subtle in its reference to a future joke you’ve not yet heard, which vastly dissimilar to the modern styles of what he likes to call the “Russell Howards of this world” with shows like “Joke Gags 8” or similar, more in-your-face advertising.

This is mainly because he knows he doesn’t need to try. He barely advertised his 2011 Edinburgh Fringe show which still sold out. He prefers the smaller rooms to the big money rakers such as the Hippodrome (with a £1 restoration fee). Lee publicly mocks his audience on stage, yet he still has a large and growing loyal fan base.

Yes, he does mock the audience, and he preferes some sections of the crowd to others, often those who are quick-witted and can see the joke before he’s said it. This preference is just an act though, repeated in all his shows, but it works and even unites the audience in their laughter. He cuts those who are slow (or just can’t laugh for fear of suffocating) with the killer line “You don’t belong here.”
In this way, he is the Ratko Mladic of comedy. Yet his vehement rhetoric is what drives the high-speed laughter locomotive, picking up passengers at Satire City via Topical Town – but only rarely slowing down for stragglers.

He compares being religious with having a mental illness, but his mockery of religion isn’t specific. Lee tells the audience that his lack of understanding of the Muslim faith is what prevents him from drawing as much humour as he does with Christianity, yet he shows his contempt for comics who slate Islam or its followers.
This isn’t hypocrisy; he doesn’t like the racist stylings of Roy “Chubby” Brown or Jim Davidson, but shows that you can mock sensitive topics such as religion without inciting personal mockery. He ends that topic by working the audience against their own prejudices that are inherent to society and then mocks the larger lack of intellect abundant in the broadcasted media.

Within the 2 hour show, he covered topical issues as well as his own pet hates, but in own unique brand of humour, soaked in sarcasm and steeped in satire. To those who say his list of comic achievements fall when he tackles the surreal, I say to them half of his show was a lead up to a man made up of stationary with a typewriter for a head and little green strings for DNA. Noel Fielding, eat your heart out.

Lee disdains being labelled as a “post modern critique of performance comedy”, when in actuality he is far from being “post” anything. His grip on topical issues is as contemporary now as it was 20 years ago, and as for being a critique – it’s his cynical misanthropy that so attracts me and so many others to this comedian, a.k.a a fat Morrissey a.k.a 41st Best Stand Up Ever.

Written by Fawzi Abou-Chahine in Inter:Mission on 8th May 2012. Filed Under: Carpet Remnant World, Reviews
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