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Carpet Remnant WorldStewart Lee at Leicester Square Theatre, WC1

By Dominic Maxwell in The Times Posted on Saturday, November 26th, 2011
Stewart Lee at Leicester Square Theatre, WC1

Over the past few years, Stewart Lee has come up with several of the best live comedy shows I’ve ever seen. Yet here, at the start of his biggest tour, he appears to be running on empty.

But don’t take my word for it: nobody analyses Lee more acutely than Lee, whether taking apart his own techniques even as he plies them on stage or in the footnotes to his book of transcribed routines, How I Escaped My Certain Fate.

“I’ve painted myself into a corner,” he mutters here, downcast behind his new black specs. “I’ve got nothing . . . there’s not really any material in this show.”

The comedian doth protest too much, of course. But not way too much. Lee has put his comedic identity crisis into the heart of his act; taken inspiration from his lack of inspiration.

And if we are puzzled by the new guises he tries out in the first half — snappy political comedian to talk about the death of Osama bin Laden; a pastiche of himself as he builds one of his wilfully overextended set pieces around his son’s Scooby Doo obsession — then he will go on to explain the effort of pillaging your own life for laughs when that life is dominated by motorway driving, work and childcare.

Conceptually it’s rewarding. But, for the first time with Lee, I really didn’t laugh much. His best work is a stylistic hall of mirrors built around something outside of himself. But this show continues the trend from his second BBC series, in which his references to his style and his status in the marketplace started to go from sideshow to main event. The effect can be solipsistic. The footnotes are taking over.

Now, they’re acute and inventive footnotes, and the show blossoms in a second half in which he both lightens up with some sharper lines — a great Planet of the Apes joke, a wicked dig at Ed Miliband, a flight of fancy about his own resemblance to the Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic — and explains his personal situation. He makes vivid the stultifying effect of fame: his every movement noted on Twitter, his every effort to do his job prompting casual obscenities online. But by then he’s done so much creative muddying of the gap between true and false that you’re no longer sure how to take him.

He may well really think that the late Bill Hicks was overrated. He certainly enjoys the heresy of saying so. And he still gets value from the frisson between what’s real and what’s an act. But when he says, “It’s easy to be a dead comedian, the hard thing is to be able to keep going,” its essence of fatigue rings true here, however ironic the context.

Written by Dominic Maxwell in The Times on 26th November 2011. Filed Under: Carpet Remnant World, Reviews
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