As an antithesis to modern comedy where we are force fed floppy haired fops (who charge £31 quid just to watch their work in progress shows); manic young upstarts called Russell (who can be seen endlessly regurgitating their material in snippets on Mock the Week); and those whose aim is simply to shock (otherwise known as Boyle’s Law), there is a dinosaur stuck in the 80s whose name is Stewart Lee and he’s at the Octagon Theatre with a 2 hour show to fill but no material. Fan-flippin-tastic!

By the time the fat, depressed Terry Christian lookalike took to the stage to embark upon Carpet Remnant World the venue was disappointingly barely half full; and even then the audience was swelled immensely by both ushers and friends of fans that had been dragged along to experience something new. Yet Stew didn’t want THOSE people here, he wanted people who know what to expect; people who are familiar with his style and people who are clever enough to understand his jokes before he’d delivered the punchlines.

At a mere 18 quid his show was a bargain; because unlike at the Bristol Hippodrome (where he played a couple days earlier) there are no exorbitant booking charges, no outrageous parking fees and no sneaky renovation add-on.

The first half of the show consisted of some topical news; some clever anti-Islamic/anti-American/ in general stuff in which our host compared Religion to mental illness. His wry observations were hammered home with visceral quotes (that may or may not have been factual) on scraps of paper that he pulled from his jacket pockets; until, just when we thought he’d warmed to us he turned the joke onto us and our own petty prejudices.

And as the show progressed he became ever more exasperated with us, the audience, as he stared into the abyss; the swathes of empty seats and the blank uncomprehending faces. On several occasions he was so disappointed that he had to stop his act for the few idiots who were getting left behind, he then felt it necessary to deconstruct his material and repeat himself once more as he peered over his spectacles and pointed out those punters who just didn’t get him, before morosely and indignantly moving along.

When one poor chap walked out about 2 minutes before the interval he was almost apoplectic with rage. Perhaps Lee should have stuck this gig on in Sherborne or Bridport, somewhere where he may have been appreciated; he certainly won’t be back in Yeovil any time soon – he clearly hates it here.

And unfortunately for us this is all because nothing very interesting has happened to this curmudgeonly man recently; in the past few years all his monotonous life has consisted of is driving around the country to provincial places like Yeovil or minding his kids while watching the movie Scooby Doo and the Pirate Zombie Jungle on repeat, with only the rare treat of buying some new underpants to relieve the boredom.

This lack of creativity leaves Stew desperate for things to talk about, so in the second half he worked some Scooby Doo references into anti-Thatcher/Tory gags, before we heard how in desperate search of inspiration he visited stored with names like World of Leather; Golf World and City Meats and in which overly protracted tale he eventually met a man with a typewriter for a head and staplers for hands in the car park of Office World Alas, even now he was exasperated as one of Yeovil’s finest spoiled his joke by pointing out that the little green pieces of string with metal (or plastic) ends are in fact called Treasury Tags.

Towards the end Lee told us how he hates being recognised (even if it is most often for someone else). In fact, before the show as he was unloading the carpets for his backdrop into the Theatre, a passer-by mistook him for Bosnian Serb War Criminal Ratko Mladic. Furthermore he is scathing of modern culture; he despises the Facebook, the Twitter and The YouTube with a passion; he hates having his every movement logged and blogged and thus over a smooth jazz interlude he read out a selection of the depraved and downright comments left about him via social media; including one from someone he’d called a close friend.

And yes, I assume you’ve guessed by now, despite this apparently shambolic performance (did he intentionally fall over while running around the stage or was it part of the act?), there was plenty going, and thus for a show purporting to have no real content, this was a cleverly constructed piece of anti-comedy. It wasn’t without its misses but at times I laughed until my rectum bled.