How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life & Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian By Stewart Lee, Faber & Faber, 378pp. £12.99 STEWART Lee on the 2005 London Al-Qaeda bombings: “Who are they, these inhuman bombers that strike at the very heart of our society with no respect for human life, without even the courtesy…
Like Ezra Pound’s notes on The Waste Land if they’d been more cutting, self-critical and in awe of Johnny Vegas, Stewart Lee here transcribes and annotates the three stand-up shows that brought him back from disillusioned retirement in 2001 to his position as one of the UK’s most revered struggling comedians. From conception through to…
It’s not culled from the world of nature but what I’m reading at the moment, which I wished I’d saved for a sylvan glade somewhere, is ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’ (Faber & Faber) by the comedian Stewart Lee. Ostensibly, it’s but three transcriptions of Lee’s stand-up routines from the past ten years, in…