Stewart Lee: Content Provider
Leicester Square Theatre, London

On a stage dressed entirely with other comedian’s bargain basement DVDs – cheaper than bricks made of old dog shit – and framed by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, Stewart Lee issues a curmudgeonly warning to any audience member tempted to use their telephone during this evening’s performance. “If I see you, I’ll come down and do my version of ‘banter’. You can take it up with the police.” You have little doubt that he means it.

Given Lee’s last outing, which featured a scathing attack on all things UKIP, you might have expected a show about Brexit, or Trumpageddon at the very least. But Lee sees “no logical, financial or intellectual justification” to talk about something unless he can keep the show on the road until 2018, by which time he will have paid off his mortgage.

It is this dichotomy between Lee’s desire to subvert the “liberal elite” and his place within that elite, as a mortgage-paying, middle class, middle-aged North Londoner, that provides the nail upon which Lee hangs his comedy hat. Just how do you create a one-size-fits-all comedy show for a divided country?

Well, he starts with a series of familiar tropes. George Osborne and Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and his wife Sarah Vine, Keith Vaz and Are You Being Served? (sadly not together) and yes, an image of Nigel Farage in a pair of calf-skin driving-gloves that I had done well to forget until now. But it is for his peers, particularly Russells Brand and Howard, that he saves his real venom. “I’ve only ever told one joke about Howard,” he demurs. “It lasted for 55 minutes.”

It is Lee’s ability to deconstruct his own jokes in full view of his audience while still managing to ambush that audience with an unexpected punchline that places him head and shoulders above his contemporaries, as both performer and writer. Oddly, the fact that Lee himself knows this, even referring to his own skills on more than one occasion, does not make it any less true.
The second half of the show begins exactly the same way as the first – a “callback” familiar to anyone who has seen Lee perform before. A side-splitting takedown of Game of Thrones, inspired entirely by a legend Lee read on a mug in HMV, precedes an entirely unexpected routine on the history of bondage and S&M, as improvised by his grandparents’ generation.

Despite the frequent use of the word “dripping”, as funny a word as exists in English, the real joke is on the under 40s who believe such practices didn’t exist before Fifty Shades. Even sex and dating, bemoans Lee with good reason, has become “just another consumable”, rendered meaningless by a generation whose lives are measured by a series of self-portraits that get in the way of something genuinely interesting in the background. All of which sets him up for the most startling, and original “punchline” to a gig I’ve seen in a long, long time. Brilliant, in more ways than you can shake a selfie-stick at.