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Content Provider (The Show)Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry ★★★★★

Alan Poole takes a trip to Warwick Arts Centre to see Stewart Lee, who gives his take on Brexit and Donald Trump amongst other topics

By Alan Poole in Coventry Telegraph Posted on Friday, May 5th, 2017

Every comedian, even the most wilfully alternative of comedians, has to have a catchphrase and Stewart Lee’s long-established calling card is ‘I can write jokes, but I choose not to…’

As it happens he doesn’t use those actual words this time round but he proves his point by punctuating his gloriously meandering shaggy-dog monologues with the odd perfectly-weighted sucker punchline.

And the best encapsulate his take on Brexit and The Donald – a predictably topical nod to liberal metropolitan elite susceptibilities, you might suspect, but in his hands the launchpad for stream of consciousness dissertations of the role of the cerebral jester in the Internet age and his grandparents’ DIY S&M predilections.

Both topics, needless to say, are a lot funnier the way he tells them, breaking all the rules of stand-up as he erects a virtual fourth wall (a firewall, you might say) and invites the audience to peep through the cracks.

There’s a dash of physical humour (the Content Provider theme is bookended by spectacular rants against the smartphone generation and just before half-time he literally tramples on the dreams of his fellow funnymen by clambering over a mound of bargain-bin DVDs) and along the way he employs geometry to explain his performance MO and arithmetic to offer a remarkably candid insight into his current commercial viability.

But, of course, it’s his sublime command of language which sets him apart from almost all of the current opposition.

He knows it’s hugely clever and he’s equally aware that his detractors think it’s too clever by half so a recurring theme is to speculate on what percentage of the audience have wandered in by accident and ponder how disappointed they must feel at being denied a proper performance.

He sustains that comedic misdirection despite the fact that his sadly curtailed BBC series and happily unpurgeable YouTube presence have exposed his particular tricks of the trade to a far wider public.

If you’re not familiar with his style you could do worse than conjure up a hybrid of Tony Hancock and Andy Kaufman and he now joins Les Dawson and Billy Connolly at the sharp end of my personal shortlist of laugh-til-it-hurts live gigs.

You can judge for yourself when he returns to Warwick Arts Centre next Thursday, because while he unquestionably has the wit and the technique to sell out arenas for some reason he chooses not to…

Written by Alan Poole in Coventry Telegraph on 5th May 2017. Filed Under: Content Provider (Show), Reviews
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