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If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One...If only Billy had put the work in, he might have been a contender ★★★★★

Sunday Telegraph comedy - The Last Taboo Billy Connolly ★★★ Stewart Lee ★★★★★

The Sunday Telegraph Posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010

Ever since the time of the court jesters, it’s been the comedian’s social function to get paid for saying things that normal people can’t get away with. So it’s easy to understand the bewildered response of the professional iconoclast when some media vested interest or other decides – generally for reasons unconnected to the alleged offence – to make an example of them for having trespassed outside the boundaries of public taste and decency.
After all, they were only doing their job.

Both Glaswegian shaggy-dog storyteller Billy Connolly and gonzo ironist Stewart have felt the hot breath of the tabloid lynch-mob on the back of their necks in the past few years. The last time Connolly forsook his customary Californian exile for a marathon residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, he was pilloried for a gratuitously flippant remark about the death of Iraq war hostage Ken Bigley.

While Stewart Lee – who might still have been basking in the profitable artistic backwater of musical theatre had the evangelical pressure group Christian Voice not misunderstood the profoundly religious sensibility at work in his Jerry Springer: The Opera ­­- has recently been in hot water for disputing the messianic credentials of Top Gear’s Richard Hammond.

Connolly’s natural insouciance has expressed itself in the decision to embark on a month-long season of sold out shows without making the slightest attempt to prepare an actual act. Happily, this eternally Rabelaisian 67 year-old does a lot of his best work staggering delightedly around the hinterland of an anecdote like one of the Caledonian street-drunks to whose sacred memory so much of his comedy is still dedicated.
So by the time he finally hits his stride after a ragged first hour – with an exquisitely eloquent description of a condemned tenement surrounded by a fence made of internal doors – this particular full-house is miraculously still with him.

Stewart Lee’s scrupulously well-planned yet satisfyingly spontaneous performance at the Leicester Square Theatre is a master-class in subversive pedantry. No-one – not his audience, not his fellow comedians, not his favourite high-street coffee chain, and certainly not Lee himself – escapes this ruthlessly self-aware 41 year-old’s kestrel’s eye for linguistic bad faith. In the belief that “the last taboo in stand-up is a man trying to do something sincerely and well”, he ends the show by singing a favourite folk song to the best of his ability. By a strange quirk of evolutionary fate, that’s how Billy Connolly’s career started.

Stewart Lee plays Leicester Square Theatre (0844 8472475) at 4pm today.
Billy Connolly is at the Hammersmith Apollo till Jan 31st (0844 8444748).

The Sunday Telegraph on 10th January 2010. Filed Under: If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, Reviews
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