I will, without exception, take the opportunity to use an ampersand wherever possible. Except on those points where it seems ugly. I am an aesthetic writer, would be the point. I’m also a big fan of Stewart Lee , to the point where I buy those weird anachronisms that DVDs are fast becoming. But lest (I went there) you think this is going to be a glut of sycophancy I’d like to kick off with the biggest problem that this latest show, If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, has.

It’s the show. Or rather, that it always feels like a show. There’s a performative aspect, a Brechtian distancing to the whole thing which, on a retrospective re-watching of his earlier live releases: Stand Up Comedian, 90s Comedian & (see?) 41st Best Stand Up Ever, seems like it’s been increasing year on year. If you’ll forgive a clumsily reductive synopsis of this collection then the major theme is a deconstruction of the idea, action and execution of stand up comedy. And to look at that description and hold it up to my criticism seems to show me up for a fool. I realise that if the idea is to deconstruct the medium then assuming a position outside the performance proper allows for a more subjective discursive…

But it’s not that that bothers me, in fact it’s the moments where unexpected difficulties drag Stewart Lee out of his rote role that are some of the show’s funniest and most honest. It’s the carefully chosen instances of rage and frustration, despair and collapse, the degree to which the set seems to be led by these pre-planned emotional peaks and troughs, rather than them occurring, or seeming to occur, more naturally. It may be that Stewart Lee’s just not the actor he used to be, or that the energy and bile which spurred on the invectives of an angry young man have passed with age. But the added artifice tips the scales from real to make-believe.

It may be a problem with the medium, or not the medium as such, more our expectations of it. The limitations that we project onto it. It’s telling that at one point, while talking to a woman with the temerity to leave mid-rant, Lee refers to the show as art, a label which you could never think to apply to ninety-nine percent of stand up. To my mind some of finest moments in stand up, the key moments of such luminaries as Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor, are those of the greatest pathos, where someone turns pain or tragedy or merely sadness into something uplifting, even beautiful. The performer gives something of themselves and the shared connection is so much stronger than the commonality of a conversation with a difficult call-centre worker or being vexed by someone of the opposite gender behaving according to stereotype.

I’m not sure that this is a review, really. It’s hard to discuss the DVD without either getting into the specifics of jokes or just telling you over and over that I think it’s funny. The material’s as sharp as ever, a spring-board of formulaic jokes by which to get onto the meat of Lee’s work and the deliberately wearying repetition of ideas and lines, it’s hard to describe but it is hilarious. Sometimes Lee’s work, including an extended run about Richard Hammond’s death is easier to admire than enjoy but where that’s the case it’s also usually the point. No matter what specious articles in the Daily Mail or the flat-out lunatics on Richard Hammond fansites (it’s a sad truth that such things exist) say…

But I digress, I am digression. For all its issues the show is expertly constructed, Lee working the audience like some demonic puppet master with fewer actual jokes than Tim Vine uses between the wings and the microphone. And, after all that, when finishing with a song Lee reveals a much better voice than I would have given him credit for, his libretto-writing background clearly in evidence. I may think it’s the weakest of his sets, but on his worst day Stewart Lee is a more interesting and importantly, funnier comic than most.

(See, an ampersand in that last sentence would have looked stupid.)