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If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One...Stewart Lee at the Regal, Oxford ★★★★

Stewart Lee's uncompromising, sophisticated brand of comedy is invaluable.

By Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph Posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009

For all that Stewart Lee’s latest show is beautifully crafted, expertly delivered and often brain-tinglingly funny, it’s destined to be remembered as the one in which the baby-faced 41-year-old comic wished death upon Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond.

Anyone who hasn’t encountered Lee’s particular brand of self-aware provocation before is served fair warning by the title: If You Prefer a Milder Comedian Please Ask For One.
Executed with the calm, single-minded focus of an SAS sniper, Lee’s mid-show character-assassination of Hammond is extreme stuff indeed.

What is it that Lee particularly objects to about ‘the hamster’ Hammond, so much so that he repeatedly expresses a desire for him to have been killed in the 2006 dragster crash that left him with life-threatening head injuries? Not only killed but decapitated and then brought back on TV in the form of a severed head on a stick. And so on, and so forth.

Well, aside from the fact that Hammond is ‘not a real hamster’ – which is evidently annoying – Lee decries him as ‘an apologist for bullies’. In other words, and I’m paraphrasing here, the jack-the-lad, politically incorrect humour that motors Top Gear’s badinage – and is often driven by Jeremy Clarkson – is a form of bullying.
And as the sidekick to Clarkson and James May – Lee likening the trio to the Three Bears – Hammond, it’s suggested, performs the role of weaselling accomplice to sniggering abuse, much as a weaker child might get in with the wrong crowd at school in self-defence. In order to elaborate that point, Lee – who attended the same Solihull school as Hammond, a few years above him – relays a story about just such a capitulation.

As you will probably have realised by now, you actually have to see the show to get the full measure of its detail and ironies. Lee’s sustained invective against Hammond is at once a satire on sick-taste humour and also, because his indignation is real, absolutely in earnest. It’s as sophisticated, calculated and double-edged as that.

The show also threads together much deadpan mockery of Caffé Nero, Frankie Boyle, and, in a climactic riff of studied, auditorium-roving derangement, a lament for British culture that draws heartfelt ire from an imbecilic pear cider advert.

Does one always agree with him? No.
Is the laughter often uneasy? Yes.
Is an act as uncompromising as his invaluable? I’d say so.

Written by Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph on 27th November 2009. Filed Under: If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, Reviews
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