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Much A-Stew About NothingComic Cutting

By Cary Gee in Tribune Magazine Posted on Friday, November 15th, 2013

Unusually for what is officially a “work in progress”, a select number of critics have been invited along this evening, to hear Stewart Lee essentially rehearse three half hours of new material that may or may not make it into his forthcoming BBC series. Knowing that we are in the house, Lee promises he will try out his best material first. “The rest of the run will only get worse”, he says, “so please deduct a star from your final reviews”. It is a typically disingenuous piece of micro-management from a comedian who has never taken any prisoners, and is not in the mood to start now.

Lee begins, to everyone’s surprise, by identifying the one positive about Margaret Thatcher. “She kept the back door open to negotiations with the IRA. My wife only does that on my birthday, or when I’ve put up some shelves.”

On this occasion, Lee positively sprints towards his punchline. Generally, he takes a much more circuitous route. “In the 1980s, Labour believed that the poor didn’t deserve to be poor and that the rich didn’t deserve to be rich. Labour’s position was opposed to the Tories.

“Nowadays”, says Lee, “Ed Miliband and David Cameron are like two rats fighting over a courgette in a urinal” – proving that it can hurt more to laugh at the truth.

“For Miliband to make a mess of Labour, after Blair, is like catching a baby that’s been dropped out of an aeroplane, then tripping over and dropping it in the gutter.” He concludes that those on the left need more imagination than those on the right, if we are to see Miliband as anything more than “the death of a post-war socialist dream”.

Lee is at his excoriating best when forcing a ridiculous argument to its logical conclusion. He takes, as his starting point, UKIP deputy leader Paul Nuttall’s assertion that the “brightest and best Bulgarians should stay at home and rebuild an economically prosperous Bulgaria”. After much hilarious repetition and reiteration of the history of immigration, Lee finally imagines Nuttall advising the fish to remain in the sea, nullifying millions of years of evolution. I would dearly love to see Nuttall watching himself being eviscerated with Lee’s boning knife. Perhaps Channel 4 could invite Nuttall to watch this routine on Gogglebox.

Sadly, some of Lee’s more topical observations are unlikely to survive until broadcast – for instance, his assertion that Jeremy Paxman’s recent and much-trumpeted interview with Russell Brand was “hardly Nixon and Frost – more like watching a monkey throw his own excrement at a foghorn”. But the material on display in this live warm-up reinforces the belief that while Lee may be “an impotent, vasectomised, 45-year-old functioning alcoholic father of two”, his comedy remains as deadly accurate as an Exocet missile. Stewart Lee is back in the nick of time.

Written by Cary Gee in Tribune Magazine on 15th November 2013. Filed Under: Uncategorised
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