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A Room With A StewWhy I didn’t walk out of a Stewart Lee gig

The Headstrong Historian Posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2015

Stewart Lee’s marathon run of work-in-progress stand up shows opened last night (29/06/2015) in the Soho Theatre. Lee will carry on these shows almost continuously until January 2016, preparing material for his BBC comedy vehicle.

A favourite comedian of mine, I had seen him perform towards the end of this process last year in the Leicester Square Theatre. Yet this didn’t really compare to the experience of watching him in the very first stages of his comedy show, in the intimate space of the Soho Theatre. This is how comedy should be done. Not the distant relationship offered by 02 arena stand-up format, entirely focused on making money.

The cosy and compact basement of the Soho Theatre allowed Lee to insult the audience more directly. He was quick to emphasise that we were guardian readers (true), we were under 40 (mostly true), we weren’t clever enough to understand his jokes (sometimes true). Although insulting his audience has become a central part of Lee’s routine, he had found new and creative ways to make us all feel bad about ourselves. This experience, part of what he referenced as Brechtian Alienation, served to make the audience think about who attends comedy and why.

The set was in three parts, each in varying stages of completion. The night started with tried and tested material about Islam, and more specifically its treatment in the comedy world. Delightfully North-London centric, Lee then went into material about Quakers in Stamford Hill and shopping on Green Lanes. Like most of his comedy, one of the key themes of his performance was to reference those on the periphery celebrities who we forgot we hated, before going on to rip them apart. On the opening night this included Rod Liddle and Jim Davidson, as well as material about more well known individuals like Katie Hopkins and Richard ‘the Hamster’ Hammond. At a number of times in the night the stand-up risked falling back into old material that had been seen many times before, this however was not often enough to effect the show,

The telegraph journalist Dominic Cavendish argued that he walked out of a Stewart Lee gig because of his contempt for the audience, and the vitriol around which he constructs his routine. However in reflection, this is the exact reason I stayed.

The Headstrong Historian on 30th June 2015. Filed Under: A Room With A Stew, Reviews, Series 4, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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