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A Room With A StewREVIEW: Stewart Lee at The Lowry

By Andrew Bardsley in The Bolton News Posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2015

During his show at a packed Lyric Theatre in The Lowry, Stewart Lee says no-one is equipped to review his unique brand of comedy.

He may well be right, but I will let you be the judge of that at the end of this attempt.

It is a fairly difficult task, as Lee is certainly is not a conventional or one-liner comedian.

He goes out of his way to deconstruct the jokes he does tell, explaining why they were funny if any of his audience is not as up to speed as many of the Guardian reading intelligentsia his shows attract.

Lee berates the audience when they do not respond in the right places, and even tells those sat in the gods that they needn’t bother to come to future shows.

For those reading this without a knowledge of his style or delivery, going to a Stewart Lee show may sound like a masochistic experience.

His fans get a hard time, and must work for every laugh.

He tells audience at the show, which is the fifth Salford gig of his current tour, is not as good as the previous four.

But this is the Stewart Lee stage persona, which at the start of the second half, he reminds us that he has created for comedic effect.

Lee is currently preparing for the next series of his successful Comedy Vehicle show, and performs three half hour sets in addition to an encore which he says at the outset he will deliver, despite how the show goes.

The set includes a brilliant routine about UKIP, and the fact that he has named his cat after the party’s deputy leader Paul Nuttall, half an hour on the subject of urine, as well as an attempt at “Islamic observational stand up” in a bid to get the Daily Mail off his back.

Of course most of this is delivered with tongue firmly in cheek, with layer upon layer of meaning added until the final call back produces hilarious results.

First finding fame in the 1990s as part of a comedy duo with Richard Herring, Lee wrote the controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera in 2003 and after returning to stand up after a brief gap, his BBC show, which will return to our screens later this year, has helped to bring him to a new audience.

Lee is now regarded the godfather of modern comedy, and every other act is judged against his exacting standards.

I just hope I got somewhere near meeting those standards

Written by Andrew Bardsley in The Bolton News on 17th May 2015. Filed Under: A Room With A Stew, Reviews, Series 4, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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