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Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Series 3TV On Remand: The Funniest Show On TV

By Michael Hogan in askmen.com Posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2014

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle isn’t your traditional Saturday night TV comedy. There’s no sparkly suits, dazzling white grins or jazz hands here. No smell of the crowd or roar of the greasepaint.
Instead, there’s a fat, depressed Todd Carty lookalike (his description, honest) mumbling into a microphone in a working men’s club.

This weekend’s comeback episode was a case in point. Ostensibly, the theme of Lee’s routine was the pernicious, pervasive effects of the internet and how it’s created a spoilt generation who want everything easy and have no imagination.
Doesn’t sound like a big bundle of ROFLs, perhaps, but by the time Lee had turned it into a searing theses, full of digressions, rants, repetitions and asides, it was a comedy masterclass.

There was a masterful takedown of Twitter, which Lee called “a state surveillance agency staffed by gullible volunteers, a Stasi for the Angry Birds generation”. He described a Northumbrian village called Shilbottle and how road sign vandals turned it into “Shitbottle, twinned with Bouteille Du Merde, France and Scheisse Flasche, Germany”.
He riffed on two other UK towns with pooey names, Crapstone and Shitterton, at one point indulging in a long, mimed phone argument sbout manure with an imaginary adversary. He gave Vodafone a kicking, reminisced about Big D peanuts and conjured up a retro web where AltaVista, MySpace and AskJeeves were the major players. Halcyon days.

These stand-up segments were interspersed by downbeat chats with satirist and “hostile interrogator” Chris Morris, who deconstructed Lee’s schtick, exposed his hypocrisy and chipped away at his confidence.
It was genuinely exciting to see the creator of The Day Today, Nathan Barley and Brass Eye back on our screens, even in a low-key cameo.

Lee’s stand-up style has no truck with mediocrity, faux-mateyness, cliché or easy guffaws. Indeed, he attacks crowd-pleasers like Michael McIntyre, Russell Howard and Lee Mack on a regular basis, which must make things a bit awkz on the comedy circuit.
Rather than settling for “is it just me or…?” cosy observation, Lee uses his incisive intelligence to delve into topics with an analytical eye, instantly unpick his own jokes and lambast the complacent audience for being part of the problem, not part of the solution. When he got a ripple of claps, he called it “the sound of the middle class applauding their own guilt”.

The result is a routine that not only makes you slide off the sofa in hysterics but grips with its hypnotic intensity and leaves you feeling improved, not just entertained. Comedy that makes you stop and think, as well as snort with mirth. A notion that Lee himself would doubtless rip to shreds but it’s true and it makes Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle essential viewing. If you don’t believe me, you can sh*t in a bottle.

Written by Michael Hogan in askmen.com on 2nd March 2014. Filed Under: Reviews, Series 3, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle
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