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SNOWFLAKE/TORNADOSupercharged Venom

'If there's a bar in British comedy, Stewart Lee sets it'

By Sean Hewitt in Nottinghamshire Live Posted on Thursday, January 30th, 2020

So much goes on, and on so many levels, during Stewart Lee’s latest stand-up performance that it’s even harder than usual to describe.

Cerebral, confrontational and laugh-out-loud funny, it’s the work of a master at his peak. Four years ago he playfully announced to a Nottingham audience that “no-one is equipped to review me”. I laughed nervously at the time but if any show sums up how true that joke still is, it’s this one.

Well, I say “show” when  “shows” is really more accurate.  Snowflake/Tornado is an all-new double bill – two separately themed performances, each about an hour long, divided by a 20-minute interval.

On the first of a sold-out four-night run at the Playhouse, Tornado, the first half, started with the inaccurate synopsis Netflix gave to his show TV Comedy Vehicle:  “Reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe” – actually the plot of bizarre horror movie Sharknado. Lee claims Netflix left it online for two years.

This mishap leads him to jealously read out the much more straightforward descriptions given to other comedians’ Netflix shows.

Which of course allows vicious takedowns of the comics in question – fans of Jimmy Carr, Ricky Gervais, Josh Widdicombe and American comedy superstar Dave Chapelle are probably still tending their wounds.

His relentlessly repeated announcement that The Times had called him the number one stand-up comedian in the world became a hysterical running joke between the well-aimed barbs at his rivals – and his continuous interrogation of stand-up, critiques of his own performance and parodic “disappointment” with the quality of the Playhouse audience never became laboured.

By the time he reached the interval with a brilliantly delivered reading of “Alan Bennett’s Sharknado” (complete with an uncanny impression and ending in a striking visual coup de theatre), the crowd was awestruck.

If anything, part two –  Snowflake –  was even better. Lee’s reaction to the rise of bigotry, it hailed what he sees as the genuine triumphs of political correctness while acknowledging its shortcomings.

The mood was more elegiac, with a freshness and intelligence rivalling the genius of his previous Content Provider tour but still allowing for bursts of marvellously supercharged venom aimed at the writer Tony Parsons,  Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge and (inevitably) Ricky Gervais yet again.

Indeed, an otherwise pin-sharp demolition was slightly derailed by an over-lengthy depiction of Gervais  incoherently “saying the unsayable” but Lee’s forensic wit saved the day as he moved on to our unsettling current prime minister – “the Ricky Gervais of British politics” – and finished with a song (!) which managed  to be sincere, crude and outrageously funny at the same time.

If there’s a bar in British comedy, Stewart Lee sets it. He’s unique and every tour is different, but the five-star quality always remains.

Written by Sean Hewitt in Nottinghamshire Live on 30th January 2020. Filed Under: Reviews, Snowflake/Tornado
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