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Vegetable StewStewart Lee, Leicester Square Theatre, WC2

The whimsical comedian’s thoughts on Russell Brand’s wedding, fag-packet mathematics and being at Oxford with David Cameron.

By Dominic Maxwell in The Times Posted on Friday, October 29th, 2010

Tonight, Stewart Lee tells us, he will be tackling three main topics. Charity. The Government. And Adrian Chiles.
Normally, he’d try to be more seamless than this. “Why hasn’t it got”, he asks himself on behalf of his fans, “a narrative arc like the other shows?” The answer is that he is working up material that can work as half-hour chunks for his second BBC Two series, next year. On this matter, at least, we can take him at his word. So even if we are guinea pigs here, this is another delicious dose of the self-aware and the self-involved. As ever, the footnotes to his performance — the moments when he turns on us for not getting a joke, for blanking “references at the very edge of human consciousness” — matter as much as the ostensible targets. Which soon sprout into flights of fancy involving, say, his crisp-loving grandad who lives in a nest, Godzilla, and the comedian Russell Howard, of Mock the Week.

For more than 20 years now, Lee has been selling his ideas with a dubious yet musical delivery that blurs the lines between the rational and the ridiculous. Here, his immaculate timing isn’t always enough to conceal a lack of inspiration in some of his material. Several of the flights of fancy take off too soon — the tale of Grandad and Godzilla, say, is Lee at his most whimsical. And the ingenious fag-packet mathematics that “proves” why Howard doesn’t do enough for the needy is an engaging misuse of logic that has descended into protracted sarcasm by its end, even if he’s mocking our own preconceptions more than Howard’s behaviour. And yet his spirit of subversion is so original that he wins out anyway.

He ends the first half with a great song about Russell Brand’s wedding, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. And he hangs on to the guitar for a superior second half in which he pretends to tune up, mocking and celebrating the bag of tricks of a musical comedian. Then he nails the certainties of alternative comedy — “In the 1980s everybody hated the Tories. It’s amazing they got reelected” — before taking us into a story about his days at Oxford with David Cameron that is richly detailed and resonant, whatever your political hue.

Lee loyalists will find some ideas and formats from earlier shows getting dusted down for their turn on the telly. Some of his engaging unorthodoxies are in danger of becoming orthodoxies, too: the way he sticks an unneeded definite article in front of something, talking about, say, “the ITV”, “the News 24”, “the comedy”. But even at a notch below his brilliant best, he retains his mix of passion and pique, of the determinedly small-minded and the generously imaginative. Fascinating, funny stuff, in other words.

Written by Dominic Maxwell in The Times on 29th October 2010. Filed Under: Reviews, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Vegetable Stew
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