SCRAMBLED EGG*****
Brian Logan The Guardian, Saturday August 9 2008
Woe betide those who find themselves on the receiving end of Stewart Lee's sarcasm. It kills with a smile - then bludgeons the corpse. One of the several routines, old and new, he is rotating as part of this year's Edinburgh show turns the irony on an American comedian called Franklyn Ajaye. Lee cites Ajaye's album I'm a Comedian, Seriously as his career inspiration. With sarcastic intonation excised, but with its mordancy very much intact, he recites the sleevenotes, which claim for Ajaye the status of an artist and thinker. Then he lists the tracks on the album: 1. Homosexuals. 2. Girls with Big Breasts. 3. Dick Caught in Zipper.

It is a viciously funny routine, one of several that Lee is rehearsing for a forthcoming TV show. But tonight's set doesn't lack a unifying theme; the quality of the material is too high for that. Yes, it is sometimes breathtakingly cynical: he burns a few comedy bridges with his send-ups of comics who riff on their own ethnicity or fetishise plain-speaking ("outlaws, they are, saying the unsayable, to the many people willing to pay to hear it"). The way Lee disassembles practically every genus of joke, meanwhile, makes one worry that he may never again actually find a gag funny.

Or is it just that he finds technique as funny as the gags? He exposes the architecture of his own jokes: how he sets up laugh-lines then alternates and repeats them, like a slo-mo vaudevillian spinning plates. Sometimes there is no need for transparency: Chris Moyles' literary output would be laughable even without Lee's wit applied. And the observational stuff about being middle-aged and staying in Travelodges is amusing but pedestrian. Perhaps Ajaye could write a routine about that - but I suspect he is keeping his head down.