FOR the first time in his life, Stewart Lee has run out of things to say. This former provoker of rightwing Christians and frequent presider over ‘corduroy Nurembergs’ now spends his humdrum days either driving between gigs, on a relentless touring schedule spurred by his TV rebirth, or reluctantly watching vintage Scooby Doo episodes as part of his childcare duties.
It’s a self-proclaimed listlessness, of course, and a clever conceit, allowing Lee to spend the first part of this set riffing off recent news stories with the air of someone appalled that he has to resort to doing so (Russell Howard and Jimmy Carr don’t fare well here).
That flirtation with the headlines also gives him free rein to apply his deconstructionist shtick, as well as allowing some corking examples of skewed logic – his novel way of finding parallels between the Libyan uprising and Cameron’s Big Society is the most ingenious topical gag we have heard this year.
Elsewhere, there are deadpan flights of fancy to savour: his imagining of Scooby’s world under Thatcher and his literal take on the names of trading estate megastores are superlative routines with criss-crossing themes, surprises at every turn and, like his news-based material, plenty of rewards for those who can keep up with his biting intellectualism.
You have to wait until the end, though, for Lee’s real passion to come through: in the midst of an identity crisis, he turns to the internet to find what people have blogged, commented and tweeted about him, to demonstrate how the web has become a platform for ignorance and hate. That’s hardly a revelation but whenever Lee approaches a subject that’s close to his heart, be it freedom of speech or industry homogeneity, it’s brought into bleak, devastating focus.
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BBC iPlayer edition of discussion of Stewart Lee on A Good Read
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