In drainpipe jeans and common-sense shirt, Stewart Lee runs up the aisle to the stage and draws a chalk circle around the microphone. This, he explains, is what medieval clowns used to do outside churches in order to protect themselves from being persecuted for heresy. He is going to need it. In the past year,…
I’VE BEEN doing stand-up for 17 years,” says Stewart Lee, “and I can tell when there is tension in the room.” There is indeed. Lee has long been one of the most skilful, stimulating comics in Britain — never more so than in last year’s exquisite comeback, a demolition job on the false imperatives of…
Stewart Lee is probably one of the first alternative comedians that burst onto the scene in the late eighties, as he says himself he has been doing stand-up for seventeen years, but despite forays into the world of journalism and his somewhat publicised involvement with the controversial Jerry Springer The Opera. While these have obviously…