Will Self has written a puff piece in the New Statesman on Stewart Lee and various instruments across the globe measuring the degree of wank in the world have exploded it has been revealed. Professor Charles Langtree of The Felchfield Institute said ‘My Twat barometer melted last night.’ ‘Then the Wankometer blew up followed by…
“Are there any jokes? No,” says Stewart Lee midway through his new show A Room with a Stew, and he’s telling the truth. There aren’t any jokes as such. But there is surreal, vivid imagery that emerges often from nowhere as it builds, layer upon layer, through exquisitely tortuous repetition. References to Brechtian alienation share…
STEWART LEE’S cat is called Jeremy Corbyn. Or so he would have us believe. Long before Corbyn’s stratospheric rise from rebellious backbench MP to Labour leader, Lee remembers seeing one of the North Islington MP’s campaign fliers in the 90s and thinking it would make a good name for a cat, his story goes. But…
This is an Excerpt from ‘The Artistry of Stand Up Comedy’, here. Stand-up comedy is so very Brechtian. It is as if all comedians, consciously or unconsciously, exist at this pole of theatrical theory. The frame of comedy itself is a large, obviously unreal, artistic construction, where every element of life is turned on its…