His perfectionism is much-loved, but there’s only so much antipathy or disdain an audience can stomach. Watching Stewart Lee in action these days is like standing on the edge of a frozen lake and seeing a man half-submerged in the perishing ice. You throw him a rope – but he hurls it back. You didn’t…
Comedian Stewart Lee has been on the radio pushing the familiar line that Birmingham City Council was accused of “banning” Christmas. As he correctly says in his interview, which you can hear for yourself here, “they called the celebrations as a whole Winterval and you were allowed to use the word Christmas, and you were…
Public services are being laid to waste and benefits shorn, but popular culture’s voice of dissent remains strangely silent For those of us who still spend far too much time thinking about what used to be called popular culture, these are fretful times. For more than two years, politics has been in a state of…
Sharp show is souped up with jokes Stewart Lee’s book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, released this summer, is a triumph of the art of footnotes, providing a DVD extra-style commentary over transcripts of some of his shows. As those who know Lee’s work would agree,…
Ben Clover finds Stewart Lee’s Vegetable Stew a little more silly and a little less ranty than usual, but no less precise. Stewart Lee isn’t going to let something like gravity interfere with his act. Near the start of Vegetable Stew he says it isn’t a show with an arc like previous 60-minuters, but it’s…