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Content Provider (The Show)Stewart Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre, WC1 ★★★★★

The stand-up finds a way to be amusing in a divided society with atomised tastes in what may be his most consistently funny show yet

By Dominic Maxwell in The Times Posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2016

It starts with a cheerily vivid threat of violent retribution to users of camera phones. It ends with a visual punchline: a riposte to generation selfie delivered from on top of piles of rival comedians’ remaindered DVDs. And in the two hours of jokes about Brexit, Trump and “the individual in a digitised free-market society” in between, Lee delivers what may just be the most consistently funny show of his brilliant career.

As you’ll know if you’ve seen Lee in his now-cancelled BBC Two stand-up show, his thirst to address our messed-up world is matched only by his hunger to discuss his style, technique and simultaneously marginal and pre-eminent position in the marketplace. He sets up a hall of comedic mirrors in which any joke about stuff that matters — his Brexit routine is good, as is a Trump routine hastily but artfully conceived to mirror it in every detail — fast ricochets into live footnotes about how the show is going, about whether this is all just “massaging the prejudices” of the metropolitan liberal elite.

Yet secretly there is a plan to Content Provider, a return to the sort of long-form live show that Lee sidelined in the years when his tours became tryouts for television material. And we, the Lee consumers, are getting a much better deal: his mixture of the overstatedly satirical and the wilfully absurd needs time to attain equilibrium.

As he roams between mocking the faddish mimsiness of anyone under 40 — his beaming, Neanderthal mime of people on their phones is my funniest moment of the year so far — to mocking politicians, Russell Howard, Game of Thrones (“Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings”) and the strictures of his own persona, he is also trying to find a way to be authentically amusing in a divided society with atomised tastes.

If that sounds highfalutin, what renders it hilarious is Lee’s sheer devotion to jokes. His writing is both dense and loose. He mocks the narcissism of our age, while forever keeping a jaundiced eye out for his reflection. Phew. I laughed till it hurt.

Written by Dominic Maxwell in The Times on 17th November 2016. Filed Under: Content Provider (Show), Reviews
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