The first question to be answered was whether Stewart Lee had managed to coalesce his Stewed Vegetables (alluded to in my interview with him a fortnight ago) into some sort of proper comic feast.
The answer was exactly two-thirds “Yes”. His Regal show was a sell-out and he was undoubtedly in the comfort zone he sought. Lee came on stage briefly at the start to announce that he would soon be back to discuss charities, Adrian Chiles and politics. There followed a deft half-hour from his warm-up act, Simon Munnery, who seems always to threaten a big breakthrough but hasn’t yet achieved it.
A long interval followed, and then the man the Sun said was as “funny as bubonic plague” appeared to a hero’s welcome.
Lee’s stage style is unique. Seemingly utterly relaxed, he challenges us with pauses, with repetitions, more pauses — gauging whether we think what he has just drawled is funny, ready to deconstruct a gag or thought at a moment’s notice. His riff on charities was based on the main reason he does charity events: for the number of packets of crisps he can eat backstage. From there, we somehow reached his grandfather, who’d been a POW — “Crisps were just one of the many things you couldn’t get in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp!”
He moved seamlessly, and very funnily, on to more dangerous turf, comparing Al Qaeda (“a shambles”) to the IRA as objects of charity (“The IRA were decent British terrorists; they didn’t want to be British, but fundamentally they were”).
He then ranted, coolly, about the inadequacies of TV presenter Chiles in terms bordering on the libellous, and had a hilarious go at stand-up Russell Howard and the amount of money he could raise for charity by not appearing on stage but going bicycling (don’t ask!) I found Lee weakest in the final portion of his set, when, clearly a good old Lefty, he went for David Cameron by inventing a series of meetings they had when up at Oxford in the late 1980s.
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