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Review: Stewart Lee, Stand-Up
Comedian, The Shed, Hovingham
by Charles Hutchinson
STEWART LEE calls his comeback show Stand-Up Comedian, perhaps as much to remind himself as his audience of his first calling.
 The
Shed's Autumn Programme 2007 |
The last few years, he has been directing Jerry Springer - The Opera, the runaway train of a controversial hit that he co-wrote, and he has returned to stand-up "older, greyer and heavier". He is 37 next month, his spiked hair is greying at the temples, and he is heavier both in build and material. Once he "talked about nothing, which used to be fun"; now he is a social commentator and, like Mark Thomas and Mark Steel, he is picking holes in national and international politics and religious bigotry.
There is a quiet authority to him as he unhurriedly goes about setting up an established prejudice, countering it with a politically correct response and then deconstructing both positions with original thoughts. He can do the big themes, and he can pick on the petty minutiae too, gently mocking George Bush for his grammar as much as his policies and calculating that the day after 9/11 must be the 12th of December.
You could call Lee a smart-ass but he is too clever for that. You laugh smugly as he says he knew he was Scottish when he had a craving for shortbread, offal and heroin, and he promptly chips away at English truisms.
He has become a stealthy iconoclast, but one with his mischievous sense of fun delightfully undiminished.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
| The
Shed's Autumn Programme 2007 |
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