Stewart Lee has been walking a fine line for 35 years. One of the stalwarts of the alternative comedy scene, he cut his teeth writing early material for Steve Coogan’s world-class Alan Partridge, creating a long radio and TV run with Richard Herring (A Bit of Lee and Herring), deconstructing his own material to the nth degree (with Chris Morris) in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, and co-writing Jerry Springer: The Opera. A career in stand up has run through all this, including classic shows such as Carpet Remnant World and 41st Best Stand Up Ever. Lee is also one of the longest-running consistent performers at the Edinburgh Festival.
Content Provider continues his run of very successful one-man national shows. The Dome looked sold out on the Thursday night of his four-night residency, and he started with a typical brief for a Lee gig: the exploration of ‘atomised man in the era of digital consumerism’ with reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s painting ‘Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog’. Here I refer to the ‘fine line’ above: how to extract the Michael out of his own intelligence, material and audience with a mixture of vitriol and irony. Luckily, it’s something he excels at.
He manages to derail very quickly into Brexit and the American presidential vote (and I’m not sure he didn’t have a plant in the audience for this), which certainly can be construed as vehicles for alternative comedy material, and fair game for the leftist multitudes who are Lee’s bread and butter punters. Classic Lee material follows, with forays into self-congratulation, his attitude toward post-Brexit fallout and a great routine on ‘the metropolitan liberal elite’.
What seemed to be missing from this show is the 20-odd minute set pieces that Lee seems to pull off so well: maybe he just wants a change, and maybe it’s just us, but we did miss the huge trademark forays into such subjects as the state of the jungle canyon rope bridges in Scooby-Doo, pear cider that’s made from hundred per cent pears, or scathing deconstructions of Top Gear. This was much more fragmented material, and for our tastes not quite as strong as the some of the previous shows.
Still, there was plenty to get your teeth into, including an ironic take on old school bondage (“if your nan and grandad wanted to use a bridle, they had to make one out of vines”), and selling his own DVDs in the lobby after the show, via his usual swipes at the Michael McIntyres and Lee Macks of this world. He definitely makes a semi-serious point about the inherent narcissism and commodification of beauty, art and lifestyle, and rounds it off with a cracking sight gag based on the Friedrich painting.
Although this might not have been one of his classic shows, Lee’s a trooper, and we hope he continues to tread the boards in his own inimitable way.
Stewart Lee, Brighton Dome, Thursday 23rd February 2017
Words by Sam Moffett
Photo by Idil Sukan
