Stewart Lee, King's Theatre, Southsea, May 15
Stewart Lee is well beyond 'funny'. His act dismantles the 'art', as his books demonstrate in great detail. He knows how it works and explains it as he goes along although the explanation is as much a part of the act as the text and the supposed themes. However many words he writes to fill roughly an hour an a half, he benefits from many of them being the same ones with his leitmotifs and recurring patterns. His art is structured like most Western music but not necessarily the free form jazz he so admires. While it may look 'free form', it depends on repetition and recapitulation within an overall design. We might venture to say that Stewart Lee vs. the Man-Wulf is conceived as a symphony in four or five movements but to do so would immediately make us overly guilty of being the sort of elite, liberal intelligentsia that he flatters his customers that they are.
Was that them, then, there? Oh, no, not me, then. I can see what he means about doing Portsmouth on a Thursday night. Spike Milligan said it was his worst ever gig. He may well despise Ricky Gervais and all he does but then he does very much the same thing. Ever elusive, the post-structuralist joke is designed to last forever.
His main theme might appear to be his fundamentalist 'woke' agenda, his many, many libertarian, right-wing targets and brutal invective but the real point is the art itself. While the audience have paid good money and are thus willing to laugh and clap, determined to have their money's worth, I'll happily turned up and be impressed by any number of pianists week in, week out but I'm resistant to the idea that someone expects me to find them amusing, much as I like Stewart Lee. I nod in appreciation or agreement and maybe the chuckle muscle moves from time to time but tough guys don't dance and I don't lol just because it's my allotted role as a member of the audience.
It's a long time since 1977 and the 'punk' uprooting of attitudes in pop music, such as it was, and it's nearly as long since The Comedy Store which 'changed' ideas about humourous performance. We are now post-modern, have surely seen it all before- or think we've at least seen enough- and so what one appreciates is a show that is forever examining itself. Stewart is impregnable because adverse criticism is proof of his point, he knows when you should be laughing and it's your fault if you're not and that is the joke, too. There are plenty of times when it looks as if the show has been de-railed but Tommy Cooper was always doing that and the suspicion is that it's all tightly rehearsed and choreographed, improvisation is only a last resort and, to take part in it fully, one has to suspend disbelief more than I find myself capable of. Or perhaps it's the likes of me that participate fully by seeing it as I do. The moments that I had most sympathy with were those when he seemed to be admitting the show was failing, that he no longer saw the point in it but Tommy Copper was always doing that, too.
Perhaps it's those providing the laughter track, without which the show would hardly work, that don't really get it.
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