Stewart Lee

Thursday, 13 January 2011
How I Escaped My Certain Fate

Read the full review at my blog

The Sun calls Stewart Lee: "The worst comedian in Britain, as funny as bubonic plague."

If you needed any further reason to love him, consider also that one critic described my favourite comedian's act as being aimed exclusively at "atheist, comic book reading, Morrissey fan nerds."

Now I resent that remark. I'm not an atheist. I'm an agnostic. There's a big difference.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate is a book show more that may only be of interest to the group described above, but deserves to break out of that ghetto and take over the world. It consists largely of heavily annotated transcripts from the three big comeback shows Lee toured extensively in the latter part of the noughties, leading to his TV return on Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. I've seen all three shows live, and on DVD, so I know the material pretty well by now. And seeing it written down obviously loses much of the humour that comes from the Lee's desert-dry delivery. He even admits, "the text of a stand-up set should be so dependent on performance and tone that it can't really work on the page, otherwise it's just funny writing". And yet, I loved this book. Not so much for the jokes, but for the fascinating peek behind the jokes - the insights into how comedians build sets, where jokes come from, and how performers struggle to hold an audience's attention, or even sometimes willingly sacrifice that attention in order to make winning it back more of a challenge. show less

This book is the EP to the album that was [book:How I Escaped My Certain Fate|8538501], and contains the transcript to Stew's 2010 show If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One. Not living in the UK any more, these books are the nearest I get to still watching live stand-up. Fortunately I am one of the Guardian-reading minority that thinks Stew is a meta-comedian of genius, as opposed to most people who seem to find him (to quote some of the critiques he's gathered on his website) show more ‘a sneering tosser’, ‘the most overrated smug twat ever’, and ‘a shit comedian doing an impression of a shit comedian’.

This one includes even more reflective introductory materials, footnotes and appendices, so the actual routine is presented alongside the convoluted thought processes of the man who came up with it, including details of where the jokes came from, what he was worrying about at the time, how he was hounded by the Mail on Sunday, and general details of what appears to be a protracted mid-life crisis for the fat Terry Christian. This routine is particularly navel-gazing because in part it's about the nature of comedy itself, and how British stand-up is becoming polarised between the extremes of Michael MacIntyre (twee, uninventive ‘have-you-ever-noticed’ style mass comedy) and Frankie Boyle (hate-filled ‘rape-and-child-abuse’ shock comedy) – although it has to be said that what annoys Stew most about these two is probably their financial success.

It's impossible to quote, because Stew's jokes nowadays take half an hour to set up and don't pay off until an hour later, but if you're interested in stand-up comedy as a form and as a social indicator, this is great. Also he makes me piss myself laughing more intelligently than anyone else I know, and he definitely doesn't ‘exude an aura of creepy molesty smugness’. show less

I had a blip with Stewart Lee around 6 years ago. I had loved Fist of Fun and TWRNJ as a student. Then I lost track of the pair of them as they quit telly and I went to music gigs and not stand up. I saw two minutes of Comedy Vehicle in 2009 and hated it so much that I decided I hated Stewart Lee. I don't know why. I can only think I was distracted from my usual appreciation of cynicism as an art form somehow. Happily, I agreed to watch the first episode of the second series of Comedy show more Vehicle and remembered that I didn't hate Stewart Lee. I've seen him live twice since then. This book is an excellent mix of autobiography and deconstruction of the three key shows that marked his unretirement. It was like he was reading it to me inside my head which, if I still hated him, would have been irksome. show less

Ah, I think I know what happened here as I spot a flag in the review section - my tag ended up as the review. Well, what can I say except this is VERY funny in that very Stewart Lee kinda-way. You MAY laugh aloud; more likely you'll chuckle in a very self-conscious meta kinda way about how comedy is both hilarious and really not funny at all. Lee is an acquired taste, but we like him in this household.