Stewart Lee, better-known as the husband of
2013 Fosters Comedy Award-winner Bridget Christie, remains one of the
best stand-up comedians I’ve ever seen.
His latest show, Much A-Stew About Nothing,
is currently touring the UK before taking up residency at the Leicester Square
Theatre in London from November 2013 to January 2014, prior to filming a new
series of the BAFTA-winning Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle for the BBC.
The new stand-up show is Lee doing three
half-hour sets for what will eventually be material for episodes of the new TV
series, then throwing in an extra ten minutes of new and untried material as an
encore.
The three sets are full of the usual Lee
tropes, such as exasperation at the audience not getting some of the gags, then
explaining why the gags are funny and how they set up something that will
appear later in the show. There’s also the usual mock frustration with the
modern world, and his despair and failure to understand much of its fascination
with celebrity culture and its political torpor. Routines about his role as a
father and a husband also put in an appearance.
It’s familiar Lee territory and it’s brilliantly
done, and his stand-up stage craft as a performer and the quality of the
material he presents make Lee worth a dozen other comedians currently clogging
up the TV schedules like fat tissue in an artery.
Lee makes you laugh and makes you think. Go
see him... before some arts critic from The Daily Mail can take no more of him and goes postal at one of his gigs. He’s brilliant.
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