Note: This is a review of Stewart Lee: ‘Basic Lee’ from 2022
As a reviewer of Stewart Lee’s new show, I was repeatedly told how to review it, and got called a ‘cunt’ for my pains (not personally). So here’s my review. First half: four stars, plenty of jokes. Second half: three stars, not enough jokes. Benefit of the doubt: four stars. There you go.
‘Basic Lee’ is ostensibly about the craft of stand-up comedy, what Lee calls this ‘ritualised ancient folly’. To be honest, his comedy has always been about this, so it’s business as usual only a bit more so. He deconstructs the scansion of the joke. ‘It goes: uh uh uh uh uh, uh uh-uh uh.’ He explains what he needs from his audience in terms of preparation: ‘If you don’t know anything, don’t come and see me.’ And he lets us supply our own punchline to a very good gag about JK Rowling based on what we’ve learned.
As Lee himself says, this is a difficult time to be a stand-up: there’s too much material. He still manages to get in stuff about having an erotic response to the Queen’s funeral and Prince Andrew ‘using the Paddington Bears as bait’, plus a load of brilliance about the current Tory cabinet that he reads off cards because ‘there’s no point learning it’. He’s still the classic English vorticist curmudgeon: a boot-putting-in on what he relentlessly calls ‘The Fleabag’ is very very good.
If Lee has a problem these days, it’s not that there’s too much happening in the world, it’s that he knows that his devoted audience can anticipate with some degree of accuracy what he’s going to say about it. As with his beloved Fall, you can do a ballpark Stewart Lee take on anything without capturing his singularity. He makes material about that too, of course, but at times you sense that, Tristram Shandy-like, his meta schtick might just catch up and overtake him, and turn his inside-out comedy right side out.
As I have been instructed to conclude, even an occasionally sub-brilliant Stewart Lee is much better than most comedians, and if ‘Basic Lee’ drags in places, you still wouldn’t want to be called a cunt for thinking you’re clever by anyone else.