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Why Lee’s hands-down the 41st best stand-up
comedian ever!
He lambasts the public and struggles to pay the bills, but Stewart Lee’s innovative comic material could still give him the last laugh, writes Richard Osley
STEWART Lee is the only comedian I’ve seen that has left me leaving a show with my sides genuinely hurting from the laughter, so maybe I’m biased.
Russell Brand wouldn’t let me into his benefit gig for sick puppies at Burgh House recently, so maybe I’m biased some more.
But when Lee mocks Brand in his new stand-up show for having to apologise for the Big Brother racism row “while dressed like a cartoon pirate” and thins down Brand’s squawky act to little more than making up silly names for his genitals, you can’t help but laugh and wonder how Brand became so famous.
Yet Brand is far more famous than Lee. He gets to live in a nice house up Hampstead way and he can afford not to take the call from the Camden New Journal. The grump.
Lee, for all his devastatingly sharp observations on how comedy works, lives in more modest accommodation in Hackney and, by his own reckoning, is running out of money.
What’s more, a man voted the 41st best stand-up comedian ever on a Channel 4 poll – higher than Lenny Bruce – could walk past you in the street unnoticed.
“I guess I’ve always valued my privacy and I’ve never been part of the whole Comedy Store circuit,” he says.
“I’ve never been asked to do those kind of venues because it’s not my style. What I do just wouldn’t work there. To be a comedian you have to be good at two things. One, coming up with ideas and things. And two, being able to deal with drunks heckling you at one in the morning. I can do the first thing. Idiots go to see Russell Brand. They think they are going to get Russell making up new names for his knob – that’s what he does. Idiots go, but they end up seeing a talented comedian because Russell is good at what he does.”
In his new show, Lee moans, gracefully, that after 20 years of joke-telling he is still doing a run at the Soho Theatre, a place which is meant to be a stage for new talent, not the 41st best stand-up comedian in the world ever.
“The idea for the show was the Channel 4 poll. Instead of arguing about who should have finished where, I have embraced the poll as fact,” says Lee. The new show is about how we measure our own success and how important that measurement is to us.”
By rights, Lee, almost 40, should be better known than he is. He used to be on the telly in the mid-1990s as part of the double act Lee and Herring. They produced the cult – albeit studentish – series Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, but the shows were slashed around the schedules by careless BBC controllers before being dropped altogether.
He resurfaced a few years back as the co-writer of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which was hugely successful – critically, if not financially – although it led him to be targeted as a blasphemer by Christian protesters.
Since then, he has produced three 90-minute sets which have raised the bar in stand-up comedy – clever mixes of observation and leftish politics.
Funnier than Mark Thomas, less crude than his old friend Richard Herring and certainly better than Brand, his latest work is Lee in prime form, a devastatingly sarcastic look at what makes people laugh.
“The funniest thing to you – the public – is a man falling through a bar,” he says in his show. “That’s what you find funny that is. A man falling over. A man is vertical and then he is horizontal. That’s what you always choose as your funniest moment of all time.”
Of course, the man falling through the bar isn’t any old man, it’s Del Boy in a wine bar in Only Fools and Horses and it is funny. But it is just a man falling over and it’s funny that something so simple is the funniest thing ever.
Lee said: “I think it (stand-up) is the most liberated art form there is and I really enjoy doing it. But I need to make some money as well and the things I might like to write, that I think would be funny, I can’t do. The tickets have been selling well at the Soho Theatre which is encouraging. If something doesn’t happen soon I might have to leave London, which I don’t really want to do.”
Something profitable could be on the horizon. The BBC has discussed the possibility of a six-part series. He was filming the pilot of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle last week. He is cautious about whether a full series will be commissioned – the last time BBC2 called him in an offer to do a series was soon withdrawn.
“When they took away the offer I was upset. I ended up doing those panel shows,” he says. “I don’t think I’d do them again. My style just isn’t suited to Eight Out Of Ten Cats. I’m getting older now and need some time to warm up and tell the stories. They just had cutaways of me grinning like an idiot. I didn’t even watch those shows and I shouldn’t have been so arrogant to think I could do them. I had a man come up to me at a stand-up show and he said after I saw you on Never Mind The Buzzcocks. I thought you were rubbish, I tried to get rid of the tickets but couldn’t. So I came, and I thought you were funny – but, listen, I still would’ve got rid of the tickets if I could’ve beforehand and then I wouldn’t have come.”
The 41st best stand-up comedian ever is short on cash, fed-up with doing panel shows and pinning his hopes on a BBC series. But go see his show – and you’ll see how he almost made the top 40.
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