Scooby Doo, Osama Bin Laden and carpet shops. Has Stewart Lee lost it? Emma McAlpine reviews the cerebral stand-up's new show.
All Stewart Lee has done this year is drive to gigs in provincial towns and look after his son. He’s got nothing to talk about. He has no sob story to tug on people’s heartstrings with and can’t make a show out of crazy adventures like Dave Gorman. “You’re defined by what you do”, he tells us. “I don’t do anything.”
What he has done, is read the news, surf the net and watch a lot of Scooby Doo. He tries out some topical humour on us; name-checking travellers, the News of the World hacking scandal and Colonel Gaddafi. He attempts an ambitious routine comparing the film Scooby Doo and the Pirate Zombie Jungle to Tory cuts and the Thatcher government. Eventually he tells us he resorted to driving down the North Circular to try and generate some amusing observational material on shops like World of Leather and Carpet World. Michael McIntyre’s job is still safe it would seem. After checking his watch and sighing, he admits: “This is a badly worked out show.” Zoinks! It all appears to be going terribly wrong...
Happily (and typically) there’s something more elaborate going on here. His shows are never particularly observational, anecdotal or topical. They all tend to have narrative arcs and themes that might incorporate some of these elements but you couldn’t stereotype the content. Carpet Remnant World is a show about the art of comedy itself, satirising modern stand-up. Comedy fans will enjoy the pot shots his bitter, jaded persona takes at fellow successful stand-ups like Daniel Kitson, Jimmy Carr, Russell Howard, Russell Kane, Frankie Boyle, Bill Hicks and even his old comedy partner Richard Herring. There’s an impersonation of a generic loud, sweary American comic (“Shut up and kiss my ass!”) followed with a more subtle nod to Eddie Izzard (he performs the same joke in French).
He draws attention to the tricks and techniques lazy comedians use such as ending a weak section with a rape joke to get the crowd back on side (“We call that Boyle’s Law”), or stitching disparate ideas together to try and make the show feel like "a more satisfying whole". He also offers up his own methods for scrutiny along the way, telling us where he might have improvised had we laughed in a particular place, and how he changes certain word combinations around every night in the perpetual search for the funniest one.
The humour comes from how he manipulates the subjects he’s parodying and makes them him own, like an uncharacteristically energetic impression of an observational comic, or an unexpectedly amusing angle on the most heavily covered news stories. He’s not afraid to poke fun at himself either: some of the loudest laughs tonight come from his knack at identifying his own doppelgangers and reading out, to a jazz backing, comments from some of his worst and most abusive internet critics. There’s also a playfulness to his language, with some spectacular punchlines created by the use of an inappropriate metaphor or an absurd simile.
While Carpet Remnant World requires some level of stand-up knowledge to understand all of the jokes, it’s by no means an alienating show for the non-comedy geeks – no matter how hard he tries to put off his new ‘TV audience’ in the room with taunts of “It’s not for you” – there’s unanimous applause at the end. For a seemingly incongruous show about nothing, there’s a lot going on here and much to enjoy. But then, as Lee shows us, appearances can be deceiving.
Stewart Lee: Carpet Remnant World is at Leicester Square Theatre until February 10th, 2012
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