Mike Stephenson reviews Stewart Lee, Stewart Lee style.
Stewart Lee breaks all the rules. Not the rules you're supposed to break. The other rules are the ones Stew breaks. The proper rules. You wouldn't expect anyone to break these rules but Stew breaks them. He breaks the rules that are proper.
That's what industry practitioners call the 'in'. Illustrating the process behind the process of illustration. You probably feel confused and disorientated. Confused and disorientated because I've torn the unspoken bond between writer and artist. A bond you lot hold sacred. Like a sandwich of mushy hedonism between two slices of lie. Opening out the sandwich would be like breaking a rule nobody should break.
But Stew does open the sandwich. Because of the equivalence of the sandwich and the rule.
The equivalence I just drew.
I shouldn't be telling you this. But at the same time I'm not saying enough. You'd expect a journalist to include as many facts as possible. The last thing you expect from an arts practitioner is to hinge his material on filler.
Repeated filler.
You can't hinge material on repeated filler.
But the thing about 'can't' is it's a word. 'Can't' is a word, just like 'you' is a word. You can't hinge material on repeated filler. But you can't break the rules.
Stew can.
'Can' is also a word. Many comedians would make a joke about the word 'can' and its circumstantial proximity to the word 'Stew'. Many comedians would do that. Many comedians would foster great hanging gardens of hilarious wordplay involving words like 'can'.
And... 'stew'.
Because stew comes in cans. It's funny because of canned stew, the method of canning stew and the kind of stew that can be canned. There was even an extra 'can' in there. Many comedians would call this uncanny, which too would be amusing.
But no comedian would ever devote himself to the disassembly of comedy gold. No comedian would ever reveal the wiring under the board of such timeless gems as the use of a single phoneme as multiple signifiers. No comedian would ever unmask magic like that.
No comedian would sneer stoically at an audience through the oxymoron of smug apathy, unapologetically judge their laughter as lacklustre and push all their buttons in the process. No comedian can make a crowd laugh in fine bursts for several minutes just by satirically tuning a guitar. You can't be quiet, slow, static and cynical and still get an uproarious reception; it's against every comedic law in the book.
But if that book were a sandwich... Stew would break it open and spill the contents on your inner thigh. As though that sandwich were a rule.
That book is a sandwich. That sandwich is a rule. Because you see... what Stew does with rules is he breaks them.
(When sarcasm evolves, each new step necessarily splits the crowd. A lot of people are left completely in the dark. But us lucky remaining few are so transfixed that we are powerless but to embrace it. A good comedian is one you can't help imitating. A great comedian is one who makes such imitation look a lot easier than it is.)
Stewart Lee: Vegetable Stew is at the Leicester Square Theatre until 18th December.
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