Stewart Lee

by liberal japonicus

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been spending a lot of time watching comedians on YouTube, and beyond the laughs, I’m always interested in how jokes and routines are constructed. So it was a bit of luck to find the work of Stewart Lee, a British standup comedian. If you don’t like it, well à chacun son goût, but I’d like to think that most of you will find this funny, though maybe not as funny as I do. I think this was the first thing that I saw, where he discusses Scooby-doo and Thatcher.

This had me go down the YouTube rabbit hole. His routines are carefully constructed with a throughline that is always unexpected, so it’s hard to take a small chunk out, but he got a rep as an anti-Brexit from his show Content Provider.

I suppose one thing I like about him because his persona is that of a grumpy old man, which is what I aspire to be. This, from Wikipedia, is a good description of his standup.

Lee’s delivery uses onstage personae, frequently alternating between that of an outspoken left-wing hero and that of a depressed failure and champagne socialist. In an ironic manner, he often criticises the audience for not being intelligent enough to understand his jokes, saying they would prefer more simplistic material, or enjoy the work of more mainstream “arena” comedians such as Michael McIntyre or Lee Mack. He will also scold them as a bias-seeking “liberal intelligentsia”. His routines often culminate in feigned depressive episodes and nervous breakdowns.

He did a 4 season comedy series for BBC 2 entitled Comedy Vehicle, which is available on Netflix, (though sadly for me, not in Japan), a lot of the videos on Youtube are from that, and if this seems up your alley, check it out. Here is the standup from the 4th episode of season 4. Lee doesn’t milk jokes, he drains them of every liquid molecule and tosses them back to the audience in their completely dessicated form.

You can also find him on a number of podcasts talking about his work, as well as a number of other videos deconstructing his humor. The wikipedia entry doesn’t give much detail about how he got into Oxford, but on a couple of the podcasts, he recounts that he was an orphan and was able to go to first attend Solihull School (one of the better ‘public schools’ in the UK) on a “waifs and strays bursary” and was then able to enter Oxford and study English lit, graduating with a 2:1 (one step below a First). He often talks about how certain economic and cultural conditions gave rise to alternative British comedy in a way that is thought provoking to me.

Anyway, I hope this gives you a few laughs. I might try and talk about some other comedians if this is interesting to y’all.