Stewart Lee Content Provider - Cerebral stand-up for people who can think and laugh at the same time

Saturday, 10:45pm, BBC Two
Alastair McKay27 July 2018

Stewart Lee inhabits a contradiction.

His live show, Content Provider — filmed in Southend in April — looks like a sprawling piece of improvisation in which he rails against his audience. It’s not his normal crowd, playing to what he calls “Essex filth... market traders on the run from London” now living in a “white supremacist theme park”. Possibly that’s an accurate description of his largely sympathetic crowd.

More likely, he had a different version of that insult tailored to fit whichever audience he was facing.

The point is, Lee likes to antagonise and unsettle. His antipathy is also targeted at comedy itself.

The stage is carpeted with hundreds of live stand-up DVDS, which he walks over, stamps on, and generally abuses. He impersonates Russell Howard (a young, more conventional comedian) while musing about dying on stage in the manner of Tommy Cooper, a legend in a fez.

Shall we pause there? Cooper was a comic genius who achieved mainstream success while trading in his own incompetence as a magician. He was playing a character who kept fluffing his magic tricks — a routine which requires more skill than just getting the conjuring right. Lee doesn’t do magic, but he does inhabit a persona. He goes further than Cooper in that he includes little asides in which he discusses the character he has created. (“If Stewart Lee was a character he had invented, wouldn’t he have invented a better one?”)

During the show, in which he disparages the audience for not appreciating the brilliance of his material and “getting” his jokes in an inappropriate manner. He also reveals the architecture of his work. You know, for example, that there are going to be three references to Deacon Blue, and that these will be employed as “callbacks” — pay-off lines which work because they refer to earlier parts of the show, which until that point had been lost in digressions.

Lee is very big on digressions. He gives the appearance of being a man on a tangent while also operating within a very structured routine. He even provides his own critical analysis of this, comparing himself to a jazz player who free-associates and then makes a record, so while every show is the same, it reflects in some way that moment of creativity, when everything seems possible. Jazz, you may surmise, is held in higher regard than Deacon Blue. And if that makes Lee sound insufferable, he’s also thought about that. “Pretentious, meta-textual, self-aware shit — what’s wrong with proper jokes? That’s what I say to me.”

There are proper jokes, of course, delivered in a succession of sneering comic accents. (Game of Thrones is dismissed as “Peter Stringfellow’s Lord of the Rings”. ) It’s more complicated than Cooper tying himself up in a magic rope. Comedically, Lee’s bile and rage has more in common with another magician, Jerry Sadowitz. Sadowitz can do sleight of hand, but he sometimes pauses to reveal the secrets of the tricks. On the other hand, the antagonism of Sadowitz’s comedy is for real.

There’s a joke in Lee’s act about Brexit and Trump which echoes a brutal line Sadowitz used to have about Nelson Mandela, to be delivered at Left-wing benefit shows — where it was guaranteed to offend. Sadowitz’s punchline was more shocking — a verbal assault — Lee’s routines spar with the pain of self-awareness.

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