Stewart Lee

For my birthday this year, back in July, my beloved bought me tickets to see a certain Mr Stewart Lee perform a warm-up show for his stint at the Edinburgh Fringe. Needless to say, it was absolutely terrific. Any right-thinking fan of comedy is fully aware that Lee is the best comic working today, and by a long way. His influence on me reaches far beyond making me laugh, however. Whenever I'm asked to speak or present, I'm constantly aware of his turn of phrase, and regularly catch myself repeating back sections of his show, particularly if I want to keep an audience entertained. His level of restraint, subtlety, subversion, timing, and enough irony to shake a stick at, is far beyond the realms of the cleverest mainstream comedians we see on our screens. When he returned to comedy after a six-year hiatus in 2004, he opened his set with the sentence, "So, on September 11th 2001...", which got the biggest laugh of the night. Similarly, he's been no stranger to controversy over the brief years since then. Following the religious reprisals of co-directing Jerry Springer: The Opera, Lee embarked on a stand-up tour that concluded with a thirty minute routine about Jesus, reaching its denouement with the line, "So, I vomited into the gaping anus of Christ". During his new show, which I was fortunate to catch a preliminary glimpse of, he rails against Richard Hammond, the cheeky co-presenter of Top Gear. "I wish he'd died", he repeats. Well, he goes further, as the Daily Mail cared to transcribe for us (somewhat missing the humour):

I wish he had died in that crash, and that he had been decapitated, and that his head had rolled off in front of his wife, and that a jagged piece of metal debris from the car had got stuck in his eye, and blinded him. And then his head had rolled on a few more yards into a pool of boiling oil, and that his head had retained just enough neural capacity for him to be able to think, “ooh, this is bit hot", before the whole thing exploded into tiny pieces. [...] I wish Richard Hammond had died and I wish he had been decapitated. Of course, it’s a joke. But, coincidentally, it’s also what I believe.

My dear reader may find it hard to believe, but this is rather tame in comparison to his tirade against religion from his 2006 show. I'll leave that for you to discover for yourselves if you haven't already. A commenter on the Daily Mail website said Lee must be "scraping the barrel for material", whereas a reviewer for The Guardian said "the tension between precision and disgust is tantalising. But beyond the disgust is a bruised idealism". The above photo is from my birthday celebrations, capturing your's truly with the elusive Thom. I think you can tell which side of the fence we accommodate.