COMEDY: How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up ComedianBy Stewart Lee, Faber and Faber, 378pp. £12.99
STEWART Lee on the 2005 London Al-Qaeda bombings: “Who are they, these inhuman bombers that strike at the very heart of our society with no respect for human life, without even the courtesy of a perfunctory warning? It makes you nostalgic, doesn’t it, for the good old days of the IRA. ’Cause they gave warnings, didn’t they? They were gentleman bombers, the finest terrorists this country’s ever had. We’ll not see their like again. Let’s have a little clap for the IRA . . . ’Cause the IRA, they were decent British terrorists. They didn’t want to be British. But they were. And, as such, they couldn’t help but embody some fundamentally decent British values”.
Imagine the words uttered in a calm drone by a chubby, greying Englishman in a too-tight suit and you have the essence of Stewart Lee: the withering reasonableness, the weary sarcasm, the ready assumption of intelligence and discernment in his audience.
You won't have seen much of him on television, though he had a semi-successful series, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, on BBC2 last year. When he was skint a few years back he did Have I Got News for You and a few similar spots, but nowadays he turns down offers to appear on Mock the Weekand other whimsical panel shows. He isn't the kind of comedian who does short routines, quips or sound-bites, and younger viewers may not have the attention span to cope with him.
Instead he successfully tours rambling, measured shows, delicately erected from strong foundations of vitriol and contempt, layered with self-deprecation, unpicking and examining his technique and motivation as he laboriously clambers up the comic scaffolding. He can be indulgent and condescending, and tends to preach to the converted, but there is nobody else in British comedy so merrily combining outlandish filth and blasphemy with the most pious kind of political correctness to expose the mediocre and the hypocritical. He has the unstinting respect of his peers, and a loyal fan-base, while remaining fairly obscure on a more general level. “The personal is absent from my work,” he says. “The me you see onstage is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most petty and my most patronising.”
How I Escaped My Certain Fateis basically the transcripts of three of his stage shows – from 2005, 2006 and 2008 – with vast amounts of careful explanation and deconstruction of this material in footnotes: one lasts three-and-a-half pages, and two sections actually begin as lengthy footnotes. And it is in these footnotes that we catch almost inadvertent glimpses of a Stewart Lee who seems as privately nice as he is publicly brave: he adores the mum who adopted him as a baby, is slightly defensive about his Oxford education, and is delighting in first-time fatherhood. Through it all, though, he holds his line about the cathartic qualities of comedy, though in truth this is the only stance available for that rarest of creatures, a genuinely principled comedian who has reached middle-age without compromising his integrity and still remains funny and relevant.
Some observations are poignant. In the transcript of a show loosely built around the appropriation by mainstream television personality Joe Pasquale of a joke originated by veteran Irish comedian Michael Redmond he comments in an aside that another old-style British comic, Jim Davidson “is not a performer troubled by the duality of meaning”. The sad footnote adds: “No one cares about this sort of thing any more. To the average punter there’s no difference between Jimmy Carr and Jim Davidson, between irony and intent, except that Jimmy Carr is much better and more original. But ethical and political questions are largely irrelevant to today’s comedy consumers. Comedians are little more than content providers”.
He is scathing about comics who fail to measure up to his own high standards (though there is probably room in the business for only one Stewart Lee), especially self-absorbed American stand-ups unable to translate the personal into the general. Bad writing by Dan Brown and JK Rowling is attacked, too, plus celebrity non-books by the likes of Russell Brand and Jeremy Clarkson. The 18th-century polymath Thomas Young was the last person reputed to have read every book published in his lifetime. Someone who did that today, says Lee, would end up more stupid than the person who read nothing.
How I Escaped My Certain Fatewill interest those who believe in the transformative potential of laughter, and provide food for thought for ambitious youngsters tempted to see the art of comedy as little more than a fast-track to quiz-show stardom. And while I eventually got slightly fed up with Lee wagging his finger at me, I have to concede that on most issues he is calmly, smugly, condescendingly, infuriatingly, hilariously correct.
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist
