Stewart Lee - Vegetable Stew

Stewart Lee was at the Curve to present Vegetable Stew; material intended for his forthcoming Comedy Vehicle TV show. In his book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Lee admitted that he enjoys deliberately losing an audience and attempting to win it back, which made it difficult to tell if Sunday's performance just didn't always tickle the audience, or whether it was deliberately designed to lose them. 

Lee’s understanding of the art of stand up was evident through,out the three pieces he presented, with numerous asides for meta-observations about the nature of the routine. On occasion, he would stop the flow to comment on what had appeared, when originally made, to have been an unplanned remark or aside and it would became apparent how carefully planned Lee’s comedy actually is. He relied on the audience being sufficiently familiar with stand-up to understand when its conventions were being subverted, and for the most part, it seemed they were with him. One audience member who supposedly expressed boredom with the routine was rewarded by having it extended for an additional five minutes. Whether there actually was such a person in the crowd, or whether it was part of Lee's act was certainly unclear to me.

The first piece concerned Lee's grandfather (albeit a fictional one), crisps, xenophobia and Japanese movie monsters. After twenty minutes of building the story the entire audience has anticipated the inevitable punchline, but Lee labours over it, deliberately stretching the tension beyond it's natural snapping point such that the punchline is anticlimactic by the time it comes, but all the funnier because we've been forced to wait so very long for it.

The middle of the show elicited less audience approval, concerning satirical observations about Adrian Chiles and similar mid-level celebs and the work they do for charity. By the time he was making accusations that comedian Russell Howard was responsible for deaths in the developing world, the decline in crowd response suggested they weren’t so sure the targets deserved it, and indeed there was a real sense of wanting to know where the hell the routine was going. He brought the crowd back together for a confessional tale about his involvement with the elitist Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, and their famous alumni  of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, before defiantly derailing it at the close. 

Lee deserved his plaudits for daring to challenge his audience, and they in turn recognised a masterclass when they got it, but there was also a genuine sense that he really wasn't joking when he launched into a (very funny) tirade about crisp-promoting local boy Gary Lineker in order to flag up the deficiencies of the Leicester reaction. 

Knowing Lee, it probably made him perversely happy.