Tales from the Mothership

I’m in the right age group to be a Stewart Lee fan, and mostly in the right political demographic (except I’m working class and don’t buy the Guardian). I was a fan of alternative comedy back in the 80s but was more likely to go to a metal gig than a comedy show at that time. So, he had been very much under the radar for me and I hadn’t seen much of his material other than the clips circulating on YouTube like These Days and Coming Over Here, which my daughter sent me because she thought he was funny and clever (spoiler, he is). But I never really ‘discovered’ him prior to that. And now I have seen him live, I feel I’ve been missing out.

When I saw tickets were on sale for his one-man show at the Quarry Theatre in Leeds, I thought, ‘Why not?’ and snagged a pair for me and my daughter to have a fun night out together. And it was fun. But it was a lot more than that.

Having seen the clips linked above, and a few others, I was expecting cutting sarcasm about the state of the world. And I wasn’t totally wrong, but it went so much deeper. As a piece of performance art (he comes on in the beginning as his own warm-up act) the best way I can describe it is that Lee builds his one-man show in the same way as I would build a short story or a novel. Everything he says and does – and I do mean everything – has a purpose that will make sense later. A supposedly ‘failed’ joke that he grumbles about the audience not getting; asking a member of the audience if they think people are born evil or if they become so due to their environment, and even a bit of slapstick where he tries to get onto a revolving stool wearing a very bulky werewolf costume, are all part of the story he wants us to see. There’s so much more, of course, but I don’t want to give too much away.

I could be wrong, but I’m beginning to think that even a supposed malfunction of one of the fog machines could have been intentional, given the way everything else worked together. For days afterwards, I found myself going back to certain moments and thinking, ‘Oh, of course!’ It’s like doing a close reading of a novel and finding all the subtext and foreshadowing you missed during your first read (and there’s a lot of subtext in Lee’s show) and thinking ‘Why didn’t I see that?’

I don’t want to give spoilers because I want anyone who hasn’t seen Stewart Lee live to experience the show as I did. Some people, who like their jokes thick and fast and don’t want to wait for half the show to see the payoff, won’t like it. And judging by the proud display of online critiques on his website, I think Lee revels in that a little bit. The show has much to say about current affairs, and society in general and what we are being conditioned to accept as normal. If you like comedy that makes you think, makes you a little uncomfortable but still makes you laugh (at yourself too), then I would definitely recommend it.

We met Stewart afterwards, signing his books and talking to fans. My daughter took a photograph with him. He looked at my ‘Medusa – Goddess World Tour’ fake band t-shirt and said, ‘Oh, Medusa, she was a monster too, right?’ Afterwards, with the clarity of hindsight, I thought that I should have said something like, ‘Was she? Or was she a product of her environment?’ (Being a priestess of Athena who was raped by Poseidon and then turned into a gorgon by Athena as punishment for said rape would turn anyone into a monster IMO.) Maybe he would have smiled because I ‘got it’ or maybe he would have thought I was being a smart-arse. But being the socially awkward fool that I am, I just said, ‘Oh, yeah.’