Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee: 'hate all popular culture'

Britain's finest stand-up comedian explains why it is his job to have a pop at the powerful - and that includes glibly offensive entertainers.

See how Gordon Brown's mouth falls down after he speaks? See how Dawn French is fat? See how Scottish people are smack heads? What about some celebrities? Don't they get DRUNK? See children? Aren't they sexy? See cricket? Isn't it boring? See stand-ups? When they guest on Mock The Week, don't they get to choose a round that allows them to recite a big chunk of their stand-up routine?

Mock The Week grows ever more popular, being the sole mainstream comedy satire show not peopled by authority figures and old favourites whose laughs grow more grating by the week. It is The Frankie Boyle Show, of course. While the others flail around him fighting, often pointedly, for applause, he can deliver the audience into a paroxysm of frenzied self-congratulation merely by suggesting that John Prescott is fat/Gordon Brown has one eye/David Cameron is posh.

Of course, the comedians (Boyle in particular) are capable of wit. But that's not the main outcome of the show. It's not about laughs. It's a show about concision, speed and nastiness. Get a clear run on the mic before anyone else and suggest that MTW stands for Mediocre Television Spamfilter and you'd get a laugh just for having replaced an initial with a rude word.

The most telling point is the guest comedians. Whether total rubbish (Gina Yashere) average (Jon Richardson) or brilliant (Stewart Lee, who described his own appearance thus: 'I must have looked like a competition winner, who'd won a prize to sit silent on an unfunny topical quiz show') they never make any impact. They're always less important than Andy Parsons. Think about how that must feel.

The guest in this episode is the bona fide genius Stewart Lee, a man the TV world inevitably can't get enough of now his own super stand-up show has come to an end. But he nearly meets his match with the inventive folk in this series finale, who offer up swimming commuters, psychologically enhanced chickens and a choir controlled by a piano. The show has been a hugely imaginative celebration of the bonkers brainwave, and we'll be sadder than a toddler who's dropped his Mr Whippy if it doesn't get another series... the tumbleweeds blowing across what must be the best props room in TV would simply be too much to bear.

What better time than Easter for jokes about licking the face of the Pope? It was thanks once again to the merrily morose Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, a kind of King Lear with one-liners, for an anti-genuflection to TV religion that railed against the general rubbishness of the world in a way that somehow made you mind it not quite so much.

Ranging across the religious spectrum from Catholicism to Islam, Lee wisely wasn't out to topple religion per se - come on, he only had half an hour - but his potshots were cannily aimed.

Tackling the idea that you can quote holy books in any way you want in order to prove a point, he set up a sophisticated joke about a chihuahua piloting an aeroplane - it was all to do with Animals In Islam - yet sent himself up by punchlining it 'hooks for hands!'.

Editor Note: This review was published in Metro despite the fact the religion episode had actually been moved to the following week and thus had not been broadcast yet

Daringly or negligently, BBC Two may have upset Eastering Christians last night by transmitting Stewart Lee's anti-religion stand-up set last night. Benedict XVIII got it in the neck and so did John Paul II, or, at least, his marketing man did for selling lollipops bearing his features in Vatican Square. The Muslims were hardly more than a passing reference, however, and Lee got distracted by David Cameron, Laurel and Hardy and a postmodernist reading of his own act. The sketches were awful. His routine about the evangelist who turned up at his door with the poser "If Jesus is the answer what is the question?" (reply: "Is it, 'For which role was Robert Powell nominated for a Bafta?'") was brilliant. As it was 20 years ago, when Lee first performed it.

Editor Note: This review was published in The Times despite the fact the religion episode had actually been moved to the following week and thus had not been broadcast yet

Stewart Lee is a very funny guy, so one can assume that he knows a thing or two about making people laugh. And that's the focus of his musings tonight. He talks about those who have influenced his career and considers where stand-up comedy is going in the future. Very far, if this display is anything to go by.

Stewart Lee turns his attention to the global financial crisis and the collapse of the property market. "The fox," he says, "has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat has his . . . stoat hole. But only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity." He goes on to explain the crucial difference between a house and an investment. "A home is a basic requirement of life. Like food. When squirrels hide acorns they are not trying to play the acorn market." Those who are now suffering the most from the property slump are the estate agents, but he warns against premature satisfaction. "The struggles to survive that estate agents are going through today," he says glumly, "are a useful barometer of some of the problems that we humans might face in the future."

The urbane Lee continues to do his bit to redress the shortage of stand-up comedy on TV. We're overrun with panel shows in which comics slice and dice their stand-up ideas into witty chunks but we get fewer full-length routines.

What Lee shows over the course of a half-hour programme is how a longer time frame lets him toy with an idea, stretch it to breaking point, and play on preconceptions so that by the end you almost feel part of an unusually witty sociology seminar.

Having said all that, tonight's edition isn't as thick with laugh-out-loud moments as it might be. Some of the better jokes are in the sketches: look out for the spoof Hitler speeches ("And you can't even hit your kids any more!" he rants in German) and Stephen K Amos lifting an otherwise daft joke about Kofi Annan.

Stewart Lee's amusing stand-up show, with accompanying (and, unfortunately, less amusing) sketches, continues tonight with a concerted examination of political correctness. Well, concerted in as much as it gives Lee an excuse to wave a child's ballet shoe over the audience and make jokes about the Finsbury Park branch of Weight Watchers.

Lee's wonderfully witty weekly barrage against the stupidities of modern life has left us asking one question - why has it taken 10 years for a TV channel to recognise his formidable talent? And, while we're at it, why isn't his former double-act partner, Richard Herring, on the telly screen, either? Regardless, political correctness - or what people assume to be political correctness - is on Stewart's radar tonight. Incoming!