“No one is equipped to review me,” Stewart Lee declares near the beginning of this work-in-progress show, referring to the multiple layers of irony and self-awareness that exist between him and his audience. Feigning contempt for the audience and the recognition his television work has brought him is, he explains, something he does “for a laugh – which is within the remit of this job”.
Relentless scrutiny of what is within the remit of comedy underpins all Lee’s standup; he will test a set piece to destruction, stretching it almost past the limit of the audience’s patience, until the repetition itself becomes the source of the laughter. In the first half, this begins with the offhand remark that Graham Norton’s chatshow beat him to the Bafta for comedy this year, and spirals into a beautifully controlled piece of demagoguery about the state of television entertainment. His targets are deliberately obvious – Russell Brand, Live at the Apollo – but he wrongfoots us by turning his scorn on our responses to the material. After a heavily flagged-up piece of reincorporation, he rounds furiously on the audience: “Don’t clap. You’re applauding your own ability to remember things.”
In the second half he has a lot of sport with the Edinburgh audience, blaming them for the lukewarm reception of a joke and, by extension, the suicides of great comics whose material was never fully appreciated. At one point, he tells any young comics in to watch and learn from him. As with most of what he says, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s good advice: even in a work in progress that includes some familiar material, Lee remains one of the most technically skilled and thought-provoking comics you’ll see at the fringe.
• At the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh until 30 August, and then touring
