Two hours of Stewart Lee (Tornado and Snowflake)

Stewart LeeI very much appreciate Stewart Lee and have listened to everything I can of his. I don’t really know any other comedian like him. It’s impossible for me to detail the levels of meta-analysis he brings to his sets. I can barely find a joke that I can quote of his because everything is so rambling and intricate and self-referencing that you’d end up citing half the show. You can see full transcripts of very similar shows for Tornado and Snowflake.

Stewart Lee: Tornado/Snowflake − 17th March 2022 − Harrogate by John Hodgson (YouTube)

Perhaps he sums it up best in the second hour—Snowflake—with this bit at 01:41:00 or so.

“It’s […] all right […] but it took him 45 minutes to tell a barely adequate anecdote about an author I’d never heard of.”

Which is also not correct, because it’s more than all right. I think it’s brilliant.

This was the punchline to a joke he’d started 30 minutes earlier, with:

“So I found myself reading an article in GQ by the 1970s punk-era polemicist
and popular 21st century novelist Tony Parsons.

“Do people know who Tony…?

“[murmurs of agreement] A lot of you, not everyone, which is a shame, because I’m now going to talk about Tony Parsons for 45 minutes.”

Earlier, there was a segment about a relatively stuffy Times reporter named Alan Bennet, who’d given Stewart a great review, but couched it in terms that seemed somewhat backhanded as compliments, as they would almost guarantee to consign him to high-brow, think-piece-style comedy venues.

“He’s fearless, undeterred by an audience’s failure to respond.
Erving Goffman (Wikipedia) would have liked Stewart Lee. Who’s that? Who’s Erving Goffman? Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee? That’s a quote for the poster isn’t it? That’ll pack ‘em in at the Bradford Alhambra!

“It’s austere stuff. Stewart Lee is the J.L. Austin of comedy. What does it mean? J.L. Austin? Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee?

“I googled Erving Goffman. Erving Goffman is the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century. His major areas of study include the sociology of everyday life, social construction of self, social organization of experience, and particular elements of social life such as institutions and stigmas—and he would have loved me, wouldn’t he? He’d’ve been flailing around in a tsunami of his own urine by now!

“Stewart Lee is the J.L Austin of comedy. Right. J.L Austin was a British philosopher of language, perhaps best-known—if at all, Alan—for the theory of speech acts. Austin’s work ultimately suggests that all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging on metaphysics of language that would posit propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning. And I’m the him of this! I’m the him of this!

“If you’ve come along here tonight, hoping to see two-and-a-half hours of the kind of J.L. Austin-influenced comedy that Erving Goffman would have loved, then you can fuck off, cos it’s not going to be that, is it? […] This is the kiss of death, this Alan Bennett review. […] I hate Alan Bennett.”

At 02:08:00,

“I actually wrote that bit to be like that, to show you who I would be if I was
who they say I am.

“LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

“Right? Yeah.
That’s right. Listen to that.

“And that − that’s how good I am. I can write jokes that fail in exactly the way I want them to, which is much harder than writing the kind of shit funny jokes that you like.”

He has a more recent show from 2024, called Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at the Lowry.

Want Laughter Therapy? Watch Stewart Lee's 2024 Live Show Now Full | Full HD by Abdullah Media (YouTube)

This copy of the video probably won’t last because it’s not an official channel but I just wanted to remember I’d seen it. Stewart Lee is one of my favorite comedians. Whenever I listen to one of his shows, I almost always start off by wondering “what is he even doing,” and I always end up thinking that it was one of the most brilliant, funny, deeply philosophical things I’ve ever seen in my life. There is no other comedian like him.

“Don’t come and see me if you don’t know what anything is.”

At about 13:00,

“Right. That’s the end of the fun, topical bit at the top of the show. It’s not really of interest to me, that sort of stuff. I just do it because I’m sick of reading people going, ‘the reason you don’t see Lee on Have I Got News for You is because he can’t write economic, topical jokes. Well, I can write them. As we’ve seen, I can write them very easily. But, um, it’s beneath me. Uh, it’s beneath you. And it’s time now to move on into the punishing experimental standup that has kept me out of the arenas for 35 years.”

At about 18:00

“I’m not going to write any more jokes. I’m going to come out here with a blackboard, with a list of topics on it. I’m going to point at one of them and you can have a good laugh imagining what I might have said about it.”

At about 01:11:30

“[…] what’s this? What’s going on? He’s doing some kind of lecture. Of course I’m not. That’s what I do. That’s my comedy. It’s not a mistake. That’s kind of routine. That’s why the broad sheets call me the world’s greatest living standup—which they do, in case you—why have we not heard of him? I don’t know! There’s been an administrative error.

“It’s because of stuff like that. That’s what they like. It flatters their intelligence, the broad-sheet newspaper critics, because what I do is as close to being not funny at all as it’s possible to be. And then, just at the last minute, when you want to blow your own head off, you go—it turns around—you go, oh it’s brilliant.”

After a long, brilliant bit in which he ties together about a dozen threads into a repetitive, mesmerizing, and coherent jumble, all played as people endlessly visiting an office, day after day after day, he says, at about 01:27:30,

“This is my life. Pure. Simple. Classic. But listen to that. There’s no laughs, are there? There’s just a strange tense atmosphere of hopeless despair. A bit like the kind of atmosphere you might get at the end of an award-winning piece of theater.”

“I’ve only ever written one decent closing joke. I wrote it in September 1989. […] I’m going to finish with it now, without changing any of the now-irrelevant personal details and then I’m going to go. See you in a couple years.

“So, I was talking to my granddad the other day. He’s 94 years—he’s dead now obviously, but he was alive when I wrote this. I’m not sick, you know—so I was talking to my granddad the other day—he’s 94 years old—I said to him, ‘Grandad, you are 94 years old. What, in your experience, has been the worst thing about growing so old?’

“And he said to me, ‘Stu, in my experience, the worst thing about growing so old has been watching all of the friends that I grew up with slowly dying off one by one.’

“And I said to him, well, Granddad, ‘you fed them those berries.’”