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"Suck my dick, lick my balls, and make me a fucking sandwich" - The Man-Wulf
Not so long ago, the comedian (and I use that word advisedly) Stewart Lee was off visiting some Neolithic site, probably a long barrow or some other burial mound, when he was suddenly shrouded in fog (or could it have been dry ice?) and fell foul to a vulpine bite which transformed him into a man-wulf. A werewolf comedian with his own special, or series of specials, on Netflix who is proudly unafraid of offending people and in fact bathes in the glory of saying what he deems to be the unsayable but is, in fact, not just the sayable but the very regularly said.
That's the premise of Stewart Lee's new show, Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf, and I went to see it last night at the Royal Festival Hall. I did not come away disappointed but I've never once yet come away from an experience with Stewart Lee feeling disappointed. Even when he let me get served before him at a House Of All gig in Highbury Garage a couple of years back.
Despite the tighter conceptual frame and the premise of the show, it is still very recognisably a Stewart Lee stand up routine. There are remarks about audience members being there who shouldn't really be there, there are critiques of the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Russell Brand, Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr, Bill Burr, moon faced Gregg Wallace, and Keir Starmer (a man who has made the move from 'boring' to 'evil' in twelve months), and there are acceptances that when recognised in public he is often confused for someone else. Be that Terry Christian, the singer out of UB40 (whoever that is these days), or the Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic.
We're also treated to tales of Lee's winning performance on Celebrity Mastermind, tongue in cheek complaints about no longer being on television, knowing sideways digs about his former partner Richard Herring, a tribute of sorts to the late Irish comedian Dave Allen, and an impression of Bob Dylan that somehow manages to be both accurate and hilarious at the same time.
There are also brickbats aimed at the parlous
state of global politics, the war on truth, JD Vance, Michael McIntyre's
manager (some very dark humour on that subject), Liam Neeson's Taken
series of revenge porn movies, Gaz Top (hard to work out what he was doing on a list of sexual predators and populist politicians, I know he's not in politics), and Coldplay's drummer (who, apparently, finds the
whole experience so boring he doesn't even know he's in Coldplay anymore
and, instead, thinks he's in an early iteration of Radiohead).
Should anyone be remotely interested the drummer of Coldplay is 46 year old Will Champion who comes from Southampton. There's a joke about Rod Hull using Emu's plastic beak as a device to cover up his public child molestation that's very funny despite the fact I've been making pretty much the exact same fucking joke for decades. Admittedly to my mates in the pub and not to paying audiences at the Royal Festival Hall but still.
More topically, there's an amusing
section about Baby Reindeer and sticking with the reindeer theme, Lee
tells a chortlesome, if possibly apocryphal, story about discussing his
"food journey" with an unnamed supermodel over a plate of reindeer
penis. When he comments on the fact he doesn't usually hang out with
supermodels, he quickly fixes his eyes on a specific member of the
audience and informs them that even though he doesn't hang out with
supermodels he's still more likely to do so than that "giggling
cunt".
It sounded much funnier live, with
Lee's delivery, than it does written down (by me) on a page but you'll
have to take my word for it. It was hilarious and so was the section
where he took Dave Chappelle apart (not for the first time) for
not understanding the difference between a pronoun and a noun, and even
the intentionally awkward audience interaction when a man was asked
if he'd rather be a vampire or a werewolf. A vampire would be preferable
because, apparently, they get a lot of sex.
Throughout the show Lee performs some fairly bad Irish dancing, wears a fake penis, crawls across the floor, adopts a frankly daft American accent, and pretends he's lost all faith in his material and even his ability as a stand up. We, the audience, lap it up. Of course. Last night Stewart Lee wasn't more funny than I had expected. He wasn't less funny either. He was exactly as funny. And that still puts him way above almost every other comedian. He knows that. We know that. So let's just enjoy it. And if you don't agree you know what you can do. Suck my dick, lick my balls, and make me a fucking gluten free quinoa crispbread based snack with an oat milk latte.
