Here is a picture of me taken on the 19th of December 2019, exactly one week after the disastrous UK General Election of that year, and not even an hour after coming round from anaesthesia after having my arms operated on to remove abscesses caused by my hidradenitis suppurativa. The dot in the centre of my forehead is not me being culturally appropriative, it's just a spot.
Out of shot in this photo is the book I brought with me to hospital, Stewart Lee's March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016-2019. I can't remember if I was rereading Lee's book or reading it for the first time during my visit as a day patient to the RVI's disturbingly-named Abscess Pathway, but I do remember that I was reading it because, having just recently seen the British electorate make possibly the second stupidest decision I had ever seen it make, I hoped to draw some comfort from reading one of the finest comic minds of our generation railing against the fatuity of his countrymen in making their stupidest decision.
It wasn't an uncomplicated pleasure. Lee was anti-Brexit but had also, as Juliet Jacques makes clear in that article I'm always quoting, 'eventually aligned himself with liberals who blamed Corbyn for the EU Referendum Result and consequent Brexit' and 'named pro-EU heroes Ken Clarke and Jess Phillips alongside Gina Miller and Adbusters copyists Led By Donkeys in his "stars of track and field" for 2019'. Worse still, in the introduction to March of the Lemmings, musing on his contemporaries now he has become a semi-regular newspaper columnist (or as he describes himself 'a cat that does a smell in David Mitchell's lovely garden'), Lee delivers himself of the opinion that 'Marina Hyde is the best of the legitimate journalist-humourists', which marks him as one of what Mic Wright calls 'a certain strain of middle-aged men [who] explode...with excitement on Twitter' every time Hyde (real name Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley-Williams, daughter of 2nd Baronet Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams) drops a new one. As much as I might love Lee's acerbic humour, I could no longer be the ideal audience member Lee has spoken of, who 'didn't laugh but...agreed the fuck out of it'. Critical distance had set in, for me as for many in Lee's audience, with the realisation that we did not share his 'patronising liberal delusion' to the extent that we had once thought.
All that being said, March of the Lemmings is still a very funny book, especially when you're on fentanyl after having your armpits slashed open. The columns are hit and miss, sometimes extremely funny, sometimes wry, very occasionally infuriating in their political ignorance, but the text of Lee's 2019 standup show, Content Provider, is excellent, and throughout, Lee's footnotes add a third dimension to the comedy, the literary equivalent of the cutaways with Armando Ianucci or Chris Morris on Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: a chance to wring extra humour out of Lee's attempts to explain himself. These footnotes also give us a chance to see Lee reflecting on his craft: I've learned a lot which has helped me as a performer from reading Lee's previous annotated stand-up sets, collected in How I Escaped My Certain Fate and The "If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One" EP, and the same holds true for March of the Lemmings, even if I did find myself at times disagreeing with the politics of this liberal idiot.
It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I approached Snowflake, the first of two new Stewart Lee specials which were supposed to air on subsequent Sundays until the death of Elizabeth Windsor sent the BBC into puritan overdrive and the NO COMEDY IN THE FUNERAL TIMES policy which this blog chooses to consciously oppose with our Motley Jamboree. There had been some hope that the second special, Tornado, would air very late this Friday, rather like that creepy horror strand Richard O'Brien used to host which usually featured a b-movie, a short and an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Alas, however, in looking this up to verify it I now find that clearly the BBC's Comedysmeller Pursuivant has not been fooled by this schedule burial, and thus Tornado has been pushed back to October 9th.
You now see, perhaps, why I felt it was important to make at least some token opposition to this state-mandated misery.
Fortunately, Snowflake demonstrates that Lee's columnist persona has not contaminated his standup character yet. I suspect it works best as a double-header with Tornado, because at only an hour long it's only half the length of Content Provider, and thus, after a slow start, it feels like things are only getting warmed up when they come to a halt with Lee reprising his 'the comedian abruptly does some singer-songwriter guitar bollocks' bit from the Milder Comedian show. That's not the only old bit of material he reprises, either: this half of the show is replete with callbacks to earlier ones, from the guitar-bothering to a running gag about Boris Johnson to an absolutely brilliant reworking of the 'political correctness as misunderstood health and safety legislation' bit from Lee's first comeback show after getting sued into oblivion by fundamentalist Christians for having the temerity to write Jerry Springer: The Opera. Even a segment about a very different form of reprisal, in which Lee takes issue with criticism of his act from Tony Parsons, calls back to his anxious ruminations about Frankie Boyle's strictures on forty-year-old comics on the Milder EP while the line 'vomit into the eyes of the infant Christ' as the climax of the political correctness remix recalls the epic vomageddon which concludes the '90s Comedian special.
Again, this probably works better when followed by Tornado, in which Lee ponders his place in the modern comedy environment. But in the context of Snowflake alone, the whole thing really builds to a bit about Ricky Gervais and the extent of his commitment to truly 'saying the unsayable' which in many ways represents the climax of one aspect of Lee's comedy. Lee has long said that his ideal set would not consist of jokes, routines or even words, and would simply be a succession of meaningless sounds: at long last, in Snowflake, Lee has achieved this, and it is of course the funniest bit of the show. The first time I saw it, I went into some kind of altered state of consciousness from laughter, and its power is barely diminished on a second viewing undertaken for writing this article. It's not so much why this particular bit is funny that's the mystery of it, but the way it keeps getting funnier. It made me wonder if the demonic invocation with which the new political correctness routine climaxes isn't actually part of the conjuration, a supplication to otherworldly entities performed so they might bestow on Lee the Gift of Tongues that allows him to transform these quite literally barbaric yawps into something sublime (he does spend a lot of time hanging out with Alan Moore after all). It's comedy alchemy.
He was wrong about Corbyn, yes. And the Marina Hyde thing suggests a worrying degree of aesthetic slippage. But unlike a lot of his colleagues 'putting on an exotic display for the court' in the words of Chris Morris, Lee is still actually funny. Which has to count for something, even if that something is 'getting cancelled because a bunch of toffs want us to be miserable this week'.
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