Hot on the heels of his new live show DVD, If you want a milder comedian please ask for one, Stewart Lee returns to our screens with a new series of Comedy Vehicle on BBC 2 with some significant changes to the format and content. For one, the graveyard timeslot it's taken on Wednesday nights is absolutely criminal. Gone is the theme music, replaced by a cold opening of Lee's monosyllabic face. Gone are the sketches, replaced with a mock interview featuring Lee in discussion with Armando Ianucci which is intertwined with the stand up portions of the show. And gone is the short, snappy segments full of one-liners and pandering to students. Replacing this is replaced by material that is more reminiscent of his recent shows where he goes off on tangents that are completely unrelated to his original subject matter. And to that I say, "yes!"
This week Lee talked about charity and went into a piece about how his grandfather loves crisps which took up the whole episode. All the flavours of crisps...plain...all the flavours. This was a master-class in comic timing as he had me guffawing at the long, drawn out set up of the jokes. His opening gag about his grandfather living in a nest of poppies because 'charity begins at home' is a great set up and it only gets better from there, as he immediately creates a divide between the live audience and 'those lot in TV land' and draws out the explanation and deconstruction of the joke. As in IYPAMCPAFO, he explains the set up of the routine step by step, saying there's going to be a callback to the opening line. Well, there is, and he reacts with disappointment at some in the audience when they're slow on the uptake. A comedian having mock apathy towards his audience. "It was good". Brilliance.
From there, he launches into a tangent about crisps, which he gets free at charity gigs. The most bags of crisps he got, how he acquires the crisps. "Ed Byrne, a woman and me". I could write out his entire routine but I won't. The long pauses, the repetition and the callbacks are a joy and what's more, very funny. I liked the Armando Ianucci 'interview' and the segment regarding his grand dad loving crisps and everything to do with crisps. The monologue about crisps goes into the absurd and the repetitiveness of it is where the humour lies. He soon has a go at the audience for assuming there are jokes where there aren't any. How absurdly contrived. There's a connection Lee makes between the crisps with the history of his grand dad being in a POW camp. Love it. He then links this to his hatred of the Japanese, and anything to do with the Japanese, painting a picture of Japanese monsters attacking his house (or should I say, nest) and a Japanese Godzilla coming to the rescue, only to be rejected by his Japanese-hating grandfather. And there, is the callback, which leads to Lee dividing the audience between those who remember the nest line and those who don't. "This room is unworkable", Lee declares. "The reconstruction process was time consuming but not expensive" is the first joke thrown into the act, which Lee deliberately ruins by dragging it through a ditch. And we're back to the crisps.
I already prefer this series to the first as the first relied on topical pop culture references such as Television channels and talent shows and books. There's nothing wrong with that, but this new direction Lee has taken with the absurd monologues about the mundane, of a middle-aged comedian on the cusp of a breakdown brought on by modern comedy, is much funnier. I didn't like the sketches in the first series, as they seemed to be purposely unfunny in a bad way and very un-Stewart Lee-like. "This next one is absurd, something like...Noel Fielding would do." Repetition, repetition, purposely ruining jokes, purposely tedious multiple call backs, repetition. I love it. The sketch idea isn't completely abandoned as he acts out in graphic detail, him dressing up as Godzilla and fighting a giant moth while his grandfather and his friends chant "Japs Go Home". Then we wrap up with an "awkward" closing line about his grandfather commenting on his friends in his regiment dying, to which Lee responds, "well, you fed them all those crisps." Call back, joke, job done. I look forward to next week's episode.
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