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Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

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    #51
    Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

    He was the dull priest who was struck by lightening during a crazy golf game

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      #52
      Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

      I actually don't find Lee smug, I think he just has unfortunate facial features. He looks like an overweight Vince Vaughan (mind you, as does Vince Vaughan these days) and I know I tend to perceive people with those little non-noses, narrowed eyes and naturally slightly pursed lips as being a bit pleased with themselves. And, although he was good, I find Bill Hicks far more aggravating a presence at times.

      I think the criticism was that they were underfunny, especially in contrast to the stand-up material.
      I thought they were mostly really good punctuation points that added pace.

      I never liked Lee and Herring, by the way.

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        #53
        Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

        Spearmint Rhino wrote:

        Also, I have issues with how studied his style is these days. Literally. I mean, that slow-burn thing he does, turning his back to the audience like he's got all the time in the world, is pure Bill Hicks, and you just know he's watched Relentless a hundred times to get the mannerisms down. And also, his carefully-rumpled suit. As soon as it comes back from the dry cleaners, he so obviously jumps up and down on it a few times to get that perfect 'Rat Packer after half a bottle of scotch' look. When he started going grey at the temples, you just know he punched the air: hey presto, instant gravitas!
        "I have always sounded like this," Lee says. "When I was young it looked like an affectation. The audience would see an 11-stone, 23-year-old man and they would think, 'What's your problem?' I had some time off stand-up for a few years and came back and was older and greyer. I think people believed the persona a bit more after that."

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          #54
          Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

          The guy in the goat-suit also played a priest in the "Brass Eye" Virgin Mary sketch.

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            #55
            Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

            The Harry Potter phenomenon peaked nine years ago, and The Da Vinci Code was a hit book five years ago. People did jokes about them back then, so it was bizarre for Lee to just rehearse them without adding anything. It made his act, which already is preaching to the converted, even more conservative. Maybe he'll be more adventurous later on in the series.

            I liked "you know, the rappers . . ." It was a touch of imaginative silliness amid the deadpan statements of the obvious, and was the only place where his technique of stringing out a joke for as long as possible directly contributed to the joke, rather than merely being a technique to wring extra laughs out of something he'd already said.

            I quite enjoyed it, but it's an odd programme.

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              #56
              Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

              Spearmint Rhino wrote:

              The pre-amble to that, the whole "You know the 'rap singers', you've seen them on Top Of The Pops" bit, was pure Harry Hill, of course (the broken-robot repetition of a handful of phrases)
              As I've always found watching Hill to be like having full body excema I have great difficulty in believing Lee has a similar style.

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                #57
                Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                The Harry Potter phenomenon peaked nine years ago, and The Da Vinci Code was a hit book five years ago. People did jokes about them back then, so it was bizarre for Lee to just rehearse them without adding anything.
                Erm, compared to all those other boundary-pushing stand-ups on TV? In any case, the content was worth listening to, regardless of the subject matter.

                I don't get the Harry Hill comparison at all. Or the Bill Hicks one, really. The biggest influence I can see on Lee these days (especially compared to his 90s heyday) is Munnery.

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                  #58
                  Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                  Just to amplify the above, I think its fairkly unlikely you would get anyone slagging off the Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter in the terms Lee used on Live At The Apollo.

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                    #59
                    Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                    I think that Lee himself has said that he wants to revive a Dave Allen feel to the show. As he should, Dave Allen was awesome but even the flow of the Dave Allen show was interrupted by the sketches, however good they were. Interestingly, Allen's last couple of series had much less, if any, sketches.

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                      #60
                      Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                      I'd differ from that view as I remember Allen's sketches not being all that bad. But then, I was younger and if I saw them now then perhaps I'd have second thoughts, but, for me, they never detracted from the great man's repartee.

                      Strangely enough, listening to Lee's critique of The Da Vinci Code - 'the famous man saw the cup' - makes me want to search out a copy and see if it really is as primary-school articulate as that example demonstrates.

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                        #61
                        Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                        Lucy Waterman wrote:
                        Just to amplify the above, I think its fairly unlikely you would get anyone slagging off the Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter in the terms Lee used on Live At The Apollo.
                        If you're forgiving Lee's out-of-date, second-hand strikes at sitting ducks because, however stale they are, they're "boundary-pushing" compared to Live at the Apollo, you're setting a very low bar for him and I'm not sure why.

                        Still, as I say it was quite funny nonetheless.

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                          #62
                          Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                          The Horse wrote:
                          If you're forgiving Lee's out-of-date, second-hand strikes at sitting ducks
                          He was making a quite broad point about publishing and reading and used some of the best known examples of popular literature to make it. It just wouldn't make sense if he chose less well known examples. He wasn't just saying, "hey, have you noticed Dan Brown is rubbish, lolz?!"

                          In any case the delivery and perfectly chosen extract from the Dan Brown meant that it was, er, really funny. I thought the skit on that was probably the strongest, as well.

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                            #63
                            Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                            It wasn't the most bleeding-edge comedy ever but I enjoyed it. Sometimes I'd flinch from material as ostensibly sneering as that, but I found myself just being glad he was saying the things he was saying, even if it's obvious to The Likes Of Us that Chris Moyles and Dan Brown are rubbish. I loved that line that "if someone alive today read every book published in his lifetime they'd be more stupid than someone who'd read nothing".

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                              #64
                              Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                              Nico Rijnders wrote:
                              The Horse wrote:
                              If you're forgiving Lee's out-of-date, second-hand strikes at sitting ducks
                              He was making a quite broad point about publishing and reading and used some of the best known examples of popular literature to make it. It just wouldn't make sense if he chose less well known examples.
                              I don't know what his broader point was other than "Books are like, rubbish now aren't they?".

                              And of course it would make sense with less well-known examples. It wouldn't make sense if the books or their authors weren't well known, but the specific jokes/observations surely don't have to be familiar. In fact as a general rule I'd say it's always a good idea to do your own.

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                                #65
                                Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                The sketches were, not to put too fine a point on it, woeful. Especially the goat one.

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                                  #66
                                  Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                  I think people are getting a little too hung up on the idea that in taking the piss out a Chris Moyles, that Lee is taking cheap and obvious potshots at an easy target. Two things; easy target Moyles might be, but he remains hugely popular and for that reason alone has to be engaged with. No point in being esoteric for esoteric's sake.

                                  Moreover, even the genius of Lee's assault on Moyles is in the attention he ironically pays to the text - many people might think that Moyles is a fat wanker buy Lee's observations, linking the "toilet book" thing to the "butt-clenchingly honest" tribute from Davina McCall, or the "some people asked me what it was about" line remain his and his alone.

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                                    #67
                                    Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                    Kevin Eldon is fucking brilliant though. More of him please...

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                                      #68
                                      Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                      Can any of this be found on Youtube or the likes? I've seen some of Lee's earlier stuff (the impromptu Hulk bit and of course the peerless Braveheart material were outstanding), but I'd like to check out the current content. UK-only content delivery (iPlayer?) isn't available to me right now.

                                      Thank you all.

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                                        #69
                                        Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                        Yes, they are on YouTube.





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                                          #70
                                          Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                          wingco wrote:
                                          I think people are getting a little too hung up on the idea that in taking the piss out a Chris Moyles, that Lee is taking cheap and obvious potshots at an easy target.
                                          Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code, not Moyles.

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                                            #71
                                            Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                            But surely the main reason wingco gave why Moyles is being engaged with - his enormous popularity - is similarly true for Potter and Brown. Their popularity is enormous, their quality low.

                                            Also, sorry for the populist argument, but at the end of the day it's a mainstream comedy show, not something obscure touring tiny clubs around the country: your mainstream audience needs to either consciously or subconsciously know that the popular stuff many of them enjoy is in fact not very good at all. That's why the obvious potshots work so well: it's a reasonable assumption that many of the people laughing about his Brown/Moyles/Potter jokes have in fact enjoyed Brown/Moyles/Potter at some point, but on some level realize that they're of low quality.

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                                              #72
                                              Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                              Nišingr wrote:
                                              But surely the main reason wingco gave why Moyles is being engaged with - his enormous popularity - is similarly true for Potter and Brown. Their popularity is enormous, their quality low.
                                              Well, to be fair, Lee hasn't read any Harry Potter, and by the look of it, neither have you.

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                                                #73
                                                Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                                Which more recent publishing sensations do you think he should have grappled with, Horse? None occur to me, and there was a Harry Potter spin-off book out three months ago which everyone bought. . . .

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                                                  #74
                                                  Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                                  Whatever he said in the show, I'd be surprised if Lee "hasn't read any Harry Potter" given the fact that he subjected himself to the celebrity autobiographies in order to mock them effectively.

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                                                    #75
                                                    Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

                                                    Harri Saer wrote:
                                                    Whatever he said in the show, I'd be surprised if Lee "hasn't read any Harry Potter" given the fact that he subjected himself to the celebrity autobiographies in order to mock them effectively.
                                                    Except that his gag about HP wasn't that it was crap but that it was a kids' series read by adults. And unlike the celeb books, the HP books weren't quoted from at all in his set. So my guess that he genuinely hasn't read 'em, or at least hasn't read all that much.

                                                    I like a good kids' book myself.

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