“Pure. Simple. Classic.” That’s the refrain – a little tongue-in-cheek, would you believe? – in Stewart Lee’s new show Basic Lee. After a series of high-concept shows (two of them recently recorded for the BBC), Basic Lee sees the 54-year-old stripped back and celebrating the rudiments of standup. One man, one microphone, as he initially defines it – a formula that’s soon accruing qualifiers and footnotes, because Lee can no sooner do basic comedy than the government can do basic competence. But the show is more limber and loosely structured than his usual work – which comes with both gains and losses.
The gains are in encountering a comic who seems, more than in his earlier output, to be enjoying himself – and who, having created a baggier show to work with, has given himself wing-spreading room over the eight months of its London run and tour. His material on the current Tory cabinet is ostentatiously recited from cue cards – because, given the likely longevity of the Truss premiership, it’s not worth committing to memory. Of-the-moment jokes about the Queen’s funeral and the postponement of Lee’s BBC special likewise won’t be in the show for keeps. The topicality is fun, though – as long as you don’t mind that most of the gags have already moonlighted in Lee’s Observer column.
That’s not the only recycling here, in a show that opens with a joke Lee used to perform in the 90s, and includes a routine about Fleabag cannibalised from early versions of his 2019 Snowflake/Tornado diptych. It’s a section I was very happy to hear again, mind you, as Lee spins his fake regard for Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s formal innovations into a whole alternative history of standup, in which, when the young Lee dares to turn his act out towards the audience, comics like Daniel Kitson and Sean Lock – reactionaries both! – whip him back into line.
That confluence, of sacrilege and sarcasm, is fertile territory for Lee. So too the mockery of his audience, his own craft, and his supposed cultural significance – all even higher in the mix than usual here. There’s a choice gag imagining the logical endpoint of Lee’s act as just a figment of his audience’s imagination. Another section finds Lee parroting the snobbish fanboying of his own mostly male followers, to cheerful laughter-of-recognition breaking out around the room.
This particular fanboy missed the rich structuring of Lee’s best work, though, and found a few of tonight’s routines a bit Stew-by-numbers. An eye-catching section in the first half finds our host weighing in, and refusing to weigh in, on the JK Rowling/trans conversation. “It’s not about that!,” he protests too much – but, while I appreciate that the routine’s withholding of an opinion is partly the point, I found it a bit coy. One or two later set-pieces (the pernickety monologue about jazz; the sketch imagining his audience’s humdrum working lives) feel too schematically like good ideas for a Stewart Lee sketch – well executed, our patience duly tested, but devoid of surprise.
None of which greatly diminishes the pleasures of this two-hour set: Lee firing on only a few cylinders is still a richer comedy experience than many acts with engines at full throttle. It may not be pure, simple or classic Lee. But it’s a chance to see this most meticulous of standups let it all hang out – and that’s a chance worth taking.
• Basic Lee is at the Leicester Square theatre until 17 December, then touring.
