Here's a review I wrote about a Stewart Lee gig for my student newspaper which was rejected, presumably because of the title (it's a heckle he got on the street in Aberdeen).

“Satirical C*nt.”

Stewart Lee “If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One” at The Music Hall, 10^th November 2009.

We live in facile times. We live in times when Michael McIntyre is considered something other than merely Michael McIntyre. Top Gear presenters scurry about our landscape in unattainable aluminium crushing saplings. Our age is crying out for someone to give it to us straight, like a pear cider that’s made from 100% pears. Stewart Lee may or may not be this man. He has certainly shed the universal misanthropic anger at the world around him of his youth and replaced it with a misanthropic anger about the world around him which has been forced on him against his will, by the continuing failings of popular culture as he sees it. The set’s general theme is the inescapability of pop culture; how hard it is to avoid Clive Anderson in the modern world, basically. The influence of stand-up newcomer and all-round zealot Josie Long is clear on Lee, who himself helped her break into the circuit. He has a newfound Longesque earnestness, inspired by his new status as a parent and by his disgust at the angry-about-nothing humour of the Frankie Boyles. Throughout the set there is a sense of a desperate will to be happy and content despite the frustrating world around him, even when he stands on a table in the middle of the audience and screams unamplified improvisation about the Mark Watson pear cider adverts for fifteen minutes, climaxing in his aggressively accosting someone getting up to use the loo with, “If you’ve EVER seen ANYTHING, you’ll KNOW that this must be pretty near the end.” The whole gig has the atmosphere not of a man struggling to be heard (he’s always been popular amongst those in the know, and always will be) but to find his voice. In the parenting world he has little to complain about, and wants it to stay that way, but this just means the minor disappointments push him over the edge even more. He finishes the set by singing a straight-up, unfunny rendition of Steve Earle’s ‘Galway Girl’, his favourite song, remarking to the audience, who tense up when they see him get a guitar, that the last taboo in stand-up isn’t rape, incest or the holocaust; it is a man trying to do something sincerely and well. Too true.