At the start, dressed in a dark suit with a grey shirt and thin black tie, he addressed the elephant in the room, namely him. He's put on a lot of weight, is going deaf (hearing aids), blind (in that he now needs glasses) and is losing his hair. He has a paunch that resembles mine if I tuck my shirt in and the image is disconcerting to me as I still remember him best from that show at the Stand where he vomited into the gaping anus of Jesus. He was thinner then (maybe because of the vomiting).
The first half, Tornado, is about how Netflix attached the wrong description to his Comedy Vehicle series. He gains a lot of mileage out of repetition (as is his schtick) and comments about how the laughs are equal in quantity to the previous night but are just in different places. He asks the audience a question at one point and receives the correct answer the first time. Not what he was expecting so he rails comedically at the punter for spoiling a future routine where two responses were necessary as the person should have known as he saw the show the previous night. This launches him into a sidetrack which gives the set some edge as he plays on the fact that he's going to have to work out a new punchline to that routine while delivering the rest of the material. He finishes on an Alan Bennett impression and a prop, which he says has cost him a fortune storing over lockdown for a two-second joke.
On its own, this was a strong hour (better received than last night he admits) but we still had Snowflake to go.
This time, he appeared on stage in a T-shirt and oversize denim shirt. This set was based around an article in GQ magazine by Tony Parsons where the music journalist labelled Lee as a misogynist. Lee dissected the comments at great length to defend himself, also explaining wokeness along the way and taking pops at American comics such as Dave Chappelle. He also demonstrated in extended detail how Ricky Gervais would say the unsayable if he did it properly. I actually thought he was going to vomit such was his commitment to his guttural utterings.
I didn't feel this half was as strong as the first but then I was starting to feel sleepy. The room was warm and I had a couple of elbow twitches where I realised I was nodding off. Stewart's voice can sound quite melodic when he's not making devil voices or sounding like he's got a verbal disability. He finished with a song on his guitar with prop snow falling on him while the room was illuminated by a glitterball.
The traffic on the way home was a bitch, probably exacerbated by my weariness. The motorway on-ramp was shut so I took a detour through the Clyde tunnel, which was single lane and full of potholes. The rain turned heavy on the other side and I realised my access to the M8 was closed here too and I was forced to take the diversion along the road through Govan parallel to the motorway. Then every traffic light changed from red to green just as I put the handbrake on as I entered Paisley. And so time got stretched to breaking just like Lee's routines.
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