Stewart Lee: Snowflake

Stewart Lee: Snowflake ★★★★★

This Review is from August 2022

Every live stand up show is an unique event and the possibility of failure is real. Will the audience behave as anticipated?

Stewart Lee has been touring Snowflake for some time and the 2020 Edinburgh Fringe run at The Stand’s New Town Theatre marks the end of its life. This afternoon, this is what happened –

The comedian introduces himself from backstage, comes on, delivers a great opening line and then some twat with a phone heckled. And, despite repeated requests, he refused to turn his phone off. It took around five or six minutes to sort out.

“In my thirty-three years of stand up experience…” says Lee, “it’s very unlikely that the show can recover from this.”

But quickly recover he did.

Right wing Brexiter, Tony Parsons, once described Lee as, and I’m paraphrasing from memory, “a woke, enlightened, professionally sensitive, Guardian columnist, BBC approved comedian…”

He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

The show sets about dismantling Parsons’ views via digressions and playful teasing of sections of the audience. This is Lee in full flow. Carving up the crowd, overexplaining the jokes. In a class of his own.

“Don’t get caught up in their stupid culture war of blaming people who aren’t to blame, for things they haven’t done. Try and stay a snowflake if you can.” Lee concludes.

The comedian is too intelligent and too funny to be ignored. Just turn your bloody phone off.

Martin Walker