How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee

How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Clowns are scary.

From the Pueblo clowns of New Mexico to the Bouffons of medieval France, clowns stand outside the social order, marking out their own sacred space from which they can parody and decry the pretensions of the high and mighty with impunity. These are not the jolly, red nosed men with the custard pies and big shoes, but the mad men, smeared with excrement who caper and point and mock. As I said, scary, but also necessary.

In this book, Lee analyzes three of his recent stand up routines by annotating a transcript with extensive footnotes that are longer than the pieces themselves. If this was a directors commentary on a DVD, it would require the stand up routine to be paused after every section to allow the commentary to catch up. Each routine is put in the context of Lee’s life during the mid 2000s - his career hitting a low point where he considered giving up stand up, his health problems and most famously his involvement with ‘Jerry Springer - the Opera’ that saw him facing a charge of blasphemy and the producers of the TV broadcast receiving death threats.

Barry Cryer once said that analyzing comedy was like dissecting a frog - nobody laughs and the frog dies. In this analysis, Stewart Lee disproves this truism with a book that is both perceptive and very funny. He emulates the Pueblo clowns in the way that he demolishes the social conventions of taste and decency with remorseless logic and precise scatological intent, particularly in his routine about vomiting into the gaping anus of Christ that is simultaneously revolting, hilarious, thought provoking and most importantly the one joke that Joe Pasquale could never steal to use on a Royal Variety performance.

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