BBC Two
We open on Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle – The One About Satire – with Chris Morris asking him “Do you think satire is a loser’s game?” It’s a fair question. Lee will go on to describe the current blowalition as the “first self-satirising government” a feature ironically flying in the face of the free market philosophy of farming out services to independent providers. We shouldn’t take this too seriously. Every generation of satirists declares their own redundancy at some point, usually at the point they stop being funny. Not that he gives a tinker’s cuss about that. “I’m not interested in laughs” he says “What I’m interested in is a temporary mass liberal consensus that dissolves on contact with air”. Ironically, that’s very funny.
A development that will excite TMWRNJ Lazy Comedy Slags fans is a resurrection of the “28 years old” joke format, this time about his son. “Fucking idiot ” he says paternally. “He is kind though so he should soon have his own Channel 4 comedy drama series” he continues, bayoneting the execrable Derek.
He says that watching the Russell Brand and Jeremy Paxman interview was “like watching a monkey throw his own excrement at a foghorn” and that’s as good a description as any of that particular turd joust. In discussing Planet of the Apes he goes on to identify the middle-class intelligentsia as “people like Helena Bonham Carter, Robin Ince and Eric Cantona” and the proletariat as “Ray Winstone, Fred West and that woman who put the cat in the bin”.
He’s not playing tonight – this is some very good shit. You can’t move for comedians declaring the current political shitscape beyond parody but much like how at any given point in history people believed they were living in uniquely violent unstable times everyone thinks that their politicians are just the wackiest crew of clowns we’ve ever seen and that mockery of them is as futile as expecting a cogent thought from Stacey Dooley. And yet they always seem to get by.
The verdict: We live in unremarkable times.
Marks out of 10: 7.5