Stewart Lee – Snowflake Review

The “self-styled snowflake of stand-up” returns with the first portion of a now-delayed double bill. Stewart Lee’s work on Snowflake hopes to tackle the surge of displacement in the modern field of comedy. More Lee can only be good Lee. Good for the heart. Good for the soul. Good for the status of stand-up comedy as an art form rather than a gag-filled routine. “This is nothing, but there is a palpable sense of hysteria,” Lee says of an audience giggling their way through a quieter part of the set. They are in the know. Fans of Lee have hit the apex after the artist left them behind. Snowflake is the result of that.

Perhaps it is because Lee is already on the next plane that some of Snowflake feels uncanny or unkempt. Shaky moments that see Lee rely on the nothingness that steered his earlier work so well. This time, though, it feels absent of the biting satire and guidance that formed the earlier works. Where comedy falls time and time again is in its appropriation and valuation of the real world. Lee was a master of that, but his new bits and pieces found on Snowflake feel more situational and lack that final blow that links it all back to an inherent and active criticism of the genre he finds himself in. Stories of spider bites and woes of the world around him are the set-up, but Lee lacks the strong finishes he so often provides.

Excuses aren’t needed. A crumbling set surrounds him, made to look as though he were hosting a 1970s BBC Christmas special. His suit is tacky and large. Morrissey isn’t looking well. But Lee steamrolls the usual routine quality of the stand-up set in this hour-long piece that never quite flatlines but never quite throws itself to the adrenalin-clad charms of the live audience atmosphere. Snowflake exists. It neither lives nor dies. It doesn’t do any irreparable damage to Lee. There is no dead wood in his material, but there is nothing here to spark the fire as so many of his other segments have. Never safe, never incredible. His breakdown of comedy is just as strong, but the fourth wall has been shattered, rebuilt, and broken again. It is less impressive to see it done a third time.  Despite that, it is still nice to see the glimmers of that classic Lee, steamrolling through the audience, pretending not to care if they’re brought along on a joyride they don’t quite understand.

All stand-up comedians are failed musicians, but can successful stand-up comedians continue at the top? Lee was the cream of the crop for so long but the cracks were beginning to show. Snowflake is the breach. Long and winding bits that, ultimately, feel misplaced rather than fuelled by that mock solipsism that guided Lee so well in earlier showcases. The bark has not left him. He has still got plenty to say and captures that Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle style with chats to the camera and great pacing, but the bite is lacking. It is long and winding. Nothing is scarier than a comedian with an acoustic guitar lingering behind him. Or it would be if the keen-eyed Lee fans knew he could crack out a good tune, as he did on the stronger If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One. At least on that classic bit of comedy, you cannot see the cogs turn in Lee’s mind as he figures out which bit of the set to jump to, which piece is going to garner the best laugh for a recorded set to be dumped onto a streaming service that isn’t Netflix.