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Life

13th Jun 2013

Now is a Good Time…to Laugh

JOE

Today’s laugh with thanks to Bulmers come to us from one of our favourite comedians, Stewart Lee. He’s been around for decades, and he really is the comedian’s comedian.

Stewart Lee has been on the comedy circuit since the late 1980s, and hit the big time in the ’90s, as part of a comedy duo with Richard Herring. Unsurprisingly, they were known as Lee & Herring, and were on the BBC with their shows Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy, which were two cult hits.

If you go to a Stewart Lee show nowadays however, most people are likely to know him from his newest show on the BBC, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, which has been pretty popular again, showing him as an old school comedian just doing stand-up and railing on whatever he feels like. In this clip, he’s not a fan of the recent trend of celebrity books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfHNdAq89Sc

He’s also good friends with the man who played Father Stone in Father Ted, Michael Redmond, who was a great stand-up comedian who used to play on the fact that he was a bit strange looking. Here’s Stew talking about his favourite joke of Michael’s, how he confronted Joe Pasquale about knicking it, and doing his best to create a joke that Joe can’t steal.

A lot of Lee’s material is painstakingly crafted, you can tell that every word is chosen carefully, and only at the end of the show do you realise how carefully he’s knitted the whole thing together.

Like many of today’s stand-up acts, he often treads the line between offensive and controversial, in particular, but we definitely recommend that you check out a full show of his to really appreciate it.

LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge