EDINBURGH FESTIVAL 2009: Stewart Lee: IF YOU PREFER A MILDER COMEDIAN PLEASE ASK FOR ONE, The Stand, Edinburgh, 9 August 2009

Reviewing a Stewart Lee show is one of the most difficult things a journalist can do. Either you pick it apart and risk being quoted ad nauseum in a later interview or – if you’re unlucky – one of his shows or you just accept that what you witnessed was one of the world’s finest stand-ups and, beyond that, have little worth saying.

So..gulp…here goes. Tonight at The Stand, 41-year-old standup veteran Lee was on fine form. His beefs tonight were mainly British TV star Richard Hammond (who famously nearly died in a car crash) to whom he devotes half the show and a couple of shaggy-dog stories, and Irish cider manufacturers, Magners, to whom he gives the other.

Look you weren’t there so I can never convey how funny this was but he issued some death-wishes to Hammond, made up a lie about being at school with him and made up a long lie about an advertising slogan being in his family for centuries. This last bit was by way of coming on to his final beef, which was the appropriation for a TV advert by Magners of his favourite song – Steve Earle’s Galway Girl. To rectify this, and, he said, to illustrate “the final comics’ taboo, which is to do something sincerely and to do it well”, he sat down with a guitar and played a heartfelt rendition of the song, along with a Fringe violinist who he’d drafted in for the job. This did exactly what it was meant to do, it surprised us (first rule of good comedy), warmed our hearts and made us all go home and download Earle's original song.

The show, quite predictably, was a triumph of repetitiousness, Taking Things Too Far and failing to provide the indicators that he was “just joking”: “I wish Richard Hammond HAD died and I wish he had been decapitated. Of course, it’s a joke. But coincidentally it’s also what I believe…”

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