How I Escaped My Certain Fate

Stewart Lee – How I Escaped My Certain Fate

Lee’s book is a very interesting proposition formally.  I’m not really interested in the autobiography of most comedians, or at least not at very great length (I find it can get wearing).  While there is, unavoidably, a bit of autobiography in this book, Lee’s life is not the business of How I Escaped My Certain Fate.  Rather, refreshingly, his work is.  The book is essentially the transcription of three of his most recent stand-up routines, each of which is prefaced by a prose piece contextualising it.  The “shows” are then incredibly heavily annotated.  To begin with I thought he was going for a knowingly Shandean level of absurdity, but it soon becomes apparent that the footnotes are really the story that he’s telling — explaining the genesis of various ideas, the links that some ideas or jokes bear to fellow comedians’ work, cogent rationales for his limit-pushing jokes, etc.  I like what I’ve seen of Lee’s work on TV (I haven’t seen him live yet) but I felt that this particular form,  sold him to me even more effectively than if I had simply been part of the audience at any one of the given recordings (particularly the Christ-bashing, which Richard Herring goes even further with, just leaves me cold in straight performance, whereas at least here I felt I understood the rationale without finding it particularly amusing*).  For anyone remotely interested in the work that goes into such a show, this is required reading.

The level of detail he lets you in on is nicely judged, being at once sufficiently illustrative on any given point but never too much for those who are not mouth-breathing fans.  For instance, music.  Lee is famously contrarian in his appeal, and it amused me that he deliberately chose Evan Parker’s “The Breath of Coldness” as the music that would play as the crowd filtered into the venue for one show — that being a difficult piece which was, apparently, “a good way of identifying troublemakers”, i.e. people for whom Lee’s set itself was likely to be a difficult sell, because such people would inevitably go up to the sound desk to request that the music be switched off.  (This suggests that I would not care for Lee, which, at least so far as I know his work, is not the case at all: don’t discriminate against those who like tunes, Lee!  We’re not closed-minded!)

One of the comments that the BF made, whose copy of the book I borrowed, was that the book really ought to come with an index, and that is a sentiment I wholly echo.  The book is crammed full of recommendations, sometimes for people I’ve heard of, much more often for people whose names I’ve barely even heard of (Simon Munnery is a notable example), despite considering myself quite a lot more knowledgeable about comedy than the average bear.  Should I re-read it, I will do so with a pencil in hand to underline salient names.

I don’t consider Lee the Second Coming as some comedy fans do (the fervour Lee inspires in some people of my acquaintance is extreme and even frightening to those not similarly minded) but I do thoroughly recommend the book: it’s very good and supremely interesting.  But there is a but coming, and it is that it’s excellent — but only if you’re into this kind of thing, specifically British stand-up of this vintage and political-philosophical bent.  I suspect those who will most enjoy it will already have long since heard of it.  Still, it’s not less worth the reading for that.

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*This is not for personal religious reasons but more prosaically because it always smacks of preaching to the converted: there isn’t the remotest danger in Lee or Herring doing this kind of material, certainly not in metropolitan areas anyway, because all their fans are almost even more loudly atheistic in their views than they are.  And I also have little time for atheists who treat those who are faithful with what is barely disguised contempt (Lee doesn’t fall into this in the book, but I’ve heard Herring in podcasts and the like where he’s just a bit too cavalier with the intelligence of the faithful than I find acceptable, really).