Stewart Lee - Observational Comedy

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• published: 21 Nov 2015
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From the stand-up special 41st Best Stand Up Ever (2008). A footnote from Stewart Lee's book How I Escaped My Certain Fate – The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian: The best and most economic parody of observational comedy comes, as usual, from the comedian Simon Munnery, who simply says to the audience: ‘Anyone ever noticed anything, ever?’ A more elaborate one was an early nineties act by the sometime local-radio DJ and full-time loony Tom Binns called Some Kind of Comedian, where he stood in a metal dustbin and said stuff like, ‘Think of a thing. Think of a thing, right. Are you thinking of it? Now, think of that thing on drugs.’ This observational-comedy section was one of the rare occasions onstage in which I try to act, as I take on the amped-up persona of a formerly fêted mid-nineties hit Edinburgh Fringe solo-show comic, now working the length and breadth of the country with the same twenty minutes every night to support his mortgage, kids, maintenance payments and coke habit, with flashes of genius filtering through a firewall of saleable content. I have no one specific in mind here. In the mid-nineties, many circuit comics imagined they were Britpop rock stars, and then came down from the contact high and realised they were still variety turns. We’re all turns. There’s no shame in it! Turn, turn, turn again!