How I Escaped My Certain Fate
Experience how it feels to be the subject of a blasphemy prosecution! Find out why ‘wool’ is a funny word! See how jokes work, their inner mechanisms revealed, before your astonished face! In 2001, after over a decade in the business, Stewart Lee quit stand-up, disillusioned and drained, and went off to direct a loss-making opera about Jerry Springer. How I Escaped My Certain Fate details his return to live performance, and the journey that took him from an early retirement to his position as the most critically acclaimed stand-up in Britain. Here is Stewart Lee’s own account of his remarkable comeback, told through transcripts of the three legendary full-length shows that sealed his reputation. Astonishingly frank and detailed in-depth notes reveal the inspiration and inner workings of his act. With unprecedented access to a leading comedian’s creative process, this book tell us just what it was like to write these shows, develop the performance and take them on tour. How I Escaped My Certain Fate is everything we have come to expect from Stewart Lee: fiercely intelligent, unsparingly honest and very funny.
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A deadly serious, hilarious book.,
This book is perhaps the funniest book I have ever read. Stewart Lee has consistently been one of the funniest comedians in the country and his apparently arrogant yet always self-deprecating style has been brilliantly realised on the page. He shows a thoughtfulness and integrity that puts previous controversies about his work into context and also provides a fascinating peek behind the subjects of his stand-up set to reveal complexity, planning and yet more humour behind them.
One of the things that stands out about his stand-up work is how much of it he does to amuse himself, and how he is well aware and largely in control of alienating and regaining his live audiences.
The transcripts of his live sets are really interesting as the copious footnotes give them new depth, but they read pretty well too – although probably better for having watched the sets on dvd. I can’t recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in Stewart Lee in particular or stand up in general. It will make you laugh.
One thing, if you’re easily offended, then I would urge you to read this book – you’ll be offended, but it raises a lot of ideas about why you might be offended, and why Stewart Lee has bothered to offend you.
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|Funnier Than Del Boy Falling Through The Bar,
Alternative Comedian Stewart Lee tells of how he quit stand-up for several years before returning to critical acclaim in this beautifully written, thoughtful and in-depth memoir full of lovely one-liners. The footnotes are a complete joy!
Excellent value-for-money, it contains detailed analysis of the transcripts from three of his recent shows (Stand-up Comedian; ’90s Comedian & 41st Best Stand-Up Ever – all available on DVD if you haven’t yet seen them) along with a number of interesting appendices containing articles and other works. Halfway through you learn the significance of the cover design.
Highly recommended if you enjoy intelligent non-mainstream comedy or just want to know more about the thought processes behind putting together a successful stand-up routine in Lee’s inimitable style.
Or if you are a sardine.
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|The art of brilliant comedy,
This book is as compelling as a thriller, as thought-provoking as a philosophical treatise and as beautifully written as any literary novel. And it’s funny; as funny as…well, as funny as seeing Stewart Lee perform live. Or almost. Having seen all of the routines transcribed here I was hearing Lee’s unique delivery of every line and remembering the (sometimes uncomfortable) silences, the shouts and whispers and the occasional startling physicality in the routines. Readers not familiar with the live acts will certainly want to seek them out on DVD after reading them here and comedy enthusiasts and fans of exhilarating prose everywhere will find plenty to enjoy.
The pleasure for me was in discovering the minute workings of the routines, their carefully crafted structure, the precisely chosen word or phrase that sets up a linguistic or imaginative collision that keeps the audience suspended in a brilliant comic moment. Lee harnesses all his formidable comedic and intellectual powers to skewer the crass and the cruel, the dumbed-down mainstream and the self-regarding celebrity elite. He is both deadly serious and richly, sometimes absurdly, comic. And it is comedy that is always about something, always underpinned by the passions and preoccupations of an intelligent and idealistic man unafraid to challenge and even alienate his audience to make his point. But for all the seriousness of purpose Lee’s performances are, first and foremost, brilliantly funny and original and this book is a valuable and enjoyable commentary upon them. “How I escaped…” is a mixture of copiously and fascinatingly footnoted transcripts of three live shows and autobiographical content that charts Lee’s early career and fluctuating fortunes on the circuit. Although he does not give away much about his personal life, preferring to keep the focus squarely on his art, Lee’s descriptions of the triumphs and disasters in his artistic journey provide a deep and engrossing insight into his motivation as a performer. All this and still laugh-out-loud funny.
Those detractors who view Lee as smug and arrogant will doubtless find further ammunition in his decision to set his work down and annotate it so minutely but they surely miss the point. Lee’s analysis of his work is fiercely honest and he his own harshest critic, as quick to admit a lapse as a triumph. This book is a strange, delightful and engrossing read and a great insight into our most original and important comedian.
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