"Is that Joe Pasquale? In the garden? What could he possibly want?"

The difference between the great and the good is undeniably apparent the moment Stewart Lee walks onto the small Phoenix stage and launches into his opening joke. Beginning with a rendition of an encounter with a born again Christian door-to-door evangelist and ending with a simple commentary on the rise and fall of the level of laughter in the room - somehow turning the reaction of people to his joke into the joke itself - the ease with which Lee uses what is basically just mumbled repetition and creates something that not only takes apart the concept of what 'a joke' is but does it while still being funny is truly remarkable.

There was nothing wrong per se with most of the preceding five acts; indeed, Alan Cochrane, using similar techniques to Lee with regard to getting outside the traditional performer/audience relationship, built up from a quiet, unassuming start to leave the stage with the crowd still working out how they got from a debate on with which hand one should hold a microphone to a man ejaculating over a plate of sushi while telling Bob Dylan to fuck off.

It was just that Lee, despite being a mainstay on the 'alternative' (shudder) circuit for nearly 20 years now and performing a set made up of only 4 jokes, all of which I had heard before, still had a freshness and intelligence that made the others seem somewhat trite and stale. One of the supports in particular, a woman whose name I have thankfully wiped from memory, seemed to have been transported from another century entirely, one where tired lesbian jokes and cliche-ridden one liners were considered risque rather than an embarrassment.



The key to Stewart Lee's comedic genius (and I do not use the word lightly) is that he credits his audience with some intelligence. Rather than waste his time patronising the crowd by leading them gently by the hand towards a punchline that is laid out for them, he builds and stretches a joke over five or ten minutes, allowing the audience to find the humour in it for themselves. His Ang Lee joke for example, surely one of the finest of any current comic, has its 'tooth hurty' punchline, if it can be classed as such a thing, slipped in at the end so subtly that you are not sure whether you actually heard it or not.

By exploiting the humour to be found in the gap between Stewart Lee the comedian and Stewart Lee the person and by recognising the processes through which comedy has traditionally arisen in order to subvert them, Lee has in effect stretched the boundaries of what a stand up comedian can do, creating a meta-comedy that has few equals. The fact that he has done it while publicly humiliating Joe Pasquale just makes it all the better.