Stewart Lee: Tornado / Snowflake review – Britain’s finest comedian in action

In the last decade, Stewart Lee has been at the peak of his powers. Increasingly over this time he has channelled his comedy through a carefully constructed onstage persona, a parody of himself. The embittered, envious comic going through mid-life crisis, brimming with self-regard, obsessed with his own status and resentful and contemptuous of his audience. This version of himself was particularly (and very amusingly) antipathetic and antagonistic in his previous show Content Provider which was a beautifully crafted comedy set that, to my mind, further cemented his status as Britain’s finest comedian.

In his new show, Snowflake/Tornado he sardonically explores many themes which will be familiar to his audience from his status and place in the comedy world to political correctness. Despite the familiar thematic ground, it didn’t feel stale and his act contained several pleasing new twists. It was a delight to see him live in action again. So much so that I will be seeing him again in Leeds in March.

By way of introduction, Lee laments his physical decline and acknowledges the immediately noticeable fact that he has got fatter and greyer since his last tour (“I know what you’re thinking, Julian Assange has let himself go”). His exploration of the indignities of his decay kicked off the set as he told us of his recent visit to the doctor where a nurse expressed sympathy and advised him to try “chair based” exercise.

There were fewer overtly political references in his set this time, but an early comment provided Lee with the opportunity to mock himself and his (liberal love-in) audience who have been “starved of the opportunity to participate in mass agreement” over the last two years. This began a consistent theme of defending liberal sensibilities and “snowflake” PC culture while also mocking them and being far more savage and confrontational than a self-professed snowflake is supposed to be.

The show is essentially two sets separated by an interval which explore similar themes but shift the focus. In Tornado he riffs on his place in the world of comedy and how others perceive him, which is explored through his petty, bitter caricature of himself, obsessed with his status and always the butt of his own joke. There are plenty of laughs squeezed out of his faux self-regard with frequent references to The Times naming him the world’s best living comedian, “heavy is the head that wears the crown”.

The foundation of Tornado is Netflix erroneously using the blurb from absurd American horror film Sharknado to describe his award winning tv series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle – an error that remained in place for two years. This provides the framework through which Lee explores his status and compares himself to more famous mainstream comedians, such as Ricky Gervais and Jimmy Carr (who get both barrels).

The first half climaxes gloriously in a self-mocking parody of Alan Bennett’s prose complete with an impression (“yes, I’m doing impressions now”). This was inspired by Bennett’s pretentiously high brow review of Lee’s stand up in which he bizarrely compared him to obscure philosophers. “Stewart Lee is the JL Austin of stand up… that’s a great quote for the poster”.

The second part of the show, Snowflake, kicks off with an attack on Tony Parsons’ criticism of Lee in GQ magazine in which he referred to him as “the rancid tip of a cesspit” and develops into a defence of political correctness via poking fun at his gran’s generation lamenting the things they can’t say and confusing PC culture with health and safety regulation.

He takes aim at Gervais again by ridiculing the idea that he says “the unsayable”, pointing out that “he’s not saying the unsayable, he’s saying the sayable. By definition. To millions of people for millions of dollars”. This characteristically veers off into a surreal and purposely overlong endurance test for the audience as he attempts to “say the unsayable” by gasping and groaning into the microphone as he becomes increasingly sweaty and red-faced. The laughs crescendo then dip into awkwardness before looping back round into laughs.

A highlight of the second half of the show is his sharp ridicule of the overblown, over reverential reaction to Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her show “Fleabag”. It was a a show I thought amusing and enjoyable myself, but I was also baffled by the extent of the praise and sudden explosion of Waller-Bridge mania.

Lee deconstructs the excessive praise lavished on Waller-Bridge and her award-winning show (“remember how different everything was before she invented looking at the camera and addressing the audience?”). This leads to a surreal riff on how different everything from stand up to weather forecast might have been if only they’d thought to directly address the audience and onto an exploration of what a “woke”, PC version of Bond might look like (which descends into Bond raping a range of small animals).

Tornado/Snowflake is a satisfying mix of the familiar and new. With Lee’s familiar criticism of his audience for not upping their game (he frequently lamented us being a typical “new years crowd” not reacting to certain bits as planned. There was plenty of his classic “callbacks”, digressions and self-mocking deconstruction of his own craft.

However, new elements such as the two literary spoofs were fresh and contained some of his best writing. In the first half he read “Sharknado” as written by Alan Bennett and in the second he read – in one of the wittiest parts of the routine – Enid Blyton’s “Noddy and the gollywog”.

Of course, there were several moments unique to the night as Lee reacted to the audience. With one bit of material being completely abandoned as a young member of the audience suddenly had to rush out, leading Lee to go off on an unscripted tangent.

Lee is touring Tornado/Snowflake across the country through to July and he will likely continue to develop the material in the run up to recording. While it didn’t quite hit the heights of Content Provider, this was still a masterful performance from Britain’s finest comedian and I laughed out loud throughout.