ROB NEWMAN
Oxford Playhouse, 29/1/23
★★★
STEWART LEE
Oxford Playhouse, 30/1/23
★★★★

ROB NEWMAN and STEWART LEE must be two of the most ambitious comedians on the stand up circuit.

In 1993, along with his then comedy partner David Baddiel, Newman became the first comedian to play a stadium. His future as a stand up was assured, and yet he chose instead to throw himself into the anti-capitalist movement as an activist, reporter and novelist, before going on to produce a number of radio series on science, history and philosophy.

His abilities as a raconteur are incredible and he relays stories of relationship misunderstandings and therapy gone wrong. He could easily produce a heart-warming show based purely on comedic interpretations of his own experiences.

But instead, we are moved on to critiques of Nietzsche and Einstein, a history of traffic reduction schemes in the Roman Empire, and a thorough debunking of theories of overpopulation, ancient and contemporary.

This puts him firmly in the camp of what historian Ciaran Walsh calls “cosmic materialism,” and his tirade against the “infantile” belief that we have more in common with alien life-forms than with our own fellow terrestrial species is as passionate as it is funny.

You leave feeling of being not just entertained, but a fuller human being, having reconnected with parts of the self — and the collective self — that you may not experience very often.

Lee’s latest show, meanwhile, claims to eschew high concept in favour of a return to the basic elements of stand up, one man and a mic. But nothing is simple in Lee’s world. Every statement is pulled apart and interrogated, along with the audience’s reactions to it.

Like Newman, he revels in the juxtaposition of the erudite and the ridiculous (and occasionally lewd), and like him, he is not satisfied with simply being funny. He wants to affect us, to leave us somehow changed — or at least unnerved.

Lee is a big fan of the Fall, and it strikes me that he has much in common with that band’s mastermind, Mark E Smith. Like Smith, Lee is in touch with his inner misanthrope, and sometimes his comedy feels like what psychotherapists call “shadow work.”

John Peel once described the Fall as “always different, always the same” and with Lee even the tried and tested material will always take an unexpected and uncomfortable turn. Like the Fall, His use of repetition (“it’s not repetition, it’s discipline,” Smith once clarified), leaves you grinning like an idiot without really knowing why.

And just before the show ends, he portrays the social interactions of a typical working week that manages to capture the banal horror of capitalism more acutely than any number of ranting socialist comedians ever could.

I am reminded of Marx’s line about man being: “at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

This is the opposite of entertainment, and after an evening of visceral hilarity it feels like a slap in the face. Brilliant.
 
Rob Newman is touring until April 21: http://www.robnewman.com/live.html

Stewart Lee is touring all year: https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/live-dates/