Stand-up: Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf

In his new show, Stewart Lee — self-described as culturally irrelevant and approaching sixty with various undisclosed health complaints — proposes to examine the success of the Dave Chappelles and Ricky Gervaises of the world by becoming one.

In the second half, he dons a hulking, £6,000 werewolf costume to perform reactionary Netflix comedy as the Man-Wulf, a brash, humanity-hating creature from the dark forests of the subconscious. The question the show asks — whether the style of comedy is inseparable from its content, or whether the same anarchic energy could be redirected at something worthier — is a genuinely interesting one. That Lee manages to make it extremely funny while asking it is a great achievement.

The first half is Lee doing what he has always done, in the self-lacerating mode he has refined across the last decade of shows. He sits in a chair in the manner of Dave Allen, from whom he openly borrows, and works through his material with the elaborate, doubling-back circuitousness that either delights or infuriates depending on your tolerance for watching someone dismantle and reassemble the same joke several times over to see what’s inside it. A section about Gregg Wallace, written eighteen months before the comedian’s public fall from grace, has acquired an obvious additional dimension that Lee milks with visible relish. A Union Jack gets tossed from the stage in the opening minutes. The audience, at the show attended for this review, already knew exactly what kind of evening they were in for, and were largely correct.

The second half is stranger and funnier. The Man-Wulf costume — creaky and imposing in equal measure — transforms the stage geometry entirely. There’s something in the physical awkwardness of the beast that recalls the Crack Fox from The Mighty Boosh, which is not a coincidence given Lee’s involvement with that programme. The Man-Wulf is a compellingly horrible figure: loud, rhythmically insistent, weirdly fascinating. That’s the point, and Lee is honest about it — the show doesn’t resolve its central tension so much as hold it up and ask you to sit with the discomfort.

Whether the concept is as deeply explored as it might be is a fair question. But as a piece of committed, genuinely ambitious comedy from someone who has been making the case for a different kind of stand-up for thirty years, it is as good as anything he has done. The world getting worse, as he acknowledges, has only made the argument more urgent. The Man-Wulf, regrettably, is winning. That Lee can still make that fact funny is remarkable.

You can catch the show on tour throughout the year.