| How I Escaped My Certain Fate |  | Author: Stewart Lee
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
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Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 127
Media: Paperback
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0571254802
EAN: 9780571254804
ASIN: 0571254802
Publication Date: August 5, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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. This book 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
 Cant help but like it September 6, 2010
Corky
Stewart Lee, is unique; his type of comedy connects well with his audience. The book is much more than simply some transcripts for a show with padding wrapped around. It is constructed with the wit and care he takes in all his delivery of his craft. It is open and honest, and cites some remarkable, enjoyable experiences as well as some laugh out loud moments. Give yourself a day off, and promise yourself a good read.
Clowns are scary September 5, 2010
Mr. Neil O. Hopkins (sheffield, uk)
Clowns are scary.
From the Pueblo clowns of New Mexico to the Bouffons of medieval France, clowns stand outside the social order, marking out their own sacred space from which they can parody and decry the pretensions of the high and mighty with impunity. These are not the jolly, red nosed men with the custard pies and big shoes, but the mad men, smeared with excrement who caper and point and mock. As I said, scary, but also necessary.
In this book, Lee analyzes three of his recent stand up routines by annotating a transcript with extensive footnotes that are longer than the pieces themselves. If this was a directors commentary on a DVD, it would require the stand up routine to be paused after every section to allow the commentary to catch up. Each routine is put in the context of Lee's life during the mid 2000s - his career hitting a low point where he considered giving up stand up, his health problems and most famously his involvement with `Jerry Springer - the Opera' that saw him facing a charge of blasphemy and the producers of the TV broadcast receiving death threats.
Barry Cryer once said that analyzing comedy was like dissecting a frog - nobody laughs and the frog dies. In this analysis, Stewart Lee disproves this truism with a book that is both perceptive and very funny. He emulates the Pueblo clowns in the way that he demolishes the social conventions of taste and decency with remorseless logic and precise scatological intent, particularly in his routine about vomiting into the gaping anus of Christ that is simultaneously revolting, hilarious, thought provoking and most importantly the one joke that Joe Pasquale could never steal to use on a Royal Variety performance.
Excellent but watch the shows first! September 3, 2010
Will Robertson
I loved this book, being a total comedy nerd. Its divided into annotations of three of Lee's comedy show, seperated by biographical accounts of his return to stand-up and his time on the road in between writing each show, before ending with a hodge-podge of articles, diary excerpts etc. in the form of appendices. Having read some critiques on here and having talked to others who have read it, I will agree that the extremly large footnotes are jarring at first (their length and depth make their very prescence as 'mere' footnotes seemingly odd) however I quickly got into the swing of things. Also the biographical breaks were the most intriguing bit of this in my opinion and wished they were longer, or that Lee would pen a full autobiograhical account of his career. However the structure allows him to focus more on the craft of stand-up than such book arguably would allow so not a true negative in my mind.
Some have also said that reading his routines from the page removes the essence of his performance, however I read it knowing the pacing and tone originally used so that wasn't a problem and found myself laughing along as I read. So for anyone who may have come to Stewart Lee without watching any or all of the shows printed (Stand-up Comedian, 90s Comedian and 41st Best Stand-up)I would very much suggest go watch/listen to them first as you may risk ruining the experience by reading a detailed break-down of them in advance without the context of the original performance, leaving the routine dead on the page and revealing the mechanics at work where you to watch the shows at a later date.
All in all a great collection of Lee's musings and craft, plus smatterings of anecdotes, biography and miscellania that leave you wanting much more. One thing I will repeat from other reviews, this book is very much for the converted, I doubt it will win many haters over to him, bar perhaps revealing he's not quite as arrogant as he appears on stage!
 Don't make me Stewart Lee. You wouldn't like me when I'm Stewart Lee September 3, 2010
Roman Totale (Wakefield)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Lee's stand-up leans heavily on feigning complicity with his audience. The set is critiqued, signposted as it unfolds. he and the crowd are in this together, he tells them.
This book transcribes three such sets and adds another layer of critiquing and signposting, this time with us readers. We are told what he's up to, where he got it all from, how he's playing them. The result for the reader is the sense that one is being as duped as the punters at the shows. This guy can't be relied on: he's having his cake and eating it again, as he did in the shows. It's all very clever, but a lot of cake for Stew and a little irritating for us. Really good writers can pull this kind of thing off (try Nabokov's Pale Fire, Gide's Faux-Monnayeurs), but Stew is only really good at stand-up.
Enjoyment not helped by the format: most pages have 2 or 3 often lengthy footnotes. You're reading ahead, reading back. The guys over at Faber do help by aligning page endings of the transcriptions with the notes, even at the cost of pages of main text of no more than a few lines.
The book's okay. It's worth its existence because of the excellence of the stand-up sets. They're probably better accessed on DVD, though, as he says himself in there. I just wish I didn't suspect that this whole approach was just a way of lobbing out a book quickly by refrying old stuff (albeit very good old stuff): lengthily annotating the pages as they fall, tagging some old magazine pieces, etc. at the end, and job's a good un.
Personal observation: he retains an 80s sixth-former "them and us" approach to what he describes as "mainstream". He returns over and over to the issue of joke theft by the ITV brigade of "our" material. "We" are the alternative crew, and he seems to use that term without irony (unless he's playing with us again, gosh). So Simon Munnery, Daniel Kitson, etc. all get big respect. But it all gets a bit colder with your Jimmy Carrs and your Ricky Gervaises. People who are doing better than Stew. He's not jealous, is he?
Marmite on caviar September 2, 2010
A. J. King (UK)
Stewart Lee is like Marmite - you either love him or hate him and nothing will ever alter that first perception. This book is marmite spread on black pudding. The reason I have only awarded it 3 stars isn't the book's intelligence, nor its insight, its wit.... it's just the sheer conceit of taking your three most popular shows, transcribing them down to every single um and er, and then to perform a clinical dissection of every single influence, reference, nuance, tic, plagiarism and affectation even those unintended but which worked anyway due to serendipity or coincidence. I have not seen footnotes like this since The Thid Policeman. None of us will have "got" every reference that Lee used in all his acts but its's a fair bet that most fans will have got most of them, so to use the kind of logic that Stew himself would use, this is an anthology for idiots. Having said that I loved Lee's analysis of comedy as an abstract art form but this isn't a book about comedy, it's about three comedies in particular, plus some essays and interviews in the appendices that I must say I enjoyed very much (largely because of the absence of masses of referential analysis on every page). At well over 300 pages the book is either good value or a crawl towards the end depending on how many of Stew's references you had already figured, but as I waded through the "Nineties Comedian" scripts I felt like lying on the stage in the foetal position and moaning "Stew, please. Please stop. Stop now, Stew. We love you. We are your fans Stew. You don't, you don't have to do this to us Stew. We are with you Stew. we are your people"* (*to which of course I now have to attach a lenghtly footnote explaining that this is actually a poor parody of a routine that Stew did concerning Princess Diana's death etc etc. - anyway you get the point).
Lee clearly writes as well as he speaks, and his intelligence shines out of every page, and if this book was a 200 page treatise on the nature of comedy it would be 5 stars from me, but it isn't. It's a clinical dissection of three specific comedy routines. It's a bit like showing how a trick is done. When you take out its heart to see what makes it work you kill it. All the way through Lee deploys the alternative comedian's force field of defence against people not liking the joke which is (makes quote signs in air with fingers) "irony". So if you don't laugh it's because you weren't meant to. If a joke is played for so long that you get bored, you are meant to. If your patience or boundaries of taste are crossed, you were meant to feel that way. There's no escape - the comedian is always one step ahead of you.
I don't understand Stew's motive for writing this book, apart from the obvious one. It seems to me like throwing a coin three times and needing three heads simply to keep what you already have. Lee won't gain any fans from the book but some of his current fans might wonder whether the conceit is actually a chink in the impregnable comedic armour. He has thrown two heads but he missed the third catch and the coin rolled under the wardrobe. We are still looking. On our knees. With a torch.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 25
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