Snowflake

A five-minute, almost entirely silent physical mime of Ricky Gervais physically choking on his own words trying to “say the unsayable” is the centerpiece of this hour. It is Stewart Lee at his most childishly stubborn, stretching a simple physical gag until the initial awkwardness circles back around to pure relief. Wearing a slightly too-small baby blue suit jacket on a stage adorned with a bright neon sign of the show’s title, he spends the hour defending the basic concept of social empathy (or wokeness) against the highly paid arena comics who claim they are being silenced.

Filmed at the York Theatre Royal in May 2022, the special was originally conceived and toured in late 2019 before the pandemic forced a two-year hiatus. This delay allowed Lee to rewrite the material to reflect subsequent Brexit and Covid developments. The result is a looser, more self-referential performance than his tightly structured past work like Content Provider. He takes aim at the UK media’s over-the-top adulation of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, dryly pointing out that directly addressing an audience was not, in fact, invented by the granddaughter of a baronet, and touches on Jimmy Carr’s predictable reliance on shock value.

Rather than delivering rapid-fire punchlines, Lee relies on his usual weapons: repetition, patronizing his own audience for not being clever enough, and reading from prompt cards. The show ends with a slow-burn acoustic guitar song as fake snow falls.