Who is STEWART LEE

*THE SYNDICATE DOES NOT EXIST*

For a few seconds, I genuinely thought he was having a breakdown.

After two decades of lapping up his edgy, rant-filled routines, I thought I knew just how far Stewart Lee would go to make his audience feel uncomfortable.

But he had managed to suck me in once more.

Seemingly frustrated his new material wasn’t going down well, he suddenly blamed audiences like us for the high suicide rate among comedians, snarling as he told us how hard it was to write good routines and we just did not appreciate hard-working performers like himself.

When an audience member had the temerity to go for a comfort break during one of the darker moments – he was listing comedians he’d known who’d killed themselves – he launched a host of four-letter insults at the hapless fan and told him not to come back. And he didn’t – like many of us, unclear whether Lee was joking or genuinely offended.

Things had started off in a much more familiar way. After getting sick of being told by the Daily Mail comedians were too scared of telling anti-Islamic jokes, he informed us he’d decided to take up the challenge. What followed was a witty, well engineered piece which expertly balanced his liberal misgivings with his irreverence towards religion.

Unfortunately, the second half was nowhere near as edgy, taking in the far safer ground of UKIP-bashing and ridiculing more commercially successful comedians.

Lee Mack has apparently called him “an intellectual snob”, cue Lee undercutting his rival by name-dropping Bertolt Brecht. That was always going to go down well with this audience – who filled all but a handful of the 2,000 seats – but it’s the kind of material he was doing 15 years ago.

Indeed, the edgiest bit of the second half saw the audience member who he’d insulted before the break (the chap had crept back in at the start of the second half) getting his own back through a spot of heckling. But even he was on his feet applauding at the end.