Stewart Lee - Carpet Remnant World

 Disclaimer and Acknowledgement

The below work is transcribed for the purposes of criticism and review as allowed under UK law as fair dealing.

All copyright for the original work remains with the original performer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

🎤 Dissecting the Punchline: The Case for a Structuralist Framework in Stand-Up Comedy The Frog on the Board 🐸 “Humour can be dissected, as a frog can,” wrote E.B. White, “but the thing dies in the process.” It’s a line frequently trotted out whenever someone dares to take comedy seriously—as if the only dignified response to a joke is a laugh, and never a footnote. But what if the point isn’t to preserve the frog? What if the goal is to understand why it jumps the way it does—and how some frogs leap clean across a room while others barely make the lily pad? In comedy studies, stand-up has often been treated like that frog: alive, sure, but too slippery, too chaotic, too... culturally mucky to warrant real critical attention. Analyses tend to focus on the joke itself (see the General Theory of Verbal Humour by Attardo & Raskin), or the performer’s politics (see Lockyer & Pickering’s Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour ), or Sophie Quirk’s study in Why Stand-Up Matters ...
Read more
Hecklers and the Art of Improvised Timing in Stand-Up Comedy Or, How to Slay a Disruption Without Losing the Room There exists a comfortably worn axiom in comedy that “timing is everything.” Rarely questioned, often quoted. But within the lived (and often loudly interrupted) reality of stand-up, this axiom is less a truism and more a battleground. Because timing, in the strictest structuralist sense, presupposes control — and in live performance, control is a negotiation. Consider the heckler: an uninvited participant in the collaborative performance contract. They do not operate within the expected bounds of comedic tradition — they rupture it. Their interjection constitutes a spontaneous reframing of the comedic artefact in progress. In the terms laid out in my poetics framework ( The Comedic Multiform , 2023 ), the heckler introduces a dissonant variable at the frame level — momentarily shifting the audience’s alignment, the performer’s authority, and the perceived rhythm o...
Read more

Comedy Afloat: Reflections on The Floating Fringe in York

There’s nothing quite like telling jokes on a barge. The room’s intimate, the ceiling’s low, and the only heckle you fear is from a passing duck. Performing stand-up in a gently echoing hull, just above the Ouse, adds a strange serenity to the usual pre-show nerves—less gladiatorial, more nautical. Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of performing and compering York the Plank — a stand-up showcase that was part of The Floating Fringe in York, staged aboard the beautifully ramshackle Arts Barge moored on the River Ouse. Friday night, I stepped up as a comic. By Saturday, I was compering the same gig, trying to keep both the show and the boat steady. Running from July 24–26, The Floating Fringe offered a grassroots antidote to more commercial circuits. With its blend of stand-up, theatre, and oddball performance art — some of which teetered closer to the surreal than the stable — it proved that fringe culture is very much alive, even when bobbing gently on a river. York the Plank Frida...
Read more