Openness, Otherness, and Expertise: Uncertainty and Trust in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle

Abstract

This chapter argues that the BBC2 television series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (2009–2016), raises important questions about uncertainty, authenticity, and trust in contemporary culture. It contends that Stewart Lee’s stand-up warrants particular attention due to a set of properties—many of which it shares with literary texts and other art forms—that demand, interrogate, challenge, and enact trust on a number of levels: formal, thematic, ethical, and political. By making demands on his audiences to trust in the performance, accept uncertainty, and allow expectations to be challenged and overturned, Lee’s work counters reactionary and/or conventional forms of comedy that implicitly or explicitly rely on the exclusion of otherness, and offers an alternative based on an aesthetics, an ethics and a politics of openness.