Stand-up: Lee Nelson

Simon Brodkin performed at York Opera House last night as part of his Lee Nelson Live tour. The comedian, famous for his onstage personae, has achieved notoriety through a number of television appearances including a series on BBC 3. Lee Nelson usually takes the stage alongside his overweight ‘best mate’ Omelette.

Comedy via persona is usually a very difficult thing to evaluate objectively; it’s potentially ironic, so it’s often far more than a simple case of good or bad. Lee Nelson makes things frighteningly easy, however. His persona isn’t cohesive, like Murray’s pub landlord- his persona is just an idiot. Why an idiot? As a convenient excuse for sub-par humour, apparently.

The jokes are weak, and the overriding sense is of a comedian who is not prepared to put in the effort necessary for composing anything beyond a rudimentary setup-punch line arrangement. The crowd seemed happy enough to laugh when Nelson, for example, pointed at a man in the audience and said: “Nice moustache… Paedo”. There’s no delivery, no artifice, no nothing- and the audience is supposed to accept this because the persona is a ‘Chav?’ A little thin for me.

Nelson’s performance is characterised by jokes that are tired and underdone. They’re also often simply offensive. Now, I like a little edginess to spice up my humour, and when there’s moral high-ground to be taken I’m seldom on it. But for me, offensiveness in a joke is justified by the relative hilarity of the joke. If a joke is very funny, then offensiveness is permissible; the end justifies the means, as far as I’m concerned. Nelson’s jokes are lame, formulaic- and offensive anyway. In my opinion, this is unforgivable.

Nelson is joined onstage by his ‘best mate’ Omelette, a character who is apparently humorous because he’s fat. I assume this was the joke, anyway- no other punch line was forthcoming, and Omelette didn’t do much except sit around onstage.

At one particularly disturbing point during the evening, Nelson brought a young girl of around fifteen on stage, and proceeded to squeeze her breasts. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and the sense of violation at having seen such a public act of lewdness committed with a girl who can barely have been of majority is with me even as I write this. The girl’s father, also onstage, simply laughed along as Nelson- who first squeezed one breast, then the other, then both simultaneously- suggested that the girl should join him in his dressing room later.

I saw nothing in this show of value, and nothing I would ever want to see repeated; in fact, I saw a few things I wish I could un-see, and I lost a couple of hours of my life. Nelson is not only unfunny, but also unpalatable and uninteresting. No doubt he would diffuse these criticisms by claiming “it’s just a persona, it’s all ironic; I’m actually exploiting the ‘Chav’ identity.” Whether or not this is true it is undeniable that the audience didn’t turn out to laugh at the character, but with him. So if Brodkin acts like a ‘Chav’, for an audience who want to laugh with a ‘Chav’, then I would suggest that what he’s doing is actually just being a ‘Chav’, for money- which, if anything, is worse than doing it for free. The fact that this tour is selling out venues is nothing more than a grand insult to viewer intelligence; please, restore my faith in humanity by never, ever seeing this show. The list of better things to do with your time is practically endless.