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The Minute Interventions of Stewart Lee

The popular performer speaks in an already recognizable tongue, producing pleasure by an affirmation of what the audience already knows and feels. Yet affirmation is, at its best, much more than this, involving an openness into the coming into being of something that is genuinely new. In this article we explore the way that humour – and specifically the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee – can cultivate an audience's bodily receptivity to novel modes of thinking and being which are never recognisable in any immediate sense. Affirmation, if it is to be more than a mere confirmation of what is already given, necessarily eschews reactivity. Certainly, Lee's comedy operates through a form of critique that goes beyond the negativity that we would associate with conventional modes of critical thinking and practice. Most obvious in Lee's lampooning of the popularity of the representationally-laden form of observational comedy, ‘critique’ here works affectively at least as much as it does cognitively. Through his attention to the form rather than the content of humour, and through his use of repetition and the creation and maintenance of tension, Lee provides a slow motion capture of those habitual modes of anticipation that foreclose other possibilities for thought and action. In examining the comedic and performative affects of Lee's comedy, we give a sense of the conditions in and through which new modes of attention, new dispositions and forms of bodily attunement might be produced. Drawing on more recent affect theory focused on the minute perceptions of the body, we argue that wit has a special relation to the new, less because it effects an irruptive change in the existing state of affairs, than because it exposes us to the affective conditions of possibility for the production of novelty.