YMMV / Stewart Lee

• Crossing the Line Twice. One of his favourite devices, pushing a particular routine as far as the audience will take it, and then further.
  • An example is in 90s Comedian, when he started talking about the then-recent 7 July 2005 bombing in London, and contrasted Islamic terrorists, who attacked without warning, with the IRA, who always phoned in a warning before setting off a bomb so that the area could be evacuated.^note He noted in the published text of this routine that he especially enjoyed telling it in heavily Republican areas of Northern Ireland, where the spectacle of an English comedian telling an Irish audience that there was something very British about the IRA was so completely bizarre that the audience gave him credit for it.
  Let's...let's have a little clap for the IRA. Come on, give them a little clap. Give them a clap, right? 'Cause the IRA, they were decent British terrorists. They didn't want to be British. But they were. And as such, they couldn't help but embody some fundamentally decent British values. We'll miss them now they're gone.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Well they would have that in that London" seems to be appearing a lot in online comments forums.
  • A lot of YouTube comments under his videos have latched onto his Self Deprecating Humour routine about constantly being mistaken for someone more famous who has become heavier and more physically decrepit (including, in one version, Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladić), with comments along the lines of "[Unflattering comparison] has let himself go".

---