After watching Lee criticise the repetition in this hymn, is it safe to make the assumption that the repetitive basis of some of his later routines is actually a life long passive aggressive battle with All Things Bright and Beautiful?
l love Stewart Lee and thought this routine was good but shouting at the audience that a thing is stupid or incredible for comedic effect is one of the biggest, most cliched tropes of comedy, it's hardly pushing any boundaries
Stuart Lee is somewhat of a rarity for a comedian in that he's just got better and better as he's aged. Most comedians burst on to the scene, win a Perrier Award, knock out a couple of DVDs then turn shit.
At the time I found Stewart Lee good but slightly full of himself. With age (his and mine), I have reached the conclusion that he is the finest stand up of the generation, operating on a different level to others. There is, however, an irony that someone who makes such a virtue of repetition in his comedy poking fun at a "needless complication of a simple idea".
I think Monty Python kicked the sh*t out of this hymn slightly better when they pointed out that He also made All Things Dull and Ugly all things Cancerous and Vile - all things evil and smelly.
Yes, Monty Python's response to that hymn was damned clever; a beautiful observation on the way religious people love to shamelessly cherry-pick the things that they credit their god with. To be fair, when Python wrote theirs they were a seasoned act with ~20 years experience writing and performing, while young Stewie here hasn't even let himself go yet :)
I know it's a joke, but the key word is not "all" but rather the qualifiers of each subset. In the instance of the chorus: - Bright and beautiful - Great and small - Wise and wonderful There's actually a lot of scope not to be made by God if these are the parameters. Like medium sized things, the not-particularly-wise, the average looking...
If you're feeling particularly ungenerous, does the word "things" cover the living? I'd say it only covers mineral and maybe vegetable, but not animal, unless specified, like bird :)
@@alicec1533 Good point! Is nothing actually a thing or no thing? If it’s no thing then it doesn’t exist, so what is it? What was the ‘nothing’ we are told that existed before the Big Bang? Did it actually exist?
What spoils this comedy for me is that the beginning of the hymn only mentions all things bright and beautiful (luminescent but not ugly objects), creatures (living things only), and things wise and wonderful (to exclude things stupid and boring, which is a relative term). A lot of things exist outside of those three categories, such as rocks and ice and mud. Therefore, it is the job of the songwriter to present his thesis of the things he believes do not fit in any of those categories. And to that, I think he did a superb and comprehensive job.
I remember being forced to sing this song in primary school. This is a funny breakdown of a song which will contradict your subsequent biology class after assembly.
So glad this was uploaded, I've been a fan ever since this was first broadcast. Stand up was the only thing Channel 5 was good for back then (I'm pretty sure it was Channel 5 anyway...)
Folk songs are also guilty of repeating a catchy chorus ad nauseum. These lyrics & the voicing also remind me of the insipid hymns on British TV’s Songs Of Praise..
@stupidjunk978 That's the point. Notice how he made the joke (set A) then went on to explain the joke about specifics (set B) and then explained a specific joke about set B (set C). So next time you see a Stewart Lee joke, just bring along one of those diagrams and say "it's this, can we go home now?"
Yes, the labeling is insufficiently precise. The hymn clearly states that it is about "their wings", referring to the birds, yet his diagramm was simply labeling set C as "wings" instead of what the model was trying to portrait, "bird's wings".
@DrZaius3141 No, the problem goes deeper than that. The set of all wings of birds is not a subset of the set of all birds. You (like Stewart Lee) confused "is" and "has": It is true that a bird has wings. It is not true that a wing is a bird.
@lilmct Ahhh! But I do realise that the lyrics to the Hymn refer to *their* tiny wings and as such means the tiny wings owned by the aforementioned birds. However, you'll notice that I wasn't talking about the lyrics to the Hymn; I was talking about Poofart Wee's interpretation of said Hymn and in particular to his incorrect labelling of Set C as "Wings" and not , as you rightly point out, the correct title in the context of the Hymn which would be "the tiny wings of birds".
Love this joke, but to add the compulsory smug comment into the mix, mathematically there is no such thing as the set of all things, this being famously known as Russell's Paradox.
Set C has an intersection with set B, but is not a subset. If it were then bees would be birds, or alternatively their wings would not exist. Surprised that Stew missed this..
Please tell me you get the actual joke, he's criticizing the hymn for saying the same thing over and over again by saying the same thing over and over again. He's making fun of his own style of comedy. Its actually quite clever. I'll agree that a lot of the time it can get a little boring, its his style and I like it, but of all videos to point that out on this is the silliest. It is literally the point of the video.
It's stew funny, that he has a prop comedian period, that ultimately came to some conclusion on the Café Nero bit ... apparently he took this idea from Richard Herring at a posh wedding. Anyhoo ... a work in progress plus people were dimmer in the 90s so it passed, just.
"all creatures great and small" great in this case might not mean grandiose, but great in size and so great(big) and small would mean that god created the tiniest creature to the largest of creatures which would mean that he is in fact correct
But Stu, it doesn't say all things does it? It says all things bright and beautiful. By adding 19 examples he's classifying them as both bright and beautiful. Gosh.
I understood what he said in the first 2 mins of the act. You'd have to be stupid to need to watch the rest of the act to undsrstand what he was getting at after he discussed the first chorus. There was no need for him to repeat himself so often. Similarly there was no need for the venn disagram as it was clear what he meant when he discussed the lyrics in the opening minute or so. Just as there was no need for you to read this far
Set C is not a subset of Set B because wings are not exclusive to birds - tiny wings even less so. Richard Herring would never make such a fundamental error, and anyone who says he definitely would is lying.
@DnB and Psy Production At the risk of seeming a tad pedantic for gripping onto what even I will accept is a very minor point for 11 years, I still contend that the belaboured song lyrics and Mr Lee's lovely Venn Diagram are, whilst related, separate entities and said diagram refers to "wings" without lyrical context. If Stu had wanted his VD to refer to the tiny wings of birds, as stated clearly in the song, then he should have, in the name of accuracy, said so. In my less than expert opinion.
@hockinm1 But it doesn't matter if wings apply to other groups because if God made birds, then he must have made at least some wings as well. Other creatures have wings but so do birds, so we can safely assume that if God made the bird's wings, he made other wings as well.
I'd like to know if Venn diagrams were around in comedy before this sketch, or was he the pioneer. There are whole comedy books about them now. Small point: wings is not a sole sub-set of birds, there are mammals, insects and even fish with wings. I'm sure Stewart has since realised and regretted this deeply ever since then.
I think the bigger question is -- Were Venn diagrams around when the song was written and when God made all things? Because, if not, it's not surprising that both God and the songwriter got it badly mixed up.
The set of wings is not a subset of the set of birds, or the set of insects, and so on, because a wing is not a bird, and a wing is not an insect, and so on. We have to distinguish "is" and "has". The set of all human beings includes you and me and Stewart Lee, but not your arms, my arms, or Lee's arms. An arm is not a human being.
I enjoy his drawn out musing, that's basically what he does now. I wouldn't watch him if I didn't like listening to him deconstuct and analyse things. That's just a matter of taste: some will like some will not. Also, as with this example, he very often makes himself out to be the but of his own jokes: he is guilty of the same needless elboration as the hymn.
@MARKETMAN6789 I find your implication that some toilets do not have seats to be racist against northern comedy clubs. And don't wash your hands before you pull the seat down..you'll get shit on your hands.
One of the odd points is he is just successful enough ... but not to be to successful, otherwise the "character" of Stewart Lee falls apart! Yet oddly he is actually successful, has a house, a wife, a kid or two etc ... No Ted Chippington.
Did God make the horrible ‘pipes pudding’ we had to eat in school? (Boiled 10-gauge Macaroni in Milk.). As we also had to sing All Things Bright And Beautiful, Compulsory Pipes Pudding presented God as a very contradictory entity, indeed, a bit of a Comedian. Sadly, one of the Pupils was sent to a School for the Educationally Subnormal, because she could not stomach God’s Pipes Pudding. The needs of ‘Starving Biafrans’ were also deployed against her. We knew the real reason was not God Almighty, but the fact that her family was poor. As you can imagine I am still fking livid about this despite it having happened in 1965. No really. I am not joking.
@DJJamesG According to whoever it is that measures these things, under the false assumption that comedy is some kind of competition like darts, snooker or snap, in which there is a finite winner, rather than a form entertainment designed to provoke laughter, and in some cases thought, the succes or failure of which is, by its very nature, subjective.
Funny, but he fails at his set theory placement of wings as a subset of birds. There are lots of animals with wings which aren't birds. E.g., bats and dragonflies.
@@joefagan9335 It still isn't a subset though. A wing isn't a bird, it's part of a bird, but not a bird itself. The wing of a robin isn't a bird, therefore it doesn't belong in the set "birds".
@carlosizz89 Welcome to the club! If you like Stu's neo-brechtian style, you may also like Zach Galifianakis. Yes, yes, I know he starred in the awful "The Hangover", but trust me, his stand-up is clever, scary, vicious and strangely self-deprecating.
Disappointing, to the point of undermining his entire career, that Stew thinks - or thought at this stage of his development (in which case, OK, it would just be his career to that point) - that the word 'enormity' means what the word 'magnitude' in fact does.
![Upscaled - Fist of Fun - s1 [couchtripper][U]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/k1nGkzD_vTM/mqdefault.jpg)
After watching Lee criticise the repetition in this hymn, is it safe to make the assumption that the repetitive basis of some of his later routines is actually a life long passive aggressive battle with All Things Bright and Beautiful?
Yes.
@@GreenDistantStar thought as much
It's like the rappers, the rap singers. You've seen 'em on the, er on the Top of the Pops.
This is just a glimpse of the genius in making, hes pushed the boundary's of comedy further than any other modern stand up.
But right said fred in a bad wig has really let himself go
l love Stewart Lee and thought this routine was good but shouting at the audience that a thing is stupid or incredible for comedic effect is one of the biggest, most cliched tropes of comedy, it's hardly pushing any boundaries
@@gionnifer I did say 'in the making' this is very early on in his career, and this routine was quite unique at that time.
One of the most sublime pieces of comedy I've ever seen - slays me every time I watch it
Stuart Lee is somewhat of a rarity for a comedian in that he's just got better and better as he's aged. Most comedians burst on to the scene, win a Perrier Award, knock out a couple of DVDs then turn shit.
***** bill bailey & gervais compared to peter fucking kay?
George Carlin got better as well
And I call that integrity.
Totally agree. He's let himself go a bit physically though, hasn't he?
vonteflon Vladimir Nabokov has really let himself go.
Stewart Lee is so great, I just discovered him 10 mins. ago and he's a comedic genius. He really needs to get more publicity
THAT is one of the funniest, cleverest pieces of comedy I have I've ever seen.
Really!!??
He's right 100%.Like a pear cider made .... I'll get my coat.
Rrrr reminds me of the time he took me to a pirate activity centre on our first date, rrr was scar'd for life.
Well count yourself lucky me heartie, after my first date with him he thanked me in a very inappropriate way at a smashed up rural bus shelter.
Listening to Lee ripping the shit out of that dreadful crap they forced us to sing at school is very cathartic. :)
I'd love to see that routine performed to a church group.
@@thedolphin5428 I don't know anyone, that goes to church, that actually likes this
I can just imagine him at school singing this hymn whilst being so annoyed by it 😂
Stewart Lee hasn't let himself go
He was however, making all the necessary preparations.
Yet
Way ahead of the curve as usual. Stew doing Venn diagram humour decades before it became fashionable.
At the time I found Stewart Lee good but slightly full of himself. With age (his and mine), I have reached the conclusion that he is the finest stand up of the generation, operating on a different level to others. There is, however, an irony that someone who makes such a virtue of repetition in his comedy poking fun at a "needless complication of a simple idea".
I guess that is the point sorta ... :)
I think Monty Python kicked the sh*t out of this hymn slightly better when they pointed out that He also made All Things Dull and Ugly all things Cancerous and Vile - all things evil and smelly.
@pencilpauli nah I think it's one of his weaker over-analysis skits
Yes, Monty Python's response to that hymn was damned clever; a beautiful observation on the way religious people love to shamelessly cherry-pick the things that they credit their god with. To be fair, when Python wrote theirs they were a seasoned act with ~20 years experience writing and performing, while young Stewie here hasn't even let himself go yet :)
MP and Lee are making DIFFERENT FUN in DIFFERENT WAYS about the same thing. Not comparable.
I love this
I know it's a joke, but the key word is not "all" but rather the qualifiers of each subset. In the instance of the chorus:
- Bright and beautiful
- Great and small
- Wise and wonderful
There's actually a lot of scope not to be made by God if these are the parameters. Like medium sized things, the not-particularly-wise, the average looking...
And what about things that are beautiful but not bright, great but not small, and wise but not wonderful?
@@karlcrash Your point is sound. The lack of Oxford comma would suggest both are mandatory, but I was in a generous mood.
If you're feeling particularly ungenerous, does the word "things" cover the living? I'd say it only covers mineral and maybe vegetable, but not animal, unless specified, like bird :)
@@CDStoner all things are things including living things. I'm struggling to think of things that are not things. Do such not-things even exist?
@@alicec1533 Good point! Is nothing actually a thing or no thing? If it’s no thing then it doesn’t exist, so what is it? What was the ‘nothing’ we are told that existed before the Big Bang? Did it actually exist?
What spoils this comedy for me is that the beginning of the hymn only mentions all things bright and beautiful (luminescent but not ugly objects), creatures (living things only), and things wise and wonderful (to exclude things stupid and boring, which is a relative term). A lot of things exist outside of those three categories, such as rocks and ice and mud. Therefore, it is the job of the songwriter to present his thesis of the things he believes do not fit in any of those categories. And to that, I think he did a superb and comprehensive job.
Beauty though is purely subjective. Whilst you say a rock is "dull and boring", a geologist would say they are beautiful.
Ted Johnson you're probably over thinking it to be fair
@@steveking5799 at the end of the chorus it say the lord go made them all. Saying he made all things
Bright would include stars, and all the elements of our relatively young solar system formed from supernova debris.
I can see where Ricky Gervais got his ideas for book of noah stand up routine :D
Stole *
I remember being forced to sing this song in primary school. This is a funny breakdown of a song which will contradict your subsequent biology class after assembly.
biology in primary school?
Stewart Lee comedy genius who else could come up with a comedy routine based on the hym highlighting it's flaws.
Richard Herring? ;-)
simon munnery
Hymn*
Its*
Joe Pasquale?
So glad this was uploaded, I've been a fan ever since this was first broadcast. Stand up was the only thing Channel 5 was good for back then (I'm pretty sure it was Channel 5 anyway...)
That hymn has let itself go
Folk songs are also guilty of repeating a catchy chorus ad
nauseum. These lyrics & the voicing also remind me of the
insipid hymns on British TV’s Songs Of Praise..
@stupidjunk978 That's the point. Notice how he made the joke (set A) then went on to explain the joke about specifics (set B) and then explained a specific joke about set B (set C). So next time you see a Stewart Lee joke, just bring along one of those diagrams and say "it's this, can we go home now?"
Dave Gorman does something similar with “ if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”
the set of wings is not a subset of the set of birds!
Yes, the labeling is insufficiently precise. The hymn clearly states that it is about "their wings", referring to the birds, yet his diagramm was simply labeling set C as "wings" instead of what the model was trying to portrait, "bird's wings".
Wings, like a bird's wing!
@DrZaius3141 No, the problem goes deeper than that. The set of all wings of birds is not a subset of the set of all birds. You (like Stewart Lee) confused "is" and "has": It is true that a bird has wings. It is not true that a wing is a bird.
Edward Scissor Hands skin is looking good there!
Are Sets things?
Yes , badgers live in them
a beautifull hymnn my fav ,i dont think youll ever be my fav comedien
This is a a hymn for children
That’s NO EXCUSE
I know this bit really well because it was in the fist of fun comedy cash in tie in book, i've never seen it performed before though XD
00:10 adding 'umm' to create the illusion of spontaneity
And then he got off the bus UHH
Lazy comedy slag...
That was hilarious.
@lilmct Ahhh! But I do realise that the lyrics to the Hymn refer to *their* tiny wings and as such means the tiny wings owned by the aforementioned birds. However, you'll notice that I wasn't talking about the lyrics to the Hymn; I was talking about Poofart Wee's interpretation of said Hymn and in particular to his incorrect labelling of Set C as "Wings" and not , as you rightly point out, the correct title in the context of the Hymn which would be "the tiny wings of birds".
Genius
What about things that are not bright or not beautiful?
This is the comedy equivalent of Terry and June.
Fair play, I just think its a shame most people miss out on the joke. Good luck with your future youtube surfing.
Yeah, I was kidding, I love him. My comment was just paraphrasing the video. :P
But I hate Venn diagrams drawn with inaccuracy in order to more neatly deliver a sarcastic appraisal of a children's bible song!
His left eyebrows let itself go
BIRD like a bird’s bird
And this is one of his short jokes!
Set C - Wings isn't fully encapsulated in Set B - Birds though.
Set A has really let its self go
set A, i win
Love this joke, but to add the compulsory smug comment into the mix, mathematically there is no such thing as the set of all things, this being famously known as Russell's Paradox.
Therefore: "set A, he loses".
I mean - wings should probably not be entirely contained within Set B. But that might be construed as pedantic..
Glad to see this again. However, his diagram is mathematically incorrect, as "all things" should be represented by the universal set.
Set C has an intersection with set B, but is not a subset. If it were then bees would be birds, or alternatively their wings would not exist. Surprised that Stew missed this..
Go and read the hymn again. It's a reference to the wings of the birds (Wings! Like a bird's wings!).
@@WilliamSmith-mx6ze The point that you appear to have missed, is that more than one type of creature has wings. Not just birds!
you can have a set whose members are other sets: set A, god wins.
OMG you're right, there are very few to none non-winged birds, LOL, I should have thought a bit more deeply :/
What about things that are not bright and beautiful? What about Things that are only bright but not beautiful and vice versa.
What is the universal set? If you mean the set of all things, then that is not allowed (assuming you are talking about traditional set theory).
Please tell me you get the actual joke, he's criticizing the hymn for saying the same thing over and over again by saying the same thing over and over again. He's making fun of his own style of comedy. Its actually quite clever.
I'll agree that a lot of the time it can get a little boring, its his style and I like it, but of all videos to point that out on this is the silliest. It is literally the point of the video.
They made us sing this blatant lie and propaganda of a song in Scouts. I'm glad someone has addressed some of it's problems.
It's stew funny, that he has a prop comedian period, that ultimately came to some conclusion on the Café Nero bit ... apparently he took this idea from Richard Herring at a posh wedding. Anyhoo ... a work in progress plus people were dimmer in the 90s so it passed, just.
"all creatures great and small"
great in this case might not mean grandiose, but great in size
and so great(big) and small would mean that god created the tiniest creature to the largest of creatures which would mean that he is in fact correct
Richard Herring has let himself go a bit
But Stu, it doesn't say all things does it? It says all things bright and beautiful. By adding 19 examples he's classifying them as both bright and beautiful. Gosh.
Morrisey is looking well.
Not so much, these days. We're all slowly getting old and ready to meet our *thing that isn't in set A*.
@stupidjunk978 Yeah, all the later jokes were just subjokes of the first joke.
I understood what he said in the first 2 mins of the act. You'd have to be stupid to need to watch the rest of the act to undsrstand what he was getting at after he discussed the first chorus. There was no need for him to repeat himself so often. Similarly there was no need for the venn disagram as it was clear what he meant when he discussed the lyrics in the opening minute or so. Just as there was no need for you to read this far
All things have let themselves go.
Set C is not a subset of Set B because wings are not exclusive to birds - tiny wings even less so.
Richard Herring would never make such a fundamental error, and anyone who says he definitely would is lying.
@DnB and Psy Production At the risk of seeming a tad pedantic for gripping onto what even I will accept is a very minor point for 11 years, I still contend that the belaboured song lyrics and Mr Lee's lovely Venn Diagram are, whilst related, separate entities and said diagram refers to "wings" without lyrical context. If Stu had wanted his VD to refer to the tiny wings of birds, as stated clearly in the song, then he should have, in the name of accuracy, said so. In my less than expert opinion.
@hockinm1 But it doesn't matter if wings apply to other groups because if God made birds, then he must have made at least some wings as well. Other creatures have wings but so do birds, so we can safely assume that if God made the bird's wings, he made other wings as well.
I'd like to know if Venn diagrams were around in comedy before this sketch, or was he the pioneer. There are whole comedy books about them now.
Small point: wings is not a sole sub-set of birds, there are mammals, insects and even fish with wings. I'm sure Stewart has since realised and regretted this deeply ever since then.
I think the bigger question is -- Were Venn diagrams around when the song was written and when God made all things? Because, if not, it's not surprising that both God and the songwriter got it badly mixed up.
The set of wings is not a subset of the set of birds, or the set of insects, and so on, because a wing is not a bird, and a wing is not an insect, and so on.
We have to distinguish "is" and "has". The set of all human beings includes you and me and Stewart Lee, but not your arms, my arms, or Lee's arms. An arm is not a human being.
@MrErisian i do hope you're referring to one of stu's hilarious routines, rather than stating a fact about yourself
but did god make the band wings
No, it's was Paul McCartney.
@stupidjunk978 hes actually alot better now he does drag stuff out but it really works especially in stewart lees comedy veichle series 2
Bats and insects have tiny wings too.
Yes. Set C should have overlapped set B and Set A directly.
It specifies "their" wings, those of a bird.
As for insects and bats, see Set A.
He may have got it wrong on purpose- that's what I choose to believe.
They should add a few more verses saying how 'god' also created childhood cancer, famine, and Jimmy Savile.
I'm so used to older Stewart Lee lol this is disorienting
he looks like a crumpled Morrissey here... ;)
that said, I much prefer his later work.
I enjoy his drawn out musing, that's basically what he does now. I wouldn't watch him if I didn't like listening to him deconstuct and analyse things. That's just a matter of taste: some will like some will not. Also, as with this example, he very often makes himself out to be the but of his own jokes: he is guilty of the same needless elboration as the hymn.
So many funerals have this song. I hate it.
@MARKETMAN6789 I find your implication that some toilets do not have seats to be racist against northern comedy clubs. And don't wash your hands before you pull the seat down..you'll get shit on your hands.
God has let himself go
Is God himself in set A? Did God in fact, make himself?
The set of winds is not a subset of the set of birds. The only elements of the set of birds are birds. He is not the brightest guy.
He does not need anything
What about bats? Wings aren't a subset of birds
@zeushighscore You may be sure, but I am not.
One of the odd points is he is just successful enough ... but not to be to successful, otherwise the "character" of Stewart Lee falls apart! Yet oddly he is actually successful, has a house, a wife, a kid or two etc ...
No Ted Chippington.
stewart lee making fun of his own massive amount of repetition :]
DRAGONS
Did God make the horrible ‘pipes pudding’ we had to eat in school? (Boiled 10-gauge Macaroni in Milk.). As we also had to sing All Things Bright And Beautiful, Compulsory Pipes Pudding presented God as a very contradictory entity, indeed, a bit of a Comedian.
Sadly, one of the Pupils was sent to a School for the Educationally Subnormal, because she could not stomach God’s Pipes Pudding. The needs of ‘Starving Biafrans’ were also deployed against her.
We knew the real reason was not God Almighty, but the fact that her family was poor.
As you can imagine I am still fking livid about this despite it having happened in 1965. No really. I am not joking.
@stupidjunk978 I would go so far as to say he needlessly overcomplicates a very simple idea.
Stewart Lee criticising this hymn for being repetitive; in his next routine, did he criticise a kettle for being black?
@DJJamesG According to whoever it is that measures these things, under the false assumption that comedy is some kind of competition like darts, snooker or snap, in which there is a finite winner, rather than a form entertainment designed to provoke laughter, and in some cases thought, the succes or failure of which is, by its very nature, subjective.
Funny, but he fails at his set theory placement of wings as a subset of birds. There are lots of animals with wings which aren't birds. E.g., bats and dragonflies.
“*their* tiny wings”
@@joefagan9335 It still isn't a subset though. A wing isn't a bird, it's part of a bird, but not a bird itself. The wing of a robin isn't a bird, therefore it doesn't belong in the set "birds".
Kim Yong Un has let himself go.
@MrErisian lmao
If there was a god, she would probably find this funny!
KD Lang's let himself go.
@carlosizz89
Welcome to the club!
If you like Stu's neo-brechtian style, you may also like Zach Galifianakis.
Yes, yes, I know he starred in the awful "The Hangover", but trust me, his stand-up is clever, scary, vicious and strangely self-deprecating.
Disappointing, to the point of undermining his entire career, that Stew thinks - or thought at this stage of his development (in which case, OK, it would just be his career to that point) - that the word 'enormity' means what the word 'magnitude' in fact does.
@mrmcbutterpants1
Set D: God