Stephen Fry Live: More Fool Me (2014) Reviews

• Stephen Fry: Fat Elvis or Oscar Wilde Redux?

  The_late_Buddy_Ryan2016-01-12

  A commenter on netflix.com (who only watched the first 10′) suggests that Fry may be edging into his "fat Elvis" phase with this one, but I submit that even during his fat phase Elvis could still belt out "Suspicious Minds" with the best of them. And yes, this is basically a 1½ hour improv'd infomercial, and Fry does seem a little fidgety at first. Once he got to the bit about the "Australian heartburn" accent though, it was clear that he was totally on form. There's a charming riff on the mobile library van as the Internet-equivalent of his teenage years, a compelling theory about why dogs are so different from wolves, and who else could read the closing lines of a scholarly biography (Richard Ellmann's of Oscar Wilde) and not leave a dry eye in the house? His amazing fluency never seems glib; after his initial fidgets, he never loses connection with the audience, except maybe when he lapses into German or, on one occasion, Rumanian. He does a great impression of HRH Prince Charles (Penn Gillette though, not so much). The well polished anecdotes about the Royal Family and QI-style factoids go down pretty smoothly, even if you've already heard them in one form or another. Another Netflix critic objects that Fry, despite his well known Cambridge credentials, uses "reverence" as a verb. I say that if Mark Twain can do it, then why not Stephen Fry? As far as I'm concerned, he can use "oberaffentittenturbogeil" as a preposition if he wants to.

• Like Hitch, a reformed Marxist searching for a way out

  ersbel2018-08-06

  Like Hitch, Fry is a reformed Marxist. He is smart enough and verbose enough to know there is something wrong. But he is not certain enough he should go too far from the governmental orthodoxy. He is pleasant. He is a good story teller. And I very much liked the far milder aggressive stance compared with Hitch. Still, that means the more entertaining moments from Hitch's discourse are simply not there.