Yesterday’s blog included Kate Copstick’s interesting take on Lewis Schaffer and his show Unopened Letters From My Mother.

Today I received a comment on that blog from one Ian Roberts. He wrote:

As long as anybody is writing about Lewis Schaffer, he is ‘happy’ in the terms that he understands what ‘happiness’ is about. His comedy is one long essay in narcissistic neurosis and an inability to focus on his craft.

As such he is a uniquely perplexing phenomenon to a small group of often appalled fans who come to watch the car crashing again and again and again.

I suspect he is too long in the tooth to change now and so his subsistence comedy will continue as long as he has breath to utter Whaddabout me? Whaddabout me?

In the beginning, he was no doubt the poor man’s Woody Allen and one to watch. Now he has certainly grown into the persona of the poor man’s Lewis Schaffer. And for that I salute him. He adds gaiety and a fixed position in the often times stellar landscape of our Edinburgh revels. It is such a shame his mother never lived to see this for herself.

And Lewis Schaffer himself responded in an email to me:

There is truth to what Copstick said: I must have the need to feel regret and remorse and sadness and fear all the time.

But I did not do this show to feel pain.

I thought it would be interesting, which is important to me. Funny can be interesting but not the only way, I have now realised.

I did not expect there would be this much heartache and sorrow.  I want to stop. I am not sure what I am getting out of it, other than tears, or what the audience is getting out of it, other than see a grown man crumble.

Thank you for finding me interesting for you to write about me.