Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999

James Acaster, wearing aviator sunglasses and a sunset jacket, walks out to a stage lit in pink and blue and swears profusely. He despises the audience he has cultivated: old people, Christians and white nerds. He wants to reinvent himself, although not as an "edgy" comedian who insults transgender people, such as Ricky Gervais.

He argues for a "second referendum" on Brexit. Claiming to notice that he is losing his audience, he abruptly changes tact and performs a skit about a person ordering steak in a restaurant—an extended metaphor about a second referendum. The waiter offers the customer "a plate of shit", if they are lucky.

Acaster describes his experience recording The Great British Bake Off in September 2018. Severely jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, he has an outburst that leads the well-meaning crew to walk on eggshells around him. That night, he has a lengthy conversation with his girlfriend that would contribute to their break-up. Still unable to sleep, he calls the Samaritans helpline, pretending to be a baker. His cooking is a disaster and when the episode airs in March 2019, a quote about his flapjacks becomes a meme: "Started making it / Had a breakdown / Bon appétit".

One routine involves Acaster's Discman from 1999

The best year of Acaster's life was 1999, when he was 14. While describing a solar eclipse on a family holiday, he drifts into several tangents. He talks profanely to the "filthy top of the tea" to scare off Christians, imagines trying to save a life on a plane with his steady hand skills from controlling a Discman, and depicts two new roommates' periods syncing as they discover they are both watching The Sopranos.

In 2013, Acaster lived with his girlfriend in a small flat. A year after their relationship ended, he discovered from a newspaper that she was in a relationship with Rowan Atkinson—known for the character Mr. Bean—whom she had performed with in a play.[lower-alpha 1] Subsequently, Acaster saw Atkinson everywhere in his life. He instructs the audience not to tweet about the gig, as they cannot capture the nuance: the routine is designed at his expense, not the couple's. However, he permits himself one joke about Atkinson having a chicken on his head.

In 2017, the worst year of Acaster's life, his agent of eight years terminated their relationship. Acaster says he only has time to tell one point of view: his agent's. According to his agent, Acaster ruined everything as a prank. On Sunday Brunch, he announced the commissioning of his Netflix specials Repertoire without permission, potentially putting the deal in jeopardy. As James' therapist told him that he blames himself in every situation—such as his recent breakup—he uses this in his prank to ask his agent to stop placing full blame on him. While swearing at his agent on the phone, he references his poor mental health and suicidal ideation. His agent ends their relationship in a later call.

Acaster began therapy in 2017 and identified rejection as a personal issue; he would let relationships sour until the other person ended them. This expresses itself ironically when his therapist fails to turn up one week and when she introduces her son to Acaster's material. Acaster decides to write a text terminating their sessions, thus paradoxically showing she helped him overcome rejection issues, but she pushes to say goodbye in person and introduce Acaster to her children. Acaster sends a text explaining how her actions exploited the issues they had discussed.

Catastrophising about his therapist leaking personal information, Acaster tells the audience the most embarrassing thing she knows. The audience unexpectedly applaud his comment that talking about poor mental health should not be embarrassing, momentarily throwing him off. He involuntarily defecated while at a restaurant with his agent, due to food poisoning. Luckily, he had a full change of clothes and makeup wipes on him. Instead of the steak dinner he wanted, he was just left with "shit".

In a post-credits scene, Acaster says that his life has subsequently improved from 2017 to 2018 to 2019; he has a new therapist, a new agent and is in a new relationship.

James Acaster, performing with the jacket and sunglasses used in the special

James Acaster is a British comedian born in 1985.[2] He began performing stand-up comedy in 2008, after failing to find success as a drummer.[3] He received five nominations for the Edinburgh Comedy Award for his routines.[4] Preceding Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 was Repertoire (2018)—a four-part Netflix special combining three previous Edinburgh Fringe Festival performances with one additional show of older material, Recap, designed to tie the collection together.[5] According to an interview with Nouse, Acaster continued writing fictional material as he had with Repertoire, but discovered that he wanted to do something different.[3]

The title Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 is largely a references to jokes that were cut from the final routine. Acaster said in interviews that eating a cold, cooked, Sainsbury's lasagne drunk was the best food he had ever tasted, and after doing so at 4 a.m. he changed a WhatsApp group name to COLD LASAGNE HATE MYSELF 1999. He was asked to name the show the following day.[6][7][8]

Acaster won the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award in 2019 for his performance of the routine, marking the first time a British comedian had won the award since 2010.[20] He also won Best Show at the 2019 Chortle Awards.[21] The routine was nominated at the 2019 Critics' Choice Award for Best Comedy Special and Acaster was nominated at the 2019 Helpmann Awards for Best Comedy Performer.[22][23] The special received five stars out of five in The Guardian,[24] Evening Standard,[25] i,[10] Chortle,[26] and The Skinny.[27]

The Guardian's Brian Logan praised the routine for its precise wording—"burnished to gem-like perfection"—the "complex games with irony and perspective", and "unexpected angles" for jokes where the writing and delivery "marry beautifully". Logan also reviewed that the special ventures into "personal intimacy" which Acaster had previously avoided in his stand-up.[24] Bruce Dessau, writing in the Evening Standard, lauded Acaster's "brilliantly self-flagellating account" of a break-up, "ingenious absurdist routine" about a second referendum and the "winning precision" with which the performance is structured.[25]

In i, Alice Jones praises Acaster's combination of stand-up structures like the break-up show and the mental health exposé "into something new and entirely thrilling". Jones found the humour surprising and "steelier, riskier and much funnier" than the comedian's previous use of whimsy.[10] Steve Bennett of Chortle believed that it was "as finely engineered a show" as any Acaster had performed, containing "a masterclass of observational comedy, as meticulously written as ever", an "unpredictable mixture of irony, awe and modest outrage" and a "doozy" of an ending. Bennett praised Acaster's treatment of worn subjects such as Brexit, his use of "honesty to lend an extra push to brilliantly funny gags" and that narrative threads are "woven together" in his therapy content.[26]

Reviewing for The Skinny, Johnny Owens said the show's message was one of "accepting that, in the end, you can only ever be whoever it is you happen to be". Owens praised Acaster's reinvented persona as helping "define the crux of the entire show", wrote that the comedy was "deftly-timed" and "neatly structured" and found the show "more ludicrously entertaining" than his existing body of work.[27] Katie Mears of Vulture noted that Acaster speaks about his real life for the first time in this routine. Mears praised the special as a "true feat", lauding the "dynamic, earnest" performance, but said that it had become more "complex and expansive" than its framing device of why 1999 and 2017 were the best and worst years of Acaster's life, respectively.[6]