Nothing wrong with having a think and a laugh. At the same time. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle - Series 1 Page 20
Quote: Marc P @ March 25 2009, 10:16 AM GMTSome people read the Beano for humour some people read Aristophanes. It's no biggie.
Or both at different times, depending what mood they're in.
Quote: Matthew Stott @ March 25 2009, 10:18 AM GMTOr both at different times, depending what mood they're in.
Or if they're in the loo!!!
Marc, have you got Aristophanes toilet paper? That's so passé...
Dan
Quote: swerytd @ March 25 2009, 9:34 AM GMTStewart Lee is not going to stop just cos *you* don't like it
Dan
Isn't that how this forum works? These comedy types should please all the people all the time surely! 
Quote: swerytd @ March 25 2009, 10:51 AM GMTMarc, have you got Aristophane's toilet paper? That's so passé...
Dan
Yes. And he's not getting it back!!
Quote: Matthew Stott @ March 25 2009, 8:59 AM GMTSo you haven't watched any of his acclaimed stand up since then? And mugging? He's hardly Lee Evans now is he!
No, Lee Evans is consistently funny rather than just occasionally.
Quote: Matthew Stott @ March 25 2009, 8:59 AM GMTWell, it feels more like the people that don't like him are enjoying hanging around and slating him again and again, whereas a lot of the people who praised him have done so once or twice, then legged it, leaving us to hold the fort!
*Swings Massive Sword* Back Aaron *Slash!* be gone Timbo!!
We've got to do make a stand against your seemingly unquestioning love.
Quote: swerytd @ March 25 2009, 9:09 AM GMTAnyway, if you have to explain it...
Then you've not executed it well enough, or made a worthwhile point in the first place.
Quote: Maurice Minor @ March 25 2009, 10:08 AM GMTIt seemed like 15 minutes of material stretched out to 30 minutes
Sadly, with all of the repetition, that's exactly what it was. I get the impression that he could be good if he just tried. But he doesn't/hasn't. Quite disheartening in a way.
Quote: Aaron @ March 25 2009, 2:23 PM GMTNo, Lee Evans is consistently funny rather than just occasionally.
No, he's not. He's a talented performer, he has great clowning ability, but his actual material is rubbish. Funny when I was twelve, but not now.
Quote: Aaron @ March 25 2009, 2:23 PM GMTWe've got to do make a stand against your seemingly unquestioning love.
I really enjoyed the two episodes so far, what's wrong with that? I'm sure I could find lines that I didn't think worked, but why should I bother? Overall I found the two episodes to be of a very high standard.
Quote: Matthew Stott @ March 25 2009, 2:49 PM GMTNo, he's not. He's a talented performer, he has great clowning ability, but his actual material is rubbish. Funny when I was twelve, but not now.
And Stewart Lee has some good material, but is an abysmal performer. In our opinions.
Quote: Aaron @ March 25 2009, 3:03 PM GMTIn our opinions.
There is only one of you Aaron; please tell me that's true or I'm going to have nightmares. 
Mwhaha.
Quote: Maurice Minor @ March 25 2009, 10:08 AM GMTI watch comedy to have a laugh not necessarily to be 'challenged' or lectured or think "oh this guy is VERY clever... very thought provoking.."
And some people like both, prefarbly together, which Stewart Lee does very well. Yes, sometimes you just want to laugh and not have to think so much about what is been said, I love Not Going Out for that reason, but then other times you want something that makes you think as well as laugh and we have lacked that for a very long time now. Bill Hicks is my favourite stand-up comedian ever, completely hilarious but also had so many valid points to make and he made you actually think.
Other comedians make similar points about how shit TV list shows are, about the banality of mainstream TV in general, but they make you laugh at the same time. That was one of the main themes of Extras amongst other things.
This one did make me laugh at the same time and made the point much better. Extras added to the banality of mainstream TV, it didn't say anything challenging or that funny.
Stewart Lee from a couple of years ago:
The reason why stand-up has been problematic for television is because it is one of the High Arts, more comparable to ballet than variety. Stand-up is also a form of Magik, in which the adept alters the world around him by force of will. The timing of a good comic is an instinctive form of alchemy that charges dead silences with electric potential, and wards off Evil. And the length of a pause, and the slightest nuance of vocal phrasing, and impercepitble shifts in volume are all tools that can utterly change the quality of an idea as it is being expressed, and summon Angels. Television timing is fictional, assembled in editing suites by computerised editing machines that can close and extend gaps, and move responses around, operated by men taking drugs to stay awake, who have long since ceased to find anything but The Friday Night Project funny.
Television drama, and television comedy, tend to represent the forms at their most basic. Where Television sledgehammers ideas home, stand-up can drip feed them deliciously, over time, and toy with multiplicities of meaning. No-one trusts Television, as the head of BBC1 has just realised. Viewers assume the stand-up's skill is a post-production construct, and how can anyone pursue ideas with possible multiplicities of nuanced meaning to audiences already degraded by the crass cruelty of Big Brother or the childlike certainties of Trevor MacDonald and his infantile ITV news? The way to get stand-up to work on television is by using creative techniques to re-establish something television has become rather bad at – gaining the trust of the viewer.
A text book example of how not to film stand-up was Ben Elton's TV series from earlier this year, which broke monologues down into dialogues in which his partner, Alexa Chung, was a largely silent partner, and located the comedian in a kind of news programme set, which only served to heighten the artificiallity of the whole process. Ben Elton has set the cause of stand-up on TV back years. He should have looked back to Dave Allen, sat in a chair, with a slow burning cigarette, back in the days when TV production values were so simple that you had no reason to do anything but trust what you were watching.
I haven't got time to read all the comments, so this may have already been said, but I feel Lee shot himself in the foot, criticising such a classic moment from British comedy. Anyway, the Lou and Andy diving board sketch has taken over as number 1 moment, in recent years, and that is much more dserved of criticism than the Del Boy moment.
Quote: catskillz @ March 25 2009, 3:50 PM GMTI haven't got time to read all the comments, so this may have already been said, but I feel Lee shot himself in the foot, criticising such a classic moment from British comedy. Anyway, the Lou and Andy diving board sketch has taken over as number 1 moment, in recent years, and that is much more dserved of criticism than the Del Boy moment.
It wasn't attacking the clip in general, which was a funny moment. It was an attack on how OFAH and other shows like that, have simply become soundbites and clips in recent years, where the same 'classic' moments are shown over and over again rendering them unfunny.
Stewart Lee also said this about stand up comedians -
'I'm Stewart Lee...urrr, urrr, duuuuh, euuurh.'
See what I did there, I confounded your expectations and used the medium of playground humour to turn the argument on it's head. Aren't I clever and great (and a practioner of the High Arts...and a magician).
Again, I like Stewart Lee and I like his brand of stand up. I don't like him trying to tell me that because he stands in front of a microphone and tells jokes, that his brand of entertainment is somehow superior to Dexter, Lost, 24, Rome, etc.