Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee leaves his Comedy Vehicle outside Edinburgh's Stand Comedy Club for a second series of his personally curated stand-up showcase. Familiar faces from the first series set to return for the new run include Simon Munnery and Josie Long, along with a chance to enjoy the fresher faces of Lou Sanders and Nish Kumar. Tonight's series opener features Edinburgh comedy award-winner Bridget Christie, long-time Lee conspirator Kevin Eldon, and the sumptuously surreal Tony Law.

Radio Times review

"It's just like Live at the Apollo isn't it?" No, it's not, and that's the point. Far from the shiny floors of Hammersmith, deep in the basement of Edinburgh's Stand Comedy Club, this is more chaotic and much closer to attending an actual night of live stand-up with the likes of Tony Law, Bridget Christie and Kevin Eldon.

Except it's not, it's a TV show, and that's also the point. Despite some smart backstage interviews with Stewart Lee, the bill of not-quite-household names never let you forget it's all a wee bit fake: obsessing over catchphrases, lighting rigs and the other trappings of stand-up on TV. It's all very self-referential and very, very funny. As the dawdling Paul Foot puts it: "This sort of thing I'm doing now, it entertains people, but it's catastrophic for television. I am committing career suicide."

Review: Brendon Burns, Soho Theatre

It's wryly amusing that early on in Brendon Burns' latest show he has a pop at the notion of comedians' comedians and Stewart Lee - "he invented the pause".

Cluub Zarathustra: where British comedy was reborn

The cult comedy night that launched the careers of Simon Munnery, Stewart Lee, Kevin Eldon, Sally Phillips and others is 20 years old.

The Nicholas Coyle three minute interview

Nick Coyle is an Australian writer, director and performer. He arrives at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as part of an alternative comedy package produced by the London Comedy club, The Invisible Dot. If your favourite acts are Simon Munnery, Josie Long and Stewart Lee, The Dot is where you go to watch your comedy.

Picture Report: Machynlleth Comedy Festival Part 1

"It's all gone downhill. It's not what it was." The first comedian I bump into in Machynlleth's high street is Stewart Lee who, typically, (ironically) mocks the rampant commercialism of the Machnylleth Comedy Festival.

Review: Usurp Chance Tour featuring Stewart Lee

The first show I've ever walked out of.

Stewart Lee: A revolution in stand-up

In a collection of critical essays published in 1929 as a prolegomena to the appearance of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Our Exagmination round his Factification of Incamination of Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett begins his contribution with the words "With Joyce, form is content." With Stewart Lee, comedy is content: Joyce's novel is a novel about a novel, Lee's comedy comedy about comedy.

In Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Stewart Lee made a confession. "I haven't seen Breaking Bad. I don't need to watch hundreds of hours of television about a man who supports his family by doing something he knows is beneath him."

We may speculate about the veracity of that remark. Lee may or may not have seen Breaking Bad but he's smart enough to know the value of good comedy. In fact, his weakness is a need to be too smart, a flaw he indulges in a format framed with a postmodern confessional in which Chris Morris pretends to be interrogating him, or at least lending a therapeutic ear to his comedic insecurities.

Lee protests too much, as he surely knows, and he might be better advised to park his vehicle and just deliver the comedy straight. Because, actually, he's a brilliant stand-up. You might call him fearless, except that all his jokes seem to be based on fearful self-loathing.

He is self-deprecating in the extreme, passive-aggressive and self-abusive, and - here's the scary bit - frighteningly truthful. Yes, he is capable of a baroque flourish, comparing himself, for example, to a "parasitical worm in a cat's anus", but his reflections on the other assorted horrors of middle-aged maleness are calibrated with precision. He is also one of the few comedians who understands the comic potential of the name "Andrew Graham-Dixon", though the market for routines about the presenter of The Culture Show is probably quite limited.

Review: Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

They're going to need to give him another BAFTA for this one.