Stewart Lee

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.

Radio Times review

Has there ever been a stand-up show quite this dark? I'd guess not, and this week Stewart Lee's self-flagellation reaches new depths - or heights - because his running theme is the futility and despair of the middle-aged bloke.

"If you're an impotent, vasectomised, 45-year-old, functioning alcoholic father of two, there's not really much point in you," he spits. Yeah all right, keep it light.

There are very funny stretches here, and targets other than himself - including whimsically named bottled beers and The Culture Show (which he describes as "like a children's programme from a collapsed Soviet state"). Let's hope it's not another three years before Lee's next series.

Radio Times review

Stewart Lee is on nasty, bilious form tonight. A long routine about how much he hates dogs is almost self-sabotaging. But then he later implies it was all designed to mock that sort of routine anyway. When he's like this, you'd be hard pressed to argue with someone who found him insufferable, but then the mini-interview segments with Chris Morris make exactly that point.

Similarly, Lee talks straight down the camera lens to address us at home several times ("You can carry on watching if you like, but you need to raise your game"), then has Morris berate him for doing so. All of this would be too self-referential to bother with, if it weren't also funny, inventive and acutely observed. And who else would imagine a stand-up routine aimed at a roomful of oligarchs?

The Robin Ince three minute interview

Stand-Up comic Robin Ince isn't a name dropper. So Martin Walker will do some for him. In a 25 year long career he's worked with the likes of Chris Addison, Richard Dawkins, Ricky Gervais, Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Natalie Haynes, and (gulp) Brian Cox. He's currently touring his show, Robin Ince: In and Out of His mind.

Radio Times review

Early in his monologue, veteran comic Stewart Lee delivers a traditional, well-turned, stand-up gag. Then when it gets a laugh, he deadpans, "You see, I can write jokes. I just choose not to."

What he mostly does instead is meander around a topic - here it's prejudice - working from his experience as a prickly liberal with a short intellectual fuse. The results are a kind of post-stand-up comedy.

A long routine involves the imaginary black wife he claims to have invented as a put-down to a racist cabbie, then branches off into a discussion of his imaginary gay husband and his actual Irish wife - each painted in deliberately stereotypical colours.

More than any other comedian, Lee keeps folding the jokes back on themselves like origami, critiquing himself and the audience. It could get wearisome but he knows exactly how far he can take it.

Have you been watching ... Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle?

The casting of Chris Morris in the third series of Comedy Vehicle has made a brilliant show even better. But do you adore or abhor clever clogs comedian Stewart Lee?

Stewart Lee: Beware - this man may be only joking

To some he is toxic and scornful. But behind the contemptuous on-stage persona is a family man who wants his own garden - and counts his luck. James Hanning meets Stewart Lee.