Stewart Lee

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.

Stewart Lee: The BBC don't promote the series

Comedy Vehicle's return was hastened in part because of a routine about UKIP in tomorrow's episode, which had to air before April 11th to comply with BBC rules on not broadcasting political satire too close to the European elections.

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Season 3 review

It's great to have him back and here's one element of the license fee that is a great investment. Stewart Lee never was the 41st best, but his current work suggest he's in a league of his own.

Stewart Lee declared he's "not the cheeky chappy next door" in response to criticism from the likes of fellow comic Lee Mack who accused him of being part of the "Oxbridge mafia".

"I'm not the cheeky chappy next door," declared Stewart Lee helpfully at the top of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (BBC Two), just in case we were in any doubt. And what a relief that was from the faux mateyness of clichéd panel game banter, the safe zone of popular comedy. Lee's sour chops are the perfect antidote to a world that's pathologically pleased with itself.

Lee's shtick hovers on the grumpy git line but rarely crosses it: he communicates a restless disillusion with the state of things without coming off as a terminal pessimist. His rebuttal of fellow comedian

Lee Mack's claim that he "couldn't cut the mustard" on a panel show - "you don't cut mustard, you spread i"' - was a priceless piece of tongue-in-cheek, prompted by Mack's reference to Lee as a "cultural bully from the Oxbridge mafia".

Lee's riposte was an exercise in neatly judged apathy: "What have I ever done to him? Nothing." It undercut the idea that panel shows are comedy's Holy Grail rather than scripted easy paycheques.

The second episode is even better, Lee building an entire 15-minute rant around a taxi driver's (alleged) off-the-cuff remark to him that "these days you get arrested and thrown into jail if you say you're English, don't you?"

Alleged? Not content to undermine the absurdity of that casual racism, Lee gleefully undermined his own reputation, floating the idea that he fictionalises the folk bigotry of taxi drivers to suit his own nefarious punchlines. It's comedy that makes you stop and think, and there's not enough of it about.

Why Stewart Lee is wrong about slapstick

In his TV series Comedy Vehicle Lee pours scorn on slapstick by berating Del Boy's fall through the bar for being voted number one in a Funniest TV Momentclip show: "Is that really what we've come to, Britain? Del Boy falling through a bar, and Trigger making a face?!" Significantly, many of the other top clips were also sight gags - Cleese's silly walks, Dawn French collapsing into a puddle... It seems that 80 years since the advent of sound technology we still favour the sight gag over the verbal. Why?

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, TV review

This comedy about comedy would be unforgivably self-indulgent if Stewart Lee wasn't just as incisive on every other facet of modern life as he is on his own comedic genius.

Radio Times review

Stewart Lee is a stand-up who doesn't do stand-up. He doesn't tell gags; often he isn't very funny. Fellow comedians hate him - he's pleased with Lee Mack's description of him as a "cultural bully from the Oxbridge Mafia" and he's regularly denounced on Twitter as "fat" and "depressed-looking" and much, much worse.

So he's an acquired taste. I like him, though I don't know why, possibly because he's astute and clever. He takes the Twitter loathing and turns it around, pulping the social network site and its users as "a state surveillance agency staffed by gullible volunteers... it's the Stasi for the Angry Birds generation". If you don't laugh at that, then possibly this show isn't for you.