Stewart Lee

An interview with Tony Law

Tony Law, described as "the sherpa of stand-up", who "leads an expedition to undiscovered alpin uplands of laughter", by Stewart Lee, is definitely a comedians comedian (having won the prestigious Comics' Choice "Piece-of-Wood" Award at the 2005 Melbourne Comedy Festival).

This isn't a mistake, this is my act!" Stewart Lee's self-deprecation is second nature and he remains as dry as the Atacama desert. Here, he happily tests the limits of the shambolic while pulling the rug from underneath what is now accepted as comedy. He sets out to do a musical comedy routine so as to win over the audience but can't resist a few nice barbs about Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow. The risk is that he deconstructs comedy to the point of nihility - the interview scenes with Armando Iannucci are particularly grating and unnecessary - but Lee is such a pro he always let's the joke, in some form, get through.

Paul Sinha: Inside Stewart Lee's vehicle

I was utterly delighted to be asked to do the show being a massive fan not just of Stewart Lee, but also of the first series.

This week saw the return of Stewart Lee's less-than-conventional stand-up show on BBC Two.

If you want to know who unconventional it is, let me put it this way - the show was meant to be about charity, but instead it consisted of Lee talking about crisps (he repeated the word "crisps" over 100 times during the show), and the programme had only four jokes which Lee deliberately deconstructed, giving advanced warning of when they were due to appear and explaining the jokes in detail.

This show is therefore not going to please everybody. Having said that I fail to understand why the BBC decided to broadcast the show at 23.20, where it would fail to get a larger audience. At least there is the iPlayer.

There were some changes to the format. Most of the sketches had gone. There was only one sketch at the end of the episode featuring Scottish comedian Arnold Brown. However, the original red button feature of the programme, in which Lee was "interviewed" by Armando Iannucci, now appears in the main show, breaking up the stand-up routines.

I am not sure whether this new format works. Maybe it is best to let it settle down for a little while, but I quite liked the original sketches, primarily because they featured comedians not usually seen on TV such as Simon Munnery and at one point Jerry Sadowitz as Jimmy Savile.

It is however a funny, interesting and above-all clever show. Lee makes you laugh and also think about the way comedy is presented. Just a shame it is on so late.

Gigglebox Weekly #8 - Stewart Lee, Psychoville

This week Ian Wolf tackles some stand-up and something sinister.

TV review: Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

Crisp tasty and easily ruffled.

Stewart Lee: "I've got plenty of jokes..."

Perhaps our greatest living Comedian, here Stewart Lee talks about why he gave up stand-up, how he hates being told what to feel, the presentation of comedy and that, despite what some hecklers say, he's got more jokes than you can shake your fist at...

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, BBC Two

One of the great pleasures of being a critic is watching a career develop, and Stewart Lee's is one that I've had the pleasure of, so to speak, for many years. I'm not a Stewart Lee completist but I enjoyed his early days on television with comedy partner Richard Herring in Fist of Fun (just about to be released on DVD for the first time) and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, his solo stand-up shows, his work on the wonderfully subversive Jerry Springer: The Opera and much, much more in between.

The former 41st Best Stand-Up Comedian ever (and current 12th) is back in Stoke Newington's Mildmay Club for the second outing of his Comedy Vehicle. If the first series was a test drive for Stewart Lee's suitability for television, this is him taking the wheel, ditching the rather unnecessary revving at the lights (we're talking about the sketches - this is a metaphor...) and taking us for a more assured drive through, er, Comedytown.

Even StewLee fanboys like tvBite will admit that the cut-aways in the first run didn't always hit the mark. Instead, in their place we have clips from an interview with Armando Iannucci, as found last year on the Red Button. So this second run is more stripped-down and, presumably, less expensive for the Beeb.

At the beginning, Lee explains that he intends to add more jokes to make himself more appealing to a wider public and to the BBC themselves ("They wanted me to put more jokes in as a condition of this being recommissioned."). The only joke is - there are no real jokes ("Not in this show"). They've actually allowed him to be more Stewart Lee-y; he's contrived to make himself less appealing to a wider public. So the pauses are longer, the repetitions more pronounced, the deconstruction more constant. He implores the audience to keep up and then scolds them for anticipating jokes or even laughing at them ("They're sycophants, basically. I despise them"). With the new 11.20pm time slot, it's as if the BBC are saying, "Go mad - no one'll mind."

Will you like it? Would you find a 29-minute routine about a man's grandfather eating crisps where the punchline is "the reconstruction process was time-consuming but not expensive" funny? If not, you may be best waiting for a ride in Russell Howard's Good News Party Limo, which is bigger and more comfortable, but ultimately leaves you feeling a bit cheap. This is still a metaphor.

Stewart Lee ('Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle')

It was with some glee (and no little surprise) that we at DS welcomed the news that Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle had been given a second series. He may have been proclaimed the 41st Best Stand-Up Ever in 2007, but we'd struggle to name many comics we'd rather see on stage than him. Before his show returns tonight, we spoke to Stewart about his new late-night TV slot, why Channel 4 are "moronic cynics" and the long-awaited DVD release of his and Richard Herring's '90s classic Fist of Fun.