Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle

Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle warm-up shows

Stewart Lee has announced about a million shows at the Leicester Square Theatre across October, November and December.

The Diary: Stewart Lee

A week in the life of Stewart Lee.

Comedy, controversy and more comedy

Meet Stewart Lee, the notoriously uncompromising comedian.

I probably only caught half of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, mainly because I can appreciate Lee's skill and sharpness but he just comes across as insufferably smug to me. And I like miserabalist, cynical comedy. I also wasn't a fan of the way brief sketches featuring Kevin Eldon, Paul Putner and Simon Munnery would interrupt Lee's standup, often to pointlessly visualize a punchline or joke. It's unnecessary and, personally, I believe it goes against what makes stand-up work - destroying that ephemeral mindspace between comedian and audience. The beauty that allows someone telling a joke to have it interpreted and visualized in a million different ways inside the heads of those who hear it. I don't need, or want, sketches that ram home the point of Lee's words.

Anyway, while it's not a show that leaves me feeling satisfied and laughing heartily throughout, it undoubtedly has a weight of intelligence behind it, so if you're attuned to Lee's deadpan style and tendency to milk phrases dry for comic effect, then you're probably very glad it's coming back.

Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle Returns!

'There'll be a 2nd series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. Huzzah! Huzzah!' tweeted producer Armando Iannucci earlier today.

First shown in March, this was one of the comic comebacks of the year. Though best known for co-writing Jerry Springer: the Opera, which made him the focus of a national hate campaign, Stewart Lee is a gifted stand-up with a laconic style. In the first instalment, his subject is books in general and so-called "celebrity hardbacks" in particular, which allows Lee, who looks a bit like a very young, very tired Morrissey, to give Jeremy Clarkson and Chris Moyles both barrels. The sketches don't work very well, but the rest is a treat.

Stewart Lee: 'hate all popular culture'

Britain's finest stand-up comedian explains why it is his job to have a pop at the powerful - and that includes glibly offensive entertainers.

Unlike The Omid Djalili Show, the stand-up comedy and sketch format is in safe hands in Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, paradoxically, because whatever Djalili might think of himself, Lee is an infinitely edgier, more dangerous operator. He never swears, yet his invective is coruscating, and last night - bringing the curtain down on a series that has never been less than 100 per cent watchable, even though I've done much of the watching through my fingers - he directed it at comedy itself, and in particular at the kind of American stand-ups worshipped by legions of British comedians. Lee doesn't do veneration, and deserves to be venerated for it.

Editor Note: This is another review which was written prior to the episodes being broadcast. The comedy episode was actually episode five.

What better time than Easter for jokes about licking the face of the Pope? It was thanks once again to the merrily morose Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, a kind of King Lear with one-liners, for an anti-genuflection to TV religion that railed against the general rubbishness of the world in a way that somehow made you mind it not quite so much.

Ranging across the religious spectrum from Catholicism to Islam, Lee wisely wasn't out to topple religion per se - come on, he only had half an hour - but his potshots were cannily aimed.

Tackling the idea that you can quote holy books in any way you want in order to prove a point, he set up a sophisticated joke about a chihuahua piloting an aeroplane - it was all to do with Animals In Islam - yet sent himself up by punchlining it 'hooks for hands!'.

Editor Note: This review was published in Metro despite the fact the religion episode had actually been moved to the following week and thus had not been broadcast yet