Will Self meets Stewart Lee

As his TV series returns to our screens, comedian Stewart Lee talks to Will Self about his prickly stage persona, how social media is changing comedy and why you won't see him on Mock the Week.

I'm creating a comedy databank for Islamic Birmingham

Fox News terrorism expert Steven Emerson claimed Britain's second city was entirely Islamic. Will I have to adjust my jokes?

Stewart Lee: 'I don't know where the ideas come from'

After years honing his singular brand of acerbic comedy, Stewart Lee is now regarded as one of the UK's top stand-ups. As the third series of his award-winning Comedy Vehicle is released on DVD - and he performs new material in preparation for a fourth - he answers questions from readers and famous admirers.

Radio Times review

Back after a three-year hiatus, the cleverest stand-up on TV had refined his tantric anti-comedy about comedy still further, flipping riffs this way and that for minutes on end like some sort of hilarity jazz trumpeter. Childish vandalism of a road sign to Shilbottle; UKIP; or Lee's own feelings of utter uselessness at being a middle-aged, vasectomised father of two drinking real ale every night: he can now work any subject up into comic nirvana by remorselessly observing not the detail of a thing, but the essence. And he made his new antagonist Chris Morris corpse. Twice.

5 excellent things about Comedy Vehicle series 3

Chris Morris, context, actual jokes ... a few thoughts on this rather excellent series.

Stewart Lee discusses the evolution of Comedy Vehicle

'When I look at the first series, it feels like a different person; the character has changed by circumstances and ageing'

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.