“It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it,” said Oscar Wilde in “The Critic as Artist” – an aphorism that has probably comforted arts journalists too much. It doesn’t mean that awarding a book stars in a newspaper is harder than writing one in the first place. It means that great art is always also a commentary on its own creation (as this review will now cease to be).

Excessive self-commentary in a work of art, however, is popularly viewed with the kind of suspicion associated with other kinds of activity beginning with “self”. The autobiographical analysis of stand-up comedy in particular would seem to be an optimistically indulgent thing to offer the public. If you didn’t laugh the first time, a voice-over isn’t going to help.

And yet Stewart Lee – stand-up comedian and recovering arts journalist – has done just that, and it works brilliantly. How I Escaped My Certain Fate: the Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian is built around the transcripts of three shows from the past decade that established Lee, in a television poll, as the “41st best stand-up ever” (the title of the last routine). He had previously been on stage and screen in the Nineties, but in the early Noughties he gave up performing and instead co-wrote and directed Jerry Springer: the Opera, which attracted 55,000 complaints when it was broadcast on the BBC and was threatened with prosecution for blasphemy.

The book begins by declaring “I never wanted to be a comedian … I wanted to be a writer”, and Lee’s literary ambition makes all the difference here. What might have been a recycling exercise for unsold DVDs becomes by turns a history of contemporary British comedy, a masterclass in joke-making, an essay on the relationship between art and society, and a movingly oblique autobiography.

The key to it all is the discovery, halfway through the story, of the artistic truth that form is content. The result is a spoken style that, with all its hesitations, digressions and repetitions, works surprisingly well on the page. As Lee observes, he is interested in the humour of speech rhythm and “little turns of phrase”, as well as big ideas and elaborate set-ups.

For instance, at the climax of one show, it matters to him that he uses the precise words “I vomited into the open mouth of Christ” and not the cruder alternative “puked” as reported in a bad review.

Such punchlines are not for everyone and Lee makes it clear that he doesn’t aspire to a shelf of “Perspex Chortle awards”. The book praises forgotten mavericks and neglected contemporaries, while making catty asides about Peter Kay and Russell Brand.

Sometimes the professional irony can misfire. Lee, however, employs a literary form that carries his book well beyond the average celebrity cash-in: the footnote. Long annotations set off on digressive journeys of their own, complicating the main text with their own sense of timing.

Form, again, becomes content through this innovation. Lee exploits the footnote’s potential to argue with himself, his editor, his friends and his critics. It also allows him to consider everything from the ethics of laughter and the niceties of audience control to his relationship with his mother and Monty Python’s use of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Complementing the very well-written autobiographical narrative that connects the routines and the footnotes are such rich mini-essays that I reached the end wishing there was an index, in order to relocate such observations as Lee’s comparison of the Mighty Boosh’s offbeat comic timing to “dried stalks of spaghetti being dropped onto a china plate”.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate is a sophisticated demonstration of the poetics of comedy by an artist who, like Wilde, has been moved to public contrarianism in the belief that there is “no sin except stupidity”.

*Jeremy Noel-Tod teaches English at East Anglia University