Standup is finally the big business the industry has hoped it would be ever since Newman and Baddiel played Wembley in the early 90s,” writes Stewart Lee (pictured) in his new book.

He’s right, of course. Standups are everywhere now: all over the telly, topping bestseller lists, writing broadsheet newspaper columns and hosting chatshows. Oh, and in Lee’s case, having their standup scripts published by Faber & Faber. Lee is justifiably ambivalent about what he calls “the age of the supa-standup”, but he’s also responsible for one of its more curious manifestations – the rise of the comic as auteur.

The transcript of his 2009 show If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One is published in January. I’ve got a preview copy, and it’s odd to hold it in one’s hands – a standup set masquerading as play script. Of course, Lee has done this before; his previous book How I Escaped My Certain Fate contained transcripts of his three preceding shows… but that book traded as autobiography.

This one is unapologetically a script, in the same format Faber has printed thousands of theatre texts. This is not normal. Until Lee came along, standup was about the spoken, not the written word. If it got immortalised at all, it was on CD and DVD.

For years, the very idea of such a book would have seemed absurd. The point of standup was that it wasn’t (or at least, didn’t appear to be) scripted. The art lay in seeming spontaneous as well as funny; there was disillusionment in the idea that a standup might repeat the same show night after night. Alternative comedy saw itself as anarchic and unpredictable – hard qualities to enshrine in a script. Mainstream comedy was more reliant on the well-turned gag, but – in the words of old-school doyen Frank Carson – “it’s the way I tell ’em” that made the comedy funny.

Lee’s script does its best to memorialise liveness – and to record not only what Lee says on stage, but how. It’s a transcript of one particular performance, at the Citizens theatre in Glasgow in March 2010.

These words in this order are unique to that gig – Lee’s off-the-cuff gags about Glaswegian sectarianism are duly transcribed, while an unscripted dialogue with an audience member is rendered exchange for pedantic exchange. There are also stage directions (“Stew is so choked with emotion he cannot finish the sentence”) that indicate how the words are made funnier: Lee’s delivery is, after all, among the most distinctive in standup. Whereas theatre scripts are published partly for the benefit of future productions, I fear for the local am-dram group that elects to stage their own version of If You Prefer a Milder Comedian …

Yes, the published text makes an amusing read, but mainly because one hears Lee’s voice in one’s head, timing the jokes to painstaking perfection, and oozing sarcasm. (Carson has nothing on Lee.)

So what does the publication of these scripts tell us about the state of the art form? It’s clearly of a piece with the comedy boom that Lee elsewhere distances himself from. That phenomenon isn’t just about standup’s skyrocketing mass appeal, it’s about its cultural cachet. You can study standup at university nowadays, watch Daniel Kitson at the National Theatre or read (erudite, perceptive) comedy reviews in the broadsheets.
The extensive footnotes on Lee’s scripts are the literary equivalent of a particularly garrulous DVD commentary. As a dissident spirit, romantically attached to standup’s delinquent youth, Lee may be appalled to think it – but this is standup going legit, staking its claim to a place in the library as well as the beer-spattered bearpit.

Fair enough: standup can be as much a literary craft as playwriting – but only in certain instances. Uniquely, Lee is the kingpin of cerebral standup, lionised by the Penguin-paperback cognoscenti.
His audience reads books, in other words – which you couldn’t say with confidence of, say, Russell Howard’s. Lee’s standup is also dense enough to lend itself to repeated reading, and to the kind of (tongue-in-cheek) textual analysis with which he fills those copious footnotes. His stage-to-page footsteps may not be followed.

Much as I’d love it, I can’t see Faber & Faber’s editor buttonholing John Bishop anytime soon – while the collected transcripts of Lee Evans would provide only a fraction of what makes Evans an eye-popping spectacle when live.
And as for the eccentric alternative acts whom Lee does so much to champion – the Andrew Baileys, Chris Lynams and Simon Munnerys, fireworks sizzling up their arses and buckets on their heads – well, live comedy at its weirdest will always be script-proof, and much the better for it.