It’s a privilege to learn the secrets of Stewart Lee’s comedy - November 2010 The Guardian - By Phil Daoust - November 18th, 2010

Stewart Lee . . . offering a peep behind the curtains. Photograph: Jo Hale/Getty Images No one under 30 will believe this, but stand-up comedy was once exciting and unpredictable. You could actually enjoy it sober. Like the punks before them, the alternative comedians who sprang up in the 1980s saw it as their duty…

DIVINE COMEDY - November 2010 The Spectator - By Ed Bartlam - November 11th, 2010

Stewart Lee is a name that should be more widely known. In the sprawling genre of live comedy, of which Britain still boasts the finest variety, Lee is a man who cuts deeper than most. Both admired by his peers and adored by his audiences, he is the antidote to those Saturday night TV comics…

Escaping Our Certain Fates - October 2010 Sitcom Geek - By James Carey - October 28th, 2010

I was in a meeting recently when someone who makes more money than me told me not to be cynical, and to hold fast to original ideas and not make my ideas fit into holes that I may have perceived commissioners and controllers think they have in their schedules. It is infuriating to be told…

Stewart Lee’s “How I Escaped My Certain Fate” (Faber & Faber) - October 2010 GR Bundy's Blog - By GR Bundy - October 28th, 2010

“The worst comedian in Britain, as funny as bubonic plague.” – The Sun “I never wanted to be a comedian.” writes Stewart Lee in the introduction to his brilliant book. “When I was very young I wanted to be a writer, first of all a writer of philosophically inclined thrillers like Robert E. Howard, Ray…

How I Escaped My Certain Fate - October 2010 Chris TT's Blog - By Chris TT - October 3rd, 2010

After looking at such a tiny detail of the Ultrasound song in the last entry, I need to mention stand-up comedian Stewart Lee‘s ferociously brilliant new book How I Escaped My Certain Fate as a great resource if you’re into developing any kind of self-absorbed analysis of your own work-in-performance. (I did have a powerful…

How I Escaped My Certain Fate - August 2010 The Telegraph - By Jeremy Noel-Tod - August 20th, 2010

“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…