What a good title. Maybe a little bit long, but beguiling. The world of the stand-up comedian is one which we are naturally curious about, those people charged with not only engaging an audience but hoping desperately that they can split sides in the process.

This is an autobiography, but without, Lee claims, personal detail – although that’s not strictly true. In tracing his professional career we gain just enough insight, such as why the Solihull-born comic needed to cover up his Oxbridge background. But the book doesn’t suffer at all from revealing little of his love life. On the contrary, his tale of being seduced by alternative comedy is far more potent.

Lee neatly attempts to contrast modern comedy with the work of Bullseye’s Jim Bowen and the “race-hatred” material of jokers like Bernard Manning, right through to alternative characters like Alexei Sayle, although he can’t quite categorise Billy Connolly – except to say he was of the ‘folksinger breed’. Nor can he quite place the “snug bar surrealism” of Chic Murray. But his strength is that he doesn’t really bother trying.

He does, however, acknowledge that the Enterprise Allowance Scheme comedy carousel he joined in the late 1980s was united by its opposition to the political and entertainment forces of the day. And he had to be part of it.

By the late 1990s, Lee was half of a double act with Richard Herring, and he charts their progress from being bottled at student union bars to performing 2000 gigs, and on to radio and television.

Comedy was indeed the new rock’n’roll. But by the end of the decade it had become a tea dance at the British Legion. Angry Young Men such as Ben Elton and Steve Coogan had little to shout about, except perhaps if their new Ferrari was delivered with mud on the tyres. Lee, meanwhile, had attained great critical acclaim but very little money. More worryingly, he ran out of ideas. “Creatively I was in Dundee,” he writes. “By now I’d hoped I’d at least be in St Andrews.”

In 2001 he quit the business, “tired and disillusioned”. Rather incredibly, he went on to write Jerry Springer: The Opera, an international project which caused religious controversy. The diversion didn’t lift his spirits. However, Lee’s stand-up career was revived, he explains, after seeing Ricky Gervais (after his success with The Office) perform live.

It wasn’t that he was blinded by Gervais’s original insight and unique meandering delivery – on the contrary, it was the realisation his one-time student days chum had “borrowed” his own performance style (albeit by osmosis). It seriously rankled. But Lee was pragmatic enough to “allow” his superstar pal to endorse him on posters and soon he was back on his feet.

Now the time was right for an act which suited Lee’s style, in which he’d offer long polemics on, say, the destruction of the planet. And he developed a technique of being deliberately unfunny so he could mislead the audience into thinking he was duff – and then hit them with wit and insight and win them round. Clever, eh? And it was a style that made him perfect for television.

But this isn’t just a story of one-man’s journey, it’s a register, an assessment of every comedian he has met or been informed by, from Arnold Brown to Eddie Izzard (whose improvisation, he says, is well-rehearsed). It also contains a transcript of a gig at The Stand in Glasgow, and he offers notes on where he went right/wrong with his gags. He explains, for example, why he said to the assembly: “As you know, Scottishness is passed through the male genes, like a disability. And it overwhelms all the female genes. That’s why there are no Scottish women. There are men in kilts – but that’s just nature trying to find its own level.”

This is a book for all comedians, for those who think they’re funny and those who appreciate those who make the effort. If there’s a criticism it’s he can’t resist using words such as ‘prelapsarian’. Lee picked up a 2:1 from Cambridge in English Lit. Perhaps he’s trying to prove he should have had a First.

Oh, and he thinks David Baddiel is funny.