Hmmm… writing about stand-up comedy when you’re not a stand-up comedian is tricky… Like writing about sausage production when you aren’t involved in the production of sausages – what you end up with is a piece that probably puts you off the product whatever you say.

Lee is a comedian who frequently requires perseverance (a bit like that above meaningless metaphor). As he suggests in his own show, staring balefully down the lens of the camera ‘I imagine watching this at home you’d find this terribly tedious’. The argument against this style of comedy is that comedy is frequently perceived as a form of escapism rather than as an art-form in itself. But that’s the argument that justifies switching television channels from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to The A-Team: the latter is more instantly accessible – but the former will last forever as a significant cultural moment.

Similarly, sticking with Lee (if you can find him late at night on BBC2), and
learning to find his nuanced comedy funny is a worthwhile and rewarding exercise.

Stewart Lee is a difficult comedian to like, and when you do like him – he’s a difficult comedian to persuade other people to like.

The problem is there are the bare minimum of traditional jokes – no catchphrases and almost no enclosed, defined moments of humour. His routines rely on his spending time building a rapport with the audience – then challenging that rapport thereby daring the audience to stay with him. All of this is blended with a self-mockery. Lee, in the best style of a preacher, approaches his craft with a theme. He describes the theme at the beginning of his set, unpacks the theme during the set, and then explains how the theme has worked – and somehow he manages to do all this comedically. In his fabled comeback set, ’90s Comedian, this technique was an essential one. In the midst of being accused of blasphemy and receiving hate mail from right wing Christians for his work on Jerry Springer: The Opera, Lee decided to devote the second half of his show to a single, visceral anecdote that combined alcohol induced emesis with an encounter with Christ. The first half of his show involved his attempts to prepare the audience in time for the second half. Somehow, he gets away with it.

His television series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is a condensed and truncated version of his live shows. Each episode follows a similar format – he opens his routine with a more traditional set of stand-up anecdotes, follows this with a more abstract piece illustrating the first half in which he ‘acts’ as a character or characters in conversation. These two halves are punctuated by filmed inserts showing him in interview with producer Armando Iannucci who, in the role of a BBC executive, criticises Lee’s lack of jokes and idiosyncratic approach to comedy. The episodes all end with an elaborately filmed piece drawing the themes of the set together – the first episode, for example, depicted Lee dressed as Godzilla defending a model city from a giant lobster, while the second depicted Lee besieging an isolated house dressed as a pearly king/biker arms with a shotgun.

It’s almost impossible to relay Lee’s comedy after the event – his style is such that repeating his lines or trying to re-enact his anecdotes are guaranteed to not be funny. Lee’s comedy relies so much on both seeing the whole routine and on his tone, the silences between the lines, even his posture. Disconcertingly, it’s difficult to relay Lee’s comedy even when talking to someone who has seen a whole episode. Watching Lee is an hilarious ordeal. When you get him it makes it much easier to stick with him – but if you fail to make that first step then you’re lost. But Lee helps you along the path to finding him funny. His sets are designed carefully to guide you (or manipulate you depending on your cynicism) towards the laughs. I know this because his book, effectively a transcription of his three most notable routines with footnotes, describes the skills and techniques Lee employs to hold the audience.

Of course – it would be useless if, to understand Lee’s comedy, you needed to read his book in advance. Fortunately, like his book, his routines come with footnotes. The filmed inserts in the television episodes are part of this trick – they undercut the frequently contentious, apparently arrogant content of the main stand-up by mocking both Lee personally and his style. These moments act as points of reference, driving the theme of the set home, but also as breathing spaces, allowing the audience to take stock before Lee proceeds towards more contentious material. This is the key to Lee’s style – he refuses to compromise but also refuses to leave the audience behind. Those he loses are almost collateral damage, grudgingly sacrificed in the knowledge that if they fail to find Lee funny in half an hour, they probably won’t be able to persevere for an hour or more of his live show. As such, Lee hones his audience . He suggests in his book, mockingly but not without reason, he has carefully selected his audience – and it is clear even in the limited time-spans of these television episodes how he manages to do this.

So – love him or loathe him, or love him and loathe him (it is possible), you need to understand Lee’s place in the hierarchy of current stand-up comedy. He stands apart from recent, stadium behemoths such as Michael McIntyre, Russell Brand and Frankie Boyle partially by being less popular – but this position allows him the freedom to mock his fellow comedians ‘from below’ – and his moments of self-reflexivity allows him to do so without appearing genuinely jealous or bitter. In this way, he is, perhaps, the most ethical of comedians.