For decades, stand-up comedians entered the palace of entertainment by the tradesmen’s entrance. Now the red carpet is rolled out, do we have any idea what to do next? And where did this change in our status begin?

In 1993, after David Baddiel and Rob Newman became the fist comics to play Wembley, Janet Street Porter declared comedy ‘the new rock and roll’. Like the naïve pop bands of yore whose soiled footsteps we now trod in, young stand-ups like me hit the road in transit vans full of lager on expensively promoted tours from which we saw little, if any, of the takings. In this respect at least, comedy was the new rock and roll.

Today, the death of recorded music and the tyranny of the X-Factor means that even rock and roll itself is no longer really rock and roll, just a stringy facsimile made of cat guts, navel fluff and hair gel. If this travesty is rock and roll, then stand-up comedy could be too, for latterly it’s equally adept at fleecing vulnerable people out of hot dog money in cavernous barns.

Takings for live stand-up have increased tenfold since 2004, most of those tickets being sold at forty or fifty quid a time for big TV names in stadiums and 1000 seater plus venues. And while all this may be good for the bank balances of agents, promoters, venue managers and stand-up comedy’s heavy hitters, is it good for stand-up comedy itself?

Does the possibility of enormous commercial reward necessarily encourage creativity?

When I first helped invent all modern day comedy in the late 80s, when comedy was still good and everyone involved was a living saint, I shared bills with Anthony ‘Iceman’ Irving, who melted blocks of ice whilst making puns about ice, and Lyndsay Moran, who sang funny songs on the accordion, wore a tutu and danced. Neither of these acts, for example, had designs on the O2, not least because it hadn’t been built, and neither did I. The most commercial, least open minded, venues you might hope to play would be The Comedy Store, and the lone outpost of the subsequently massive Jongleurs chain in Battersea. And even these places were still pretty good.

Nobody was hemmed in by the possibility of riches. It is inevitable, surely, now that the template of the multi-millionaire, multi-million selling stand-up exists, that ambitious young people will try to develop an act to fit a demand, rather than creating a demand for a new kind of act. And nothing good ever comes of that approach.

There’s a deeper argument to be had here about whether the stand-up comedian, who shares anthropological roots with the holy fools and tricksters of myth, should even be a success? Aren’t we supposed to be outside society, looking in, poking fun?

In the late 1990s, when he became quietly massive, Frank Skinner neatly and charmingly sidestepped this dilemma, as had Billy Connolly before him, doing routines about attending film premieres and such like, as if he were the bewildered incomer, reporting back on our behalf. But success normally limits the comedian, creatively. After a quarter of a century, Jerry Sadowitz remains that last word in supposedly offensive comedy, having contrived, by genuine ill-luck, poor genes, or cunning design, to be one of society’s eternal outsiders, thus given comic license to denigrate everyone, fighting from the bottom up.

This is not the same thing at all as doing jokes about the handicapped in a £3000 suit to a stadium full of fans, even if both might be funny.

Inevitably, the money that’s on offer to the current crop of big name stand-ups will also affect the quality of what you get to see on your TV.

Rhod Gilbert is a very good stand-up who can play massive venues. The rumoured advance for his last seventy minute stand-up DVD was £250 000. I can’t remember where I heard this rumour but, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine it’s true, or that something like it is, maybe concerning someone else. £250 000 for seventy minutes of DVD stand-up is significantly more than one gets paid for writing three hours of stand-up for BBC2. The top-name comics have no financial incentive to sell one hundred and eighty minutes of their good stuff to TV when they can make more out of selling seventy to DVD.

That’s why you have to have me doing stand-up on BBC2 instead (‘Stewart Lee is the worst stand-up comedian in Britain, as funny as bubonic plague’ – The Sun), rather than someone better whom you like. Instead, the real talents host quiz shows, chop out old gear in six minute lines of variety shows, and chip in on panels, floating the brand whilst keeping the uncut product for premium rate customers.

That said, the so-called ‘comedy boom’ has benefitted me enormously.

The message board that follows the on-line appearance of this piece will no doubt be clogged with genuinely furious people who can’t even accept that I might even be a comedian at all. They have my sympathy and I have never sought deliberately to waste their time or their babysitting money.

But when the top acts are doing stadium tours, I can do 20 000 people in a 400 seater over two months round Christmas in London and still appear like some sort of obscure cult for cool people.

In the slipstream of the mass popularity of stand-up, even the person who is supposed to be the alternative to stand-up can do reasonably well. I think all of us comics must offer thanks to one man, and one man alone, for this state of affairs. Michael MacIntyre.

For it was Michael MacIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow that convinced the public that they might like stand-up, en masse, and he has begun to make household names of some hugely worthwhile acts, who somehow managed to shine in the show’s brutal showcase format.

MacIntyre is the king-maker, the power-broker of British entertainment. He is the gate-keeper, via exposure on his Roadshow, to millions upon millions of pounds worth of stadium stand-up ticket sales.

Though MacIntyre’s massively popular and super-evolved brand of observational schtick is regarded with baffled ambivalence by many comedians themselves, he may, on balance, be a good thing for the future of stand-up as an art form. The skipping humorist’s utilitarian ubiquity means that everyone knows what a stand-up comedian is now.
Everyone has, hopefully, some innate understanding of the form, of the rules of engagement, of what is novel, and what is clichéd, so perhaps comedians and audiences are in a better position to develop their application and their appreciation, respectively, of the craft of the comic itself.

And the idea of going to see stand-up comedy, as the ticket sales show, is now no longer something only those with very specialised interests do.

There’s a generation of comics hitting the boards now, influenced, without even knowing it, by stand-up comedy’s Velvet Revolution, when the late Seventies Comedy Store and Comic Strip crew toppled the light ent idols, or at least wobbled them a little.

Michael MacIntyre has handed them the keys to Imperial Palace. At last, the stand-up comedians are inside the citadel, but we don’t seem quite to know what to do with our power and influence, and we run from beer endorsement to cash-in novelty book deal to Channel 4 vehicle like moths in a planetarium.

No-one in this country has anything to compare the current situation to.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Will public demand force an evolutionary leap in the art form of stand-up, or will the potential money to be made mean the safe middle ground becomes ever more crowded?
In many ways, it’s out of our hands.
You are the audience. You have the power. The future is up to you.