Stewart Lee gives a talk on comedy and writing

Stewart Lee discusses the fantasy that stand-up comedy is spontaneous rather than written, and describes the evolution of stand-up over the last few decades.

His talk, given at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, takes in a wide range of subjects from the first app he ever came across to a discussion of the value of culture in society.

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Stewart Lee can be funny about Islamophobia

Those of us who ground our way through Thursday's Comedy Vehicle will be relieved to see this video.

It shows Stewart Lee using the same material and being funny.

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Stewart Lee on his new series of Comedy Vehicle

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We have seen Stewart Lee talking to Will Self and Alexei Sayle.

Here he is being interviewed by The Quietus:

Have you noticed a similar change happening in comedy? 

SL: I have. If you went to the alternative night with all the weird acts, which 25 years ago was downstairs at the Market Tavern on Islington Green on Essex Road, you'd see Simon Munnery who is the son of a plumber. Or Johnny Vegas, who is not a member of the upper classes. 

The same thing now, which is the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society at the New Red Lion, is a very good night, but there's a higher proportion of people whose parents bought them a flat. Inevitably, because you can't do that sort of stuff that doesn't pay, unless you've got some sort of fallback position.

The interviewer, Simon Price, takes Lee Terribly Seriously, but then maybe we should.

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Stewart Lee talks to Alexei Sayle

The new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts at 10 this evening on BBC2.

While we are waiting, here he is interviewing Alexei Sayle about Thatcher Stole My Trousers, the latter's second volume of memoirs .

Something the two have in common is that, rather than flatter it like lesser left-wing comedians, they attack their audience's view of the world.

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Stewart Lee and Will Self

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Good news. A new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts on BBC2 at 10pm on Thursday 3 March.

Stewart Lee is interviewed on the Guardian website today (and in tomorrow's paper?) by Will Self:

On stage, Lee is apparently an embittered, envious, self-lacerating man, caught in a ferocious double-bind: if he’s unsuccessful it’s because his audience are stupid shits who don’t get his jokes; and if he’s successful it’s because he’s a stupid shit churning out jokes that confirm his audience in their prejudices. So convincing is this act – if indeed it is an act – that I became intrigued: was the “real” Lee quite as prickly as his performance persona? In order to find out I asked him over for a serious sit-down.

It's good stuff, but I wish someone would tell Self to stop saying "self-reflexive".

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