A year before most people will see it on television, in a gentrified dungeon off Leicester Square in London, Stewart Lee tests out some new material. He is a comedian, but on stage this evening he has the detachment of a technician conducting a science experiment: night after night, he will make fractional tweaks to the syntax or the emphasis of a line and gauge the fractional, almost imperceptible response of the audience. Though, as he states explicitly early on, he doesn’t wholly care what we think. The aim is to create a 30-minute monologue that is so taut you could ping a coin off it. So that anyone who tries to dismantle its arguments – Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall, say, or a more popular, less divisive comedian – should arrive well-briefed and ready for a fight.

Tonight, there’s half an hour about Islamophobia, which is surprisingly silly, and half an hour about urine, which is surprisingly serious. Lee is, of course, fully aware of this incongruity and it has become fundamental to his live act and his BBC2 series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, where these polemics will eventually appear. “Sometimes I read that I’m this leftwing comic who just goes on about politics the whole time,” he says when we meet in a cafe a couple of days before the gig. “Other times I read that it’s just surreal nonsense about crisps. It’s both of those.” Lee cackles briefly, explosively. “Or I read there’s no jokes and it’s just about cleverness of structure and then I read a criticism of the last series that it was an obvious bid for mainstream acceptance by being full of jokes. It’s a lot of things.”

The 46-year-old Lee is obsessed with obscure musicians, outsider artists and forgotten writers and he brings some of their off-kilter spirit to standup comedy. Maintaining this stance is far from straightforward, though, and he now spends much of his life fretting over when inspiration will strike. This is partly because most of his spare time is taken up with his two children, aged seven and three, and his wife, comedian Bridget Christie, and he doesn’t want to talk about them in his act. He used to like hill-walking and playing the guitar, but rarely finds the time now.

“I don’t know where the ideas come from and it’s terrifying,” Lee admits. “They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s I’d walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I’m just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.”

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle: ‘Sometimes I read that I’m this leftwing comic who just goes on about politics the whole time.’ Photograph: BBC

But the biggest change to Lee’s circumstances has been his belated success. A circuit standup since leaving university, he only started to turn a profit about a decade ago, in his mid-30s. He co-wrote the hit musical Jerry Springer: The Opera, but saw little of whatever profits there were. “The financial side of it was like standing in a wind tunnel with pound notes blowing around, but you couldn’t really grab any of them,” Lee recalls. “Loads of money passed through but at the end you were standing there with nothing and all your clothes were blown off.”

When he wanted to make a recording of his 90s Comedian show in 2006 – which both the Times and Chortle, the comedy-business website, would subsequently declare the best standup DVD of the decade – Lee was told by his then agent that he couldn’t even give the filming rights away .

At some point, however, enough people came round to Lee’s wilfully smart, relentlessly provocative routines. Comedy Vehicle first aired in 2009, script-edited by Chris Morris and with Armando Iannucci as executive editor; viewing figures were slow to take off, but increased with each episode and the series was nominated for a Bafta. It has been recommissioned for a fourth series, to be filmed next December and shown in early 2016, and he is secure enough now that he recently traded up his flat to a house with a garden in north London, though not to Shropshire, as he flat-out lied in a recent column for the Observer.

“The problem is that who you are in relation to the world changes,” says Lee of this newfound stability. “It was very convenient from 2005 to a few years ago to be this person moaning about stuff because, in my mind, it seemed that the critical perception of me as good was not reflected by my audience sizes or anything like that. It was justifiable to play this character, but now I’ve got to be someone else because the initial position that the character would take doesn’t quite make sense now. So you’ve got to think about that as well.”

Lee has to work harder these days to polarise audiences, but he manages to achieve it with admirable consistency. The poster for these current live shows, A Room With a Stew, features two oversized quotes: one from the Daily Telegraph calling him “toxic” and another from a Ukip parliamentary candidate describing his routine as “totally evil propaganda… untrue and unfunny.” Lee remarks, “You put those things on so that if people come along and say, ‘I didn’t like it,’ I can go, ‘Well, I didn’t say you would.’”

Based on the response of Observer readers asked to submit lines of inquiry for this You Ask the Questions interview, Lee enjoys landslide support, though he inspires a resilient strain of snarkiness, too. In fact, we received an unprecedented number of submissions for this feature.

Lee, an occasional columnist in these pages, shrugs off the interest. “Frank Skinner recently made the distinction between an artist and a service provider: he said comedians could never be artists, you are service providers,” he says. “And I understand why Frank would say that, because you have a responsibility to people who have got a babysitter on a Friday night in a way that a painter doesn’t. Or you are there at the point of sale, which makes you accountable to the customer. But I absolutely don’t see myself as a service provider. It’s arrogant really, it’s not fair, but I’ve covered my back by putting all this bad press on the posters.”

Series three of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is out on DVD now; A Room With a Stew continues throughout 2015 (stewartlee.co.uk)

YOU ASK THE QUESTIONS

Will you vote? If so, who for and with how much sadness in your heart?

Liam Williams, comedian

Depending on what part of the country I was in, I’d vote to try and stop Ukip getting a seat. Round here, which has been a fairly safe Labour seat, I think it would be possible to vote Green and not worry that something awful was going to happen. They seem to be the only people that you don’t feel angry with at the moment, but I don’t know, we’ll have to see what happens in May. If Ukip came up with some policies, if they are pro-environment and pro-multiculturalism – they might, I don’t know. But if it was tomorrow, round here, I’d vote Green.

Stew, could you divulge something detestable about yourself to help quell my longstanding crush on you?

Sam Chapman, by email

Ah well, I’ve put on about three stone in eight years, which is not good. And I’m approaching that position where I’d prefer not to have to do my shoelaces up. But weirdly, being decrepit helps in a way with the perception of you as an act, because in the 1990s when we were young and comedy was the new rock’n’roll, it was like you were supposed to be a pin-up. You can see all these young guys imprisoned by that; some of them knocked 10 years off their age. So at least you are not part of that if you’re going bald and grey and deaf. At least you’re not in this unwinnable race against the ravages of time.

You’ve talked about playing a kind of “Stewart Lee” character on stage. What were your feelings about Daniel O’Reilly’s claim that Dapper Laughs is just a character? Can “playing a character” on stage mitigate personal responsibility for the content of what you’re saying/doing in any way?

Matthew Bowskill, by email

I think it can do, yeah. He’s an unusual case because – apart from all the things about, “Was the content acceptable or not?” – he’s a very specific modern problem. He had made his name by doing six-second things on YouTube. That doesn’t necessarily prepare you for long-form ideas. Then he was accelerated to a level of fame by YouTube and by ITV2’s desperation to hit the 16- to 32-year-old market. They were clutching anything blowing across the windscreen and they put someone on who was not ready for it. If you’re dealing with that kind of material, you have to know what you’re doing. To flag it up that it’s a character or that it’s a deliberate comic‑effect attitude.

What do you do with that righteous anger when you are not doing standup?

PlanetNat, posted online

Well, that’s slightly sarcastic. Actually, it’s sort of the other way round. You get annoyed about things in real life and then the tragic thing is that while you are moaning on the awful injustice and suffering of something, something grimly comic will then strike you about it, like a parasite feeding off the misery of the world. Some comics do it with their own lives: it’s a very short step, for some people, from the divorce papers arriving to realising there’s a one-man show in it.

That’s the terrible thing, whenever something really bad happens, you always just think, “Well, probably an hour in that”. There was a half-hour in the last series that was all about being 45 and married and having beer from the supermarket. One night I was trying to put some things in a cupboard and I fell off the shelf and nearly knocked myself out. I had to go to casualty. Again, when I was there, I was thinking, “As long as I haven’t got brain damage, there’s probably something in this”. Because the way they were talking to me, they couldn’t really believe what I’d done. That made me think about how you’re perceived as a middle-aged man. If you’re a young man and you fall off a shelf, they’re like, “He must have been drunk”. If you’re a middle-aged man, it’s sort of the most tragic thing: you’re on the way out, you can’t even walk.

I’m going to be a father for the first time in May. Any advice?

Slother, posted online

Yeah, get the Haynes baby manual, by the people who make the car manuals, it’s a brilliant book. There’s a lot of books for dads that are written in a Jeremy Clarkson sort of way. They go: “Your wife’s tits will have gone all droopy, don’t expect any action for six months”, and stuff like that. But the Haynes manual for the baby has no human feelings in it at all. It treats the child as if it were a machine that needs to be maintained. For example, there’s one page where there’s pictures of photographs of nappies with different-coloured poo in them and it tells you if the child’s well or unwell. You can compare your actual nappy with it. It has a picture on the front drawn in the same dispassionate way as a Ford Escort would have been – it’s really, really great.

Do you fear, like me, that with the seemingly rapid rise of Ukip, we are in danger of becoming a less tolerant country?

Shaun Tompkins, by email

Yes, absolutely and I think we already are. Katie Hopkins saying that policemen should get a medal for shooting that kid [Michael Brown in St Louis], that football guy going on about the Chinese and the public reaction to Dapper Laughs. And the triumphalism attached to the backlash against Emily Thornberry stupidly tweeting that picture are all post-Ukip. There’s a post-Ukipness about them. They have already coarsened public discourse and allowed people who harbour feelings of hatred [to express things] that they previously felt were polite to keep in. It’s made them feel that they can just say whatever they like.

Does jazz influence your comedy? Your ability to riff on a particular theme with variations, repetition, dynamics and pace reminds me of a modern jazz soloist: Parker, Coltrane, Roger Whittaker.

artmod, posted online

Obviously that’s hugely flattering and you’d like to think it was the case, but they’ve lived their whole lives to develop a dedicated aesthetic of total improvisation while being utterly ignored by society and living on the fringes of humanity and in utter poverty, and then dying in obscurity and never being recognised for their art. I, on the other hand, have been on Have I Got News for You and stuff like that. So it’s not really the same sort of thing.

But I retroactively understand what I do by listening to exactly that period of jazz: when you listen to Coltrane doing My Favourite Things, he can do it for 50 minutes because at the beginning he establishes a theme and then he gets back to it at the end. And always within it, you have the nagging feeling that you’re getting hints of it. I think you can do a shaggy-dog story and construct a set in that way as long as you give the impression you know what you’re doing and it’s about something. Then the suggestion that it’s trying to get back to that thing will create a tension that allows you to do that. To say any more than that, you risk going into that territory of utter delusion.

‘What kind of stupid, stuck-up snob wouldn’t like Oasis?’ Photograph: Heiko Junge/EPA

What was the last thing you changed your opinion on, and why?

Phalanxia, posted online

Oasis probably. I didn’t like them when I was a twentysomething snob, because I thought Blur were clever, and now my wife really likes them, so I’ve listened to them a lot and I really, really like them now. I even like the records that aren’t supposed to be very good, like Be Here Now. It’s a great example of what it is and the meaninglessness of the lyrics doesn’t bother me now because they are just sung in a brilliant way. So Oasis, and it’s ridiculous not to like Oasis – what kind of stupid, stuck-up snob wouldn’t like Oasis? Well, me as a twentysomething. I hope they reform.

Do you think the internet is making people happier?

SirJohnTerry, posted online

No, I think it’s making everyone unhappy. It makes me unhappier. I read in magazines about records that I want, I go out and try to buy them, there aren’t any shops left. I get them from Amazon, they don’t pay any tax, they come in the post, you have no human interaction with anyone. I used to imagine that I was friends with people in record shops and bookshops because I would go in and talk to them – even in HMV. It used to have a really big jazz department and the guys who worked there obviously really liked the music and you could interact with people. It’s a shame that all those things have gone.

The other thing is, if I was starting out in standup now, I probably wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t be able to do it. Even if you do a try-out spot to 10 people, the chances are that someone would have got home and tweeted about it. So you go home, look at your name, and someone would say, “This bloke’s shit.” I’d give up. I wouldn’t have the self-belief to get through that stuff.

Dear Mr Lee, I approached you after you had watched (like I had) a Tinariwen gig in London and said to you how much I enjoyed your work. You replied, “Thanks.” I then asked if you’d mind having a picture taken with me. You said, “I couldn’t think of anything worse.” I was wondering, have you, after a considerable amount of lapsed time, thought of anything worse?

Jonathan1984, posted online

Obviously, I’ve thought of worse things than that since then. I hope that if you say these things with a smile people leave you alone – that man at Tinariwen was at least good‑humoured about it, I remember that. If you laugh it off, you’re normally all right.

But then I did that with one guy when I was in an Indian restaurant with the kids one lunchtime in Edinburgh. My son had locked himself in the toilet, I was trying to get him out of there and the little three-year-old was sitting at the table and had dhal all over her face. I was obviously trying to deal with it, and a bloke came off the street and asked for a photo and I went, “Well… ” Then he wrote me a 1,000-word email slagging me off for it. But you could see what was going on: it was a difficult situation to break out of, and also not nice for the kids. All the other people in the room [are] going: “Who’s that bloke? And why’s that man having his photo taken? And why is his son locked in the toilet?” I had to get a coin – take a photo of that.

The problem now is that every single person in the world has a camera on their phone, so if they just vaguely recognise you they want a photo taken. Often I can tell when this is the case, so when those people ask for autographs and they don’t know who I am, I sign them but I sign them as Richard Herring [Lee’s former comedy partner] or Ali Campbell from UB40. No one ever queries that.

AND… CELEBRITIES ASK THE QUESTIONS



Photograph: David Fisher/REX

You turned 46 this year, a landmark birthday in anyone’s life. If you could travel back in time, what would the 46-year-old say to the 45-year-old?

Kevin Eldon, comedian

Watch your weight; do something about it now. Get your stuff out of storage sooner rather than later because the rates are going up.

And make sure that one of you in your marriage has utility bills in the same name as the car paperwork, so you can get a parking permit. That’d be it.

Photograph: Antonio Olmos

What album by the Fall do you listen to the most?

Richard Ayoade, director and comedian

Definitely Hex Enduction Hour, which was the one that was out when I was 13. They were at the peak of one of their cycles then, I think. But also the things that get you when you’re 13 or 14, that’s when you’re most susceptible and if you’re lucky enough to encounter a good thing when you’re 13 or 14, it will stay with you for your life. The tragedy is that your taste will be formed by something awful forever, like Iron Maiden or something. The rhythms of Mark E Smith’s language are very affecting or addictive, I suppose, and I’m aware to this day of the cadences of things that I do that are very much in the shadow of that. It’s a fantastic social document of when you grow up as well: “A feminist’s Austin Maxi parked outside/With anti-nicotine anti-nuclear stickers on the side”. You know that’s the 1980s, isn’t it? So yeah, Hex Enduction Hour, which I always say is my favourite album of all time.

Photograph: David Levene

I live in constant fear of being exposed as a charlatan. Where are your weak spots that a hostile press may exploit to attack you?

Grayson Perry, artist

Well, that’s a really, really good question. And I suppose the press are that – and I try to keep one step ahead of them. I am not really entitled to maintain the level of hostility that I have towards society and the comedy business now that I’m a success. So, on some level, you have to do something that I never thought I’d do and I never liked it when I saw it in others, and that is to make some sort of separation between yourself and the character on stage. Another is the classic thing that gets thrown at Labour politicians, which is: “How can you talk about all these social things when you’re from a privileged background?” Although I have a number of sort of red flags on my background that would technically make it unprivileged. I’ve got a number of loopholes. So those two things.

Photograph: REX

You are an admirer of many obscure artists in the world of free jazz, literature and performance. Do you feel uncomfortable now that you are so much more popular than many of your heroes?

Robin Ince, comedian

Well, that reminds me that success is not a meritocracy, that a degree of randomness is involved and that I’m lucky doing standup at a point where it became this thing that people were into. Lots of people work at things and nothing happens. You can’t start to think like that. There’s all these interviews with people: “Oh, you know, he’s done really well now, but he went to Edinburgh five times and he was in debt for 10 years and he didn’t even win the Perrier.” Most comics are in debt for 10 years. There’s not a system whereby they go, “You’ve done that, here have this bag of success.” So it makes me appreciate how lucky I’ve been that I consistently see all these people I think are amazing and have got day jobs as well. It’s very humbling.

Photograph: Giles Smith

What is your most recent new favourite band?

Josie Long, comedian

The Sleaford Mods. My friend Paul Putner told me about them and I was really excited because I thought, “Oh great, there’s a new band and they’re exciting as the ones I liked when I was young”. And then it turned out they were in their early 40s. I’ve seen them live twice now, in little rooms, and they are absolutely compelling. The singer Jason is the most amazing frontperson, he has the terrifying intensity of someone you wouldn’t want to talk to in the pub and the laptop guy stands still, drinking a can of lager. Between them it’s like a horrible Pet Shop Boys. But they are really great and they have cheered me up no end this year.

Photograph: IBL/REX

Why do you still do it, and what are you proudest of?

Caitlin Moran, journalist

Well, one reason I still do it now is because you’re an animal and you’ve spawned children and so you have a biological impulse to provide for them. It’s not about impressing them, they think I’m ridiculous and I don’t mind that at all. I’d rather that than they respected me to be honest: they think I’m fat, stupid, grumpy and that I can’t do comedy. They pity me, because they’ve seen little bits of my act and to them it’s all mumbling: “Why would anyone like that?” So that’s one reason: to provide for children.

The other reason is that – I know George Carlin in the States was prolific for a long time – but I’m not sure anyone here has done quite as much at the same level. I’m not saying it’s better than anyone else, but there’s more of it. And I wonder: “If you just carry on what would happen?” Inevitably the way standup is talked about, it’s thought that you’re doing it to get TV presenting work or to become an actor or to do something else. But actually I don’t really want to do any of those things. I want to do this and nothing else. What if you just carried on doing it? It’s really interesting. I don’t think it’s really been done a lot to just keep going and see what happens. So I’m proud that I keep on going.

Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose

Can you think of anything positive to say about Russell Brand? And why does the liberal media love him and hate you?

Robert Peston, BBC News economics editor

Well, his book has got my nieces and nephews talking about politics. I think the liberal media like him because if you put an article by him in a paper, irrespective of its coherence or quality, it drives a lot of traffic through their website. And they can’t really afford to walk away from that. I don’t think the liberal media does hate me; if anything, the perception would be that I’m given an easy ride by the liberal media.

But he was good, Russell Brand. I remember being on a bill with him about 10 years ago in a little pub in Islington. But it’s difficult for him to be good now because there’s so many different lenses focused on him, different people’s expectations. I can’t really think of a bit of material by him. I don’t think anyone can. He’s sort of just this thing. As a thing, it’s quite interesting, because when you put that thing in a situation, sometimes really funny things happen. Like when he was at those GQ awards [where he made a joke about the sponsors Hugo Boss making Nazi uniforms].

The thing can also effect genuinely useful change by simple virtue of its celebrity, and this embarrasses the powers that be, as in the Hackney housing story, so it will be really interesting to see what else happens.