Interview: Stewart Lee, comic

Earlier this century Lee abandoned stand-up, disenchanted that comedy had lost its edge. "I was a mumbling relic from an earlier age," he writes. "I was spent. The crowds had changed. The rules were different . . . Alternative comedy was dead."

Then in 2001 Richard Thomas asked him to help create the show that would become Jerry Springer: The Opera. It was the hot ticket of the 2002 Fringe, and transferred to the West End, where it won four Olivier Awards.

A success that should have brought its creators money and acclaim, the show paid out in headaches and debt instead. Royalties were waived to pay for lawsuits. When the BBC announced it would air the show, more than 65,000 people complained ahead of time. Christian Voice threatened to prosecute Lee for blasphemy.

Perversely inspired, Lee fell back in love with comedy. "The simplicity of stand-up, the fact that you can think of an idea in the afternoon, after a long lie-in, and implement it in the evening, suddenly seemed very attractive," he says.

He revised his business model and launched a comeback that's still going strong. This, then, is his chronicle of life after Jerry. It's the transcripts of his 2005, 2006, and 2008 shows, bracketed by chapters that set them into biographical context. Dense footnotes annotate the origin of jokes, why they appear when they appear, the intricate mechanism of each show, and much more.

In person, Lee's blue eyes twinkle endlessly. He has a distracting laugh that's both maniacal and self-deprecating, but there's no trace of the curmudgeonly persona he sometimes adopts on stage. Responding to my assessment that his book is as densely layered as filo pastry, he says, "There's the stand-up character, transcribed verbatim, and he's like the worst version of me. There's the essay bits that are probably the closest to how I'd actually explain myself. And the footnotes are deliberately obstreperous and go into much more detail than is necessary about things that are red herrings, while skipping over some really important things."

He interrupts himself with a laugh. "The footnotes are both an effort to clarify things and to make them more needlessly mysterious. So you get me talking about what I wanted to do, and then what I did do, and then looking at it now, seeing how I failed or succeeded, or how things feel, with hindsight.I wanted to write about the actual nuts and bolts, because that, to me, is interesting."

These shows garnered Lee some of his best reviews, yet his footnotes often say: "I'd never do that joke now." And despite a lifetime as an outspoken liberal, he insists he's growing more PC than ever. To what does he attribute these changes?

"Having a kid makes you suddenly connected to the world; you have someone's health and suffering that you're responsible for. I'd find it much more difficult to do some of the callous humour I might have done in my twenties now. If you see someone being hurt now, you think of it happening to your child. I would still think those things are funny, I just wouldn't say them. Anyway, what's funny depends on who is saying it and how."

Luke was born in 2007. His mum is fellow comic Bridget Christie, married to Lee since 2005. He is an atheist, she's a practising Catholic. How much of his changing philosophy is a function of daily exposure to his wife's faith? He's laughing before I finish the thought.

"I think PC is good, but it's become taboo to talk about what value there might be in respecting people. When I started, you didn't do sexist jokes, but now they're de rigueur. It's flipped. Now the shocking thing is to see someone giving a second's thought to whether it's the right thing to say or not. PC is the last taboo."

It's strenuous, making it look like he's doing nothing at all. How I Escaped My Certain Fate flays the work so thoroughly that it even lays bare the spaces he leaves for improvisation. He anatomises the fine art of the deliberately engineered "fail", designed to alienate parts of the audience - including those who were on side initially - in order to win them back again.

"By the time I gave up stand-up in 2000, one of the few things I still enjoyed onstage was trying to lose a room and then win it back for my own amusement. Now, instead of it being an act of self-indulgent self-sabotage, I was able to use these skills for some purpose, as I attempted to forge the audience into a group that will go with the heavy stuff ahead, proving to them that they need not find supposedly offensive subject material offensive. Form and content, finally, had a relationship."

Fans looking for laughs should know that much of the transcribed material doesn't read funny, reinforcing Lee's point that it's all in who's talking and how. But this was never envisaged as a joke book. "It's about a definite period of trying to work out how to be a comedian and what sort of comedian I wanted to be, before it was too late."

• Stewart Lee's book How I Escaped My Certain Fate is published by Faber, priced 12.99. A one-off show, Stewart Lee's Silver Stewbilee, is on 18 August at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh. Vegetable Stew will run at The Stand throughout August. www.stewartlee.co.uk