It’s been incredibly heart-warming to witness ‘Crumpled Morrissey’ Stewart Lee’s commercial ascension over the last few years. Seeing his routine in a half-full tent at Glastonbury 2005 was like a ‘Beatles in the Cavern Club’ moment for hecklerspray.

This comparison falls apart utterly since Lee already had a long and distinguished career in radio and TV, but at that point he had a relatively low profile for his stand-up. Seeing him use such beautifully eloquent and heavily worded analysis one minute and then to make equally successful points by saying virtually nothing at all showed a comedian with such a brilliant understanding of language both in making astute comment, but also getting a laugh for it.

We were so moved by the experience that upon our return home we promptly sent him an email. We simply had to let the man know. We imagine all stalking starts with similar self-justifications.

His 90s Comedian DVD featured the routines that he did on the road after he had been the subject of a logically and morally flawed campaign against him for his part in directing Jerry Springer The Opera. Due to its intensely blasphemous content the DVD very nearly didn’t get a release. If that had been the case, the world would have been deprived of a lasting document of some of the finest, bravest, smartest and most hilarious stand-up comedy to emanate from a stage.

His re-invigorated profile resulted in last year’s TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Half an hour of stand-up with the odd sketch, it was a fairly accurate reflection of his talents. It didn’t always work but it was always making a point and it’s clear that Stewart Lee is very comfortable with that balance these days. His act regularly contains different bits that cause laughter to different parts of the audience, but everyone is interested in where he’s going with each subject.

On Saturday, we caught him playing at the Manchester Lowry. Support came from Henning Wehm. Wehm has a nice line in self-deprecation, which sets him up to make observations about the Brits. He’s already a regular on Radio 4 panel shows and his profile is going to continue to grow as the British public love it when overseas cultural commentators settle over here and tell us about ourselves, as Bill Bryson and Rich Hall can attest. There’s something to be said for someone who, unlike most of us, has chosen to live here. It gives people an interesting perspective.

It’s this angle, along with his delivery that allows him to get away with some of his weaker material. When we saw him selling CDs after the show we wanted to steal him and take him home with us, although sadly he didn’t win us over quite enough to buy anything from him.

Lee is road-testing material for his forthcoming second BBC series and so the night took the shape of three 25 minute TV episode-sized routines although since the tour started, certain events have made it look like the part dedicated to Adrian Chiles will fall foul of the censor.

One thing that grates is comedians repeating their well-known routines. Comedians aren’t rock stars- people don’t come to see them play all the hits. Tonight Lee does repeat some of his previous material about the IRA. Although it’s lost some of the mouth-agape power it once had, Lee’s most uses his powerful weapon of  sentence construction, and the lines are re-structured enough to get the laughs.

He also continues his peer-i-cide of other comics by taking aim at Russell Howard. Not quite as brilliant as his devastating attack on Joe Pasquale but a hilariously convincing argument for Howard being evil nevertheless. His finest moments come from his ongoing commentary on his own act, deriving laughs from analysing and setting up predictable jokes and punchlines.

This pre-empting modesty doesn’t quite let him get away with the two songs he plays- his earnest singing voice still sits a little uncomfortably with the dry sarcasm of his spoken words for our ears, but its evidence that he still insists on pushing boundaries and testing his audience whilst exposing himself completely.

It’s easy to see why he is called the comedian’s comedian but that tag of esotericism isn’t fair- really he’s just part of the long tradition of intelligent people, from Oscar Wilde to Bill Hicks, showing us the world for how it is, in all its naked, absurd glory via the medium of wit.

Apologies for the Bill Hicks reference but European legislation means that all articles about stand-up comics must contain at least one Hicks comparison.

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The problem with comedy – and this really is a problem – is that while one member of a steamy love affair is rolling on the floor, begging for the jokes to stop, yelling that it hurts. It bloody hurts. Arrrggggh! The other one is silent, arms folded, almost angry because they’re not laughing.

These jokers can actually destroy relationships. Hence, you might as well completely ignore the title of this piece, because, frankly, you might hate it. Others of you might love it. But some of you will definitely hate it. No one knows. It’s all just so deliciously subjective.

Even so, in the spirit of blowing away those January Blues using something made-up called a ‘laughter bomb’ (or ‘joke grenade’, or ‘funny gun’ – your choice), below are eight men and women who you might find funny… or not. The point about the subjectivity of this has pretty much been hammered home.Tony Law

With a big womanly thumb jammed into the ‘absurdist comedy’ pie, Tony Law splits the consensus. Some people like their jokes to reflect real life, others will enjoy this weird bit about a bear and a shark.

Tom Stade

Not a great deal is known about this Tom Stade chap, aside from that he’s Canadian - or American or something - and apparently he now lives in sunny England. Funny guy.

Zach Galifianakis

Don’t be ashamed to board big trendy bandwagons, be  comfortable declaring that you like the comedy work of the bearded man from The Hangover. He has a beard, damn it, and beards are good. They make you look a bit like a wolf.

Kristen Schaal

Fans of the deadpan New Zealand music and comedy romp, Flight of the Conchords, will recognise Schaal as the band’s one and only fan. She’s great in that, and she’s pretty nifty at stand up as well.

Joe Wilkinson

A relatively new name on the English comedy circuit, Wilkinson is another man who likes to let his facial hair run amock. One to watch.

Stewart Lee

The kind of people who willingly use words like “cerebral” in everyday chit chat are fans of Stewart Lee. That’s just a fact. He’s cerebral, you see.

Sarah Silverman

Silverman can be a little bit hard to like, especially a year or so ago when she turned up in London to put on a rather lazy performance to a very disgruntled audience. But the lady has got funny bones.

Jim Gaffigan

Jokes about food can be funny. Above is the proof of that.

Josh Burt is one of the brains behind Interestment Comedy.

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Folded:

• In the Loop (more creative swearing than you’ll ever need)
• Stewart Lee (for having the stones to allow his recent awful TV show to air at all)
• Vintage ice creams (good old Freaky Feet. Though spot the one that shouldn’t be there)
• Laughing at people attempting to have a picnic in lukewarm sunshine (bet that tin of Frutini is transporting you right to Bondi beach, isn’t it?)
• gamesTM (far, far, far and away the best video games magazine on the market)

Creased:

• This hair (belongs on a man who only ever wears black 501s)
• BBC2 not showing the second season of The Wire straight away (‘in a few weeks’ they say. ‘Mid May’ we’ve heard. When’s season three going out then? Christmas Day?)
• V-Water (the orange one smells like baby piss. Probably tastes like it too, you’ll have to ask around to confirm that)
• Desperate Housewives anti-climax (kill a character somebody might care about why don’t ya?)
• Picturehouse cinemas (full of poncy tossers who think that smiling is only for those without a post-grad education)

Stewart Lee is to the world of comedy what pans are to a chef; pretty vital unless you want cold beans, and nobody wants cold beans.

This man possesses razor sharp comic timing; somehow he can make any innocuous word comical. One small inflection or miniscule tweak of his expression conveys more than any amount of high pitched puerile drivel from the crosseyed one from Mock the Week or pretty much anyone from BBC Three.

Lee has worked on or been the star of some of the best subversive and irreverent comedy programmes to appear on our screens. Originally the slimmer half of Lee & Herring he produced Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. The latter shamelessly provided more material and wit in its short run than the equivalent of 16 million series of Two Pints of Lager. We’re being conservative in our estimate, too. After the controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera, Stewart has only briefly kept us afloat by appearing as a panellist or contributor. But now he is back to save television with his Comedy Vehicle.

The opening titles depict Lee looking blissfully moronic in his car, a look he has had years to perfect and uses to great effect. Each week he presents a different topic which is performed via the medium of stand up and sketches. The latter are performed by some of his old stable mates, Kevin Eldon, Simon Munnery, and Paul Putner who are themselves comedians and writers of great esteem.

This week’s edition pits Stewart against the intellectual might of celebrity writers such as Chris Moyles and Russell Brand. He speaks polemically about said writers and the sad state of literature where one of our most well published authors (Dan Brown) can also be terrible. He also provides a useful time saving device by suggesting that we dismiss Brand’s Booky Wook as rubbish without reading it. This also applies to Chris Moyle’s second autobiography, Asher D’s literary vomit, and the entire Harry Potter series. He has (excluding Potter) read these piles of bound paper so that you don’t have to, much in the same way that we watch After You’ve Gone and The Green Green Grass so you don’t have to.

Watch this brilliantly pedantic, mesmerizingly-voiced comedian as often as you can, he offers the rare gift of being both very funny and occasionally incredibly incisive in a similar vein to the late Bill Hicks.

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Mainstream comedians are fantastic, aren’t they? Of course they are, why else would they be on the telly?

Dawn French, Lee Mack, Justin Lee Collins, Alan Carr… the list is endless.

Just thinking about them makes us want to round up every TV executive in a small room and hack the testicles off them that they haven’t even got in the first place.

And so the following is a list – in no particular order – of some of the most brilliant, unique, prime-time repellent and, therefore, largely anonymous comedians we’ve had the privilege to have never heard.

Read what we’ve got to say, watch and listen to what they have to say, fall in love and spread the word.

Doug Stanhope

For any of you who have ever thought ‘I wonder what Bill Hicks would say today if his pussy of a pancreas hadn’t of got all cancerous’ then what spews from Doug Stanhope’s gorgeously vitriolic mind is probably as close to an answer as you can get.

Not that he’s plagiarising the great man, not one bit. The topics are similar but the jokes and ideas have evolved and are all his own.

There are lots of people who will tell you that they don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of them and they’re almost always talking bollocks, but with Doug you get the impression he means it and it’s this unparalleled lack of shame that separates him far, far away from the rest.

Any of you who have Mary Whitehouse posters blutacked all over your walls then this video is definitely the one for you:

Daniel Kitson

Basically, to be fair, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, etc, and so on, et al, blah blah; what we all want from our entertainers – be they comedians, musicians, novelists or people who do drawings with their own blood and poo – is for them to make us feel less lonely in this bloody horrible world; nothing beats a warm cockle in the heart, and no comedian can warm a heart-cockle like Daniel Kitson.

Take a man like Russell Brand; as undeniably talented as he is, it’s hard to fully empathise with a man whose sole motivation behind every gag is ‘how can I continue to successfully seduce/manipulate this myriad of celebrity-worshipping girls into having sex with me?’

He’ll say anything, so long as it doesn’t disrupt this masterplan, and we’re sure he couldn’t care less (it’s hard to care too much about anything when you’ve got four bent over bottoms baying for your boy – so Stuart Heritage informs us) but it does go some way to stifling your comic potential.

Luckily for us though, Daniel Kitson is unfettered by such distractions, perhaps due to being a bifocalled-ginger with a stutter, and we love him all the more for it – no doubt you will too.

You may know him as Spencer off Phoenix Nights, but what you should know him for is being one of the best stand-up comedians in the world:

Tony Law

Tony Law is a man from Canada. As if that wasn’t funny enough, he also tells jokes. Never before has an accent and an occupation been so perfectly matched, apart from maybe Adolf Hitler.

Until now, absolutely nobody has heard of Tony Law apart from his mum and it’s about time that changed, because the man is a fucking colossus.

A safe word to describe his act would be surreal, although we’re sure there is a better one out there, we’re just buggered if we know what it is, the illiterate frauds that we are.

We’ll just let him speak for himself. Enjoy:

John Hegley

Poetry, as we all know, is for limp wristed, mum-bumming toffs who actually enjoyed reading Shakespeare at secondary school.

But we are all wrong! A few centuries after Shakespeare butchered the art-form, along came a man from Luton called John Hegley, who taught anybody who was bothered enough to listen that poetry can actually be brilliant.

Unfortunately there isn’t much in the way of John Hegley videos around this here internet place, so this grainy, out of sync offering’ll have to do. Otherwise you can click here for an old-fashioned read.

Stewart Lee

How dare we group Stewart Lee amongst a list of unknowns? To be honest, we feel quite ashamed of ourselves too, but it’s been over a decade since he and Richard Herring (who is still touring and at the top of his game – click here for the ultimate lesson in how to handle a heckler) lit up our TV screens with the likes of Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy and, aside from some hardcore fans and an equally hardcore group of right-wing Christian lobbies, nobody seems to know who the man is, and so any exposure is worth it – mankind can only benefit from having Stewart Lee’s wisdom up inside it.

A couple of years back he was ranked 41st in a Channel 4 poll of the best stand-up comedians of all time, which is about 40 positions too low as far as we’re concerned.

We’re not saying he’s Jesus, that’s for you to decide. Watch this and judge for yourselves: