"[He chose] Miss You by The Rolling Stones [because] This song reminded him of when he went to the Edinburgh Festival without his wife and focusing on trying to succeed, and then realising he was missing her."

...but I thought he came across really well on the show. As an artist there may be huge gulf between him and Stewart Lee, but as a person, not so much I think.

Oh Yoko! by John Lennon - a song (McIntyre) and his wife sing together.

and i'm not funny

... was funny, he'd be in with a chance of some success.

Has this tremendous conceit about itself as somehow being "important", and not subject to normal standards of behavior or condsideration, in case it hampers "artistes" in their quest to "push the boundaries".

It's all tosh. Comedy is making people laugh. No more, no less. Michael McIntyre does this very successfully. Perhaps, in a fairly unoriginal but inoffensive manner. But then so did Eric Morecambe.

I like Stewart Lee. He makes me laugh. I've been to see him on numerous occasions and always enjoy his gigs. I've read his book and enjoyed it. But..

A) More people find McIntyre funny. Just a fact. Sometimes I laugh more at him than at Stewart myself.

B) In any other sphere, Stewarts comments would be regarded as rather graceless. Its also hard to escape the conclusion he's just basically jealous. One natural show off not liking how another attracts a bigger crowd.

I think McIntyre has no illusions of what he is, and finds it hard to understand the venom of those anxious to have being a comedian regarded as something far more socially significant than it should be.

I'm a bit surprised that he is surprised by the envy and bitterness.

Not because I think he's crap. His act is OK (and certainly more entertaining than S****** L**'s) and he seems like a bright enough chappie. I thought, however, that he would at least have been smart enough to understand the milieu in which he has chosen to operate.

... I was suprised at how warm he was towards most other comics, I was expecting him to be much more caustic. I suspect many comics are snooty about McIntyre because his style is so conventional - he could be transported back to the seventies and pretty much do the same act - it is strictly Royal Variety.

but I'll wager it's the first time anyone has used the words "spoon feeding your audience warm diarrhea' on Britain's longest-running radio programme (and the second longest-running in the world).

with your hosts Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck

Bring me the head of Light Entertainment!

You'd be met with derision on here if you suggested that commercial success was a true barometer of musical quality. Yet when it comes to comedy, it happens all the time.

The Daily Mail's resident Harpy has waded in with her balanced opinion. McIntyre good everyone else, especially if they're remotely left wing, bad.
I can take or leave him, I don't switch over when he comes on but I don't actively look for him on Dave!
Mind you she hates Frankie Boyle so she gets one thing right at least.

I find neither MM or SL funny. But then humour - like music - is totally subjective isn't it? And I am sure that there are many people who find them both funny.

To push the music analogy, SL is clearly The Fall, he has selective popularity, but most people who do like him, love him. MM is more like Abba or Take That: he has a massive audience for his easy-listening work which of course annoys the hipsters. I can guarantee, when MM's career is finished, like Abba, he will be reassessed and people will pop up on programs like We Love the Tensies to say "I loved him when I was a kid, he was the last true comic of the music hall tradition" or some tosh like that.

McIntyre a bit like those right-on musos and indie-kids moaning about Beyonce at Glastonbury because she is "pop"?

I might have missed something but isn't McIntyre just doing populist old fashioned Jimmy Tarbuck style material? I don't know much about him (or Lee for that matter) but that sort of criticism just seems to be like shooting fish in a barrell.

Edit: Ah, Big Jim you just beat me to the "music analogy"!

... even Bruce Forsyth has made me laugh, Michael McIntyre never has. He just notices very bland and ordinary things, says so in a jokey voice and helpfully laughs himself if you don't join in and yet enough people do. Genuinely I stare at him in bewilderment, wondering if there's something wrong with me.

There is nothing actually wrong with inoffensive comedy. Jerry Seinfeld is not an offensive comedian, I don't think he even swears, but he's a candidate for being one of the world's greatest practitioners of stand up. PG Wodehouse never made a dirty joke in his life.

But with McIntyre I don't even see the comedy.

... it's deja vu all over again ;)

I don't see the problem with Michael McIntyre - I wouldn't switch on the TV for him myself, but there's an audience out there for a decent mainstream comedian who doesn't frighten the horses, a Bob Monkhouse or a Bob Hope, and it was obviously an appetite not being satisfied with all the "edgy" comedy of the past decade. I'm quite glad there's someone out there who's going to do jokes I can laugh at with my kids - it's one of the reasons I love Harry Hill and Miranda Hart.

I suspect McIntyre's going to be despised by the cool kids for another ten years and then somebody's going to turn round and say, "Can somebody remember why we hate this bloke so much?"

AGAIN?

We are having this debate: it's about time someone did (irony alert).

Having said that, I'm not a fan of MM, but I was genuinely shocked at the hostility at the Comedy Awards a couple of years ago. Everyone was lining up to have a go. It was relentless, like watching bullies all gang up together to have a go at the class swot breaktime after breaktime. This were, in the main, grown men of 35 and over. And then to boo when he won was pathetic. It made me want to like the man (and then I watched him and sat there nonplussed, as Ganglesprocket says above).

People of the intellect and stature (imo of course) of Armando Iannucci should not be using an award win to have a go at a comic who has nothing to do with their work (The Thick of It is hardly a direct rival of MM's roadshow is it?) really. Maybe, as it is the Comedy Awards, use the win to tell a joke. Or be satirical.

and incestuous place to work in. Indeed, much like music. Saying you like McIntyre is, for many people, the equivalent of saying you like Barbie Girl by Aqua. But you know what? People do. and not because they're idiots or morons, but because they just like it.

McIntyre isn't my favourite comedian, but I don.t mind him at all. Part (maybe even all) of a performer's appeal is the persona, and I like McIntyre's slightly puppyish, wide-eyed and silly aspect. It's OK saying that his "observations" are bland and predictable. If that were the case and it was all so obvious, how come we're not all doing it as successfully as him?

I also like Stewart Lee (and have done since the days of Lionel Nimrod and Fist of Fun with Richard Herring) but I wonder if his focus on McIntyre is actually a bit self-defeating. It sort of disappoints when he has another pop. It was a bit like Frankie Boyle and the Kerry Katona gags: it was just an easy lazy target to hang your own prejudices and hang-ups on. It might be the act, but it's a bit tired.

Perhaps most of the envy and bile directed at McIntyre is to do with the relative speed of his rise. Some may feel that he hasn't "paid his dues" quite enough. But how is that his fault? All he did was work and accept the breaks he was given, which, after all, is what pretty much every other act would do in his position. Some of the same sniping has been aimed at John Bishop as well.

After listening to the show, I actually rather like the sound of him as a human being as well as a performer.

Does this thing where he says stuff that makes you laugh. Maybe it'll catch on.
Once featured on MM's Roadshow, but with a toned-down version of this routine which is NSFW.

being nasty about Mr Pastry?

Remember when Victor Borge laid into Les Dawson after he stole his trademark bit of business? No, me neither.

Did Eric Morecambe ever give Eddie Large grief?

And, hard as I try, I can't recall a single untoward word said by Kenneth Williams about Ted Rogers.

Present-day comedians, eh. What a funny lot they are. Sometimes.

thread is funny.

In fact it's f**cking hilarious.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

That's me laughing at the inevitable familiarity of this thread's narrative.

Then again repetition and a well sign-posted punch-line are staples of comedy.

You know, like Michael McIntyre on Dave.

... Mum and Dad think Michael McIntrye's hilarious - I still love them.

are involved in some elaborate homage to Stewart Lee.

We'll keep on repeating the same debate over and over, slowing it down more and more until there's only a few nervous laughs, then we slow it down and repeat it and repeat it, and repeat it (occasionally pointing out that we are repeating it) until it becomes funny again.

In which case we are geniuses (genii?)

Either that or MM vs SL has become the new equivalent of 'tis' vs 'tisn't'.

The spoonfeeding bit comes at the end of a long routine from If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One. It's just a joke, like on Top Gear.

Here are a couple of extracts from the Stewart Lee's book re: Michael McIntyre.

"There was a school of comedy in the ‘90s whereby the audience would warm to a comedian that seemed to be expressing opinions and feelings they themselves had had, but never expressed. There’s an incredible and admirable skill in doing this, and Michael McIntyre perhaps represents its apogee, his rapid fire observations about everyday life being so accurate and instantly recognisable that he is absolved even of the obligation to develop them into actual jokes . But I’ve always liked the kind of comedy that makes you go, ‘My God. I would never have thought that!"..."

and

"I discovered the comedic power of the cat’s feet towel entirely by accident, while looking to give the story of my imaginary encounter with Jesus in my Mum’s toilet the ring of truth by loading it with vividly remembered local detail. We had a cat’s feet towel in the toilet so I put it in the story. I didn’t realise how strongly people would identify with it. I had a brief taste, by complete accident, of what it must be like to be Michael McIntyre at Wembley, on a massive screen, talking about a drawer full of insulating tape. Ironically, I am reliably informed that Michael McIntyre doesn’t actually have a ‘man drawer’, and invented the concept in order to ridicule ordinary people, for whom he has nothing but haughty contempt."

www.chortle.co.uk%2Ffeatures%2F2011%2F07%2F19%2F13653%2Fstewart_lee%253A...

This link works:

http://www.chortle.co.uk/features/2011/07/19/13653/stewart_lee%3A_what_i...

Fraser, I know this is a long piece to paste in but it deals eloquently with most of the points raised in this and all previous S Lee threads.

"On Sunday, at 2.26 in the afternoon, a man claiming to be the transport correspondent of the Daily Telegraph rang me up asking me why I had described Michael McIntyre as ‘spoon-feeding his audience warm diarrhoea’. I hung up, assuming it was some weird prank call, like the people who ring me at 3am asking when I am going to play Leamington Spa, and wake up the baby. I mean, why would the transport editor of the Telegraph be asking me about a line from a routine I did in 2009?

The next day in an article in the Telegraph, the transport editor David Millward, whose last three pieces have been about a flying car, mileage clocks, and bio-fuels, tried his driving-gloved hand at writing about stand-up. He explained how Michael McIntyre was unhappy about comedians making fun of him. I had declined to comment, apparently. It seems the transport editor of the Daily Telegraph really does have my mobile number after all. He probably has my PIN number too then and will delete important messages in the event of my murder. In the current climate, I now have to change my phone number. Bollocks.

What had happened, it transpires, was this. TV’s Michael McIntyre had been on Sunday morning’s Desert Island Discs, where the presenter Kirsty Young had confronted him, as evidence that he was hated by comedians, with a quote from my act, in which I said he spoon feeds his audience warm diarrhoea. The line comes 2,673 words in to a 27,190 word, 105 minute show, 2009’s If You Prefer A Milder Comedian Please Ask For One, which takes McIntyre, and the Frankie Boyle/Jeremy Clarkson offence model, as polarised extremes of comedy, between which I try to find a third way.

The show opens with me attempting to give audiences what the struggling stand-up Stewart Lee imagines they want, namely a McIntyre-style routine about high street coffee shops. I cast the audience in the role of baffled onlookers as I try to complete this normal routine, while being continually distracted, over a 20-minute period, by invective and Nineties style pirate whimsy.

When the audience fail to respond to me reading out a letter from an angry pirate, I say to them, in desperation: ‘You have my sympathy, you know? It’s 2010. It’s a weird time for stand-up. ’Cause you, you sit at home, don’t you, all of you, watching Michael McIntyre on the television, spoon-feeding you his warm diarrhoea. I’m not going to be doing that. I haven’t noticed anything about your lives. They’re not of interest to me. This is a letter from a pirate. It’s not about going to the shops or anything.’

I wasn’t being interviewed. I was in character. Context, Kirsty Young, you are better than this. As Morrissey said to you on air: ‘Your pretty face is going to hell.’

Later on in the same stand-up show, raging off mic from a theatre box as part of a 15-minute offstage freakout about how all my DVDs are downloaded illegally by hipsters, I call the millions who queue up to buy McIntyre’s ‘captured partisans digging their own graves’.

The case is overstated, for comic effect. I’m not going to pretend I like McIntyre’s work in of itself, and would hate this piece to be misconstrued as an apology, though I do find much to admire in him as a comedian, and the phenomenon of the stadium-sized observational stand-up is, to me, both a fascinating and an amusing oddity. But the way the diarrhoea line was presented to him, shorn of set and setting, does make it read rather differently.

Doubtless someone with a search engine will turn up something horrible, but when I am asked about McIntyre in interviews, as all us comedians are now, I have learned to complement him on having converted a nation to the idea of stand-up as a viable entertainment option, and usually find a way to leaven any negative comments with positive ones, (though these are often edited out), even to the extent of expressing the genuine desire to be allowed to tour all his most famous routines myself, word for word, to see if their very familiarity would lend them to a tonal reinterpretation.

(Could the endless noticing of everyday quirks be delivered in such a way as to suggest they were the work of a vengeful and malevolent God, for example?) The on-stage Stewart Lee however, a more bitter man 20 minutes into a failed routine about coffee shops, thinks McIntyre is a purveyor of warm diarrhoea. As well he might.

McIntyre went on, on Desert Island Discs, to say how his attendance at the 2009 British Comedy Awards was ruined by comedians making fun of him, and how sad it was because his wife had bought a new dress, and he had won after all, beating me and Frankie Boyle for some spuriously defined gong. I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there. I went once in 1992 and I’ve only been invited once since, when I was working anyway. It’s not my bag. I saw it on TV once and there was a big, frightened, unhappy snake writhing around on stage, and loads of drunk TV twats were laughing at it as it flailed miserably towards their coke-flecked tables.

Nevertheless, Monday’s Metro carried the following headline; ‘Michael McIntyre has told of his upset after fellow comedian Stewart Lee insulted him at the British Comedy Awards.’

I wasn’t at the British Comedy Awards, as I say, but by now the story seems to suggest that, in the moment of McIntyre’s triumph, I jumped up, banged the table with my fists, shouted something about diarrhoea, and tore his wife’s dress.

I wasn’t there, and yet I’m continually quoted as the focal point of the rudeness that upset him. Is there no-one who was actually there who could be named instead? Jonathan Ross mocked him from the Comedy Awards podium and Lee Mack had recently called McIntyre a ‘skipping cunt’ on stage in Canterbury. Why don’t they mention them instead?

For the record, I have met Michael McIntyre four times. In the Spring of 2005 he was hosting a show at the Tattershall Castle where I went to near silence, as I often did at circuit gigs, and he seemed keen and confident. A few weeks later I saw him in the street in Kilkenny, where he said he’d been ‘telling everyone how marvellous’ I was, like he was the Mayor or something. That summer, in Edinburgh, I stood near him and Jimmy Carr in a courtyard, but I don’t think we spoke. And at the BAFTAs last year, where you get a better class of TV cokehead, I shook his hand and wished him luck, even though his flamboyant manager, Addison Cresswell, had just whispered under his breath to me the half-serious threat: ‘Stop making fun of my boy or you might find your career peaks too soon.’

These days I mainly meet other comics at the 60 or so unpaid charity benefit shows I do every year, and I never see McIntyre at any of these, so I don’t know him. I don’t know anyone who knows him. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t want to. I want to keep him in my imagination as a phenomenon. David Baddiel has warned me, in an unsolicited e-mail, that I am now too well known to do jokes about people because I will meet them and find they are all right, really. He has underestimated the full extent of my anti-social nature.

Anyway, today The Daily Mail has got hold of the story, so all sense and reason is out of the window now. Their chief rage monger, Jan Moir, censured in 2009 for her comments about the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately, wrote a column with the headline, ‘Heard the one about the right on comics who HATE the funniest man in Britain.’

There is very little point in trying to reason with The Daily Mail, and attempting to do appears to have driven Robin Ince mad. But once they have written a load of shit about you, it buzzes away in annoyance ruining your day, and you have to purge it somehow, and so thanks to Chortle for this opportunity to squeeze this one out.

Moir’s column about ‘foul-mouthed left-wing’ comics who hate Michael McIntyre is only to able to suggest two examples of this ‘cabal’, me and, bizarrely, Frankie Boyle, the paper’s default bête noir. Here we go, point by point, chop chop chop, Timber.

Firstly, I am not ‘foul mouthed’. I swear once in the 180 minutes of the first series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, not at all in the 105 minutes of my last live show If You Prefer A Milder Comedian…, and only once in the 90 minutes of the previous live show, 41 Best Stand-Up Ever, when I describe Moir’s fellow Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn as a ‘cunt’, for saying the East Anglian sex worker murders were of no consequence. Michael McIntyre actually swears more than me.

Apparently I represent ‘a slime pit of unpleasantness’ and once again, a Mail newspaper de-contextualises one line from my 45 minute 2009 routine about Richard Hammond to prove this. The same routine also references the anti-PC brigade’s attempts to ‘upset the grieving relatives of Stephen Gately’, an explicit nod towards Moir herself, who either chose to ignore this, didn’t understand it, or hasn’t watched the piece. (You decide).

Ironically, because people like Jan Moir mean it’s impossible now to employ any degree of comic ambiguity for fear of them choosing to misrepresent it, the DVD of the bit actually ends with the line, to camera, “I don’t really think Richard Hammond should die. What I was doing there, as everyone here in this room now understands, just in case there’s anyone from the Mail on Sunday watching this, is I was using an exaggerated form of the rhetoric and the implied values of Top Gear to satirise the rhetoric and the implied values of Top Gear. And it is a shame to have to break character and explain that. But hopefully it will save you a long, tedious exchange of emails.’

Again, Jan Moir either chooses to ignore what is, essentially, a direct address to her, or else she hasn’t watched the bit.

Mail and Mail on Sunday writers who hadn’t seen the Hammond bit continually misrepresented it in search of scandal, as they did with Jerry Springer The Opera, which I contributed to, but when their own critic finally went to see the show he concluded; ‘In context, nothing Lee says [about Richard Hammond] is offensive.’ How about some joined-up thinking?

Moir continues: ‘Lee claims he was making a point about bullying, but the viciousness is breathtaking. Which brings us to Frankie Boyle, the malcontent Scottish comedian who thinks it is funny to make jokes about child rape, Madeleine McCann and, famously, Katie Price’s blind, autistic son, Harvey.’

No. What I do does not ‘bring us to Frankie Boyle’, because I don’t do anything about child rape, Madeleine McCann or Harvey Price or anything like any of that; and it doesn’t bring us to Frankie Boyle because he has neither been quoted as commenting on Michael McIntyre or ever been described as left-wing and PC and liberal, which surely makes him utterly irrelevant to both the title and the supposed content of Jan’s silly article.

At least this time The Mail have misrepresented me, my mother isn’t here to be embarrassed by her Daily Mail reading friends, pitying her for having a son who would do and say all these things, that I didn’t really do or say.

There is no story here, no facts, no names, nothing. Perhaps Jan Moir knows this, and this is why she has appended this Boyle irrelevance to the end of it, and conjured a cabal of McIntyre-hating foul-mouthed left-wing comedians, without actually being able to name a single example of anyone who fits this bill.

And, prior to Frankie Boyle’s joke about Jordan’s son, the last time the public spontaneously moved against someone on the grounds of taste and decency, it was against Jan Moir herself. To paraphrase her own comments on Boyle: ‘You might think there would not be a rock in the country big enough for (Jan Moir) to crawl under and disappear for ever.’ Moir’s piece is diarrhoea. And it’s not even warm.

The problem with doing jokes about McIntyre is that it’s become a cliché. Everyone’s doing them, and by the time I got to record my Michael McIntyre song for TV in January I was already aware it was dead in the water, though thankfully it was cut short by people walking out bored. To quote Simon Munnery, a greater comedian than anyone mentioned on this page, and one who has never won a British Comedy Award,: ‘When the crowd get behind you you’re probably facing the wrong way.’

But it is necessary for people to be reminded that there is more than one way of doing stand-up, as McIntyre’s observational shtick becomes a gold standard, and young comics think their only chance of success is to get a slot on his roadshow.

I’ve made the point, in a piece for the Independent, that McIntyre’s ubiquity means ‘alternative’ comics do, for the first time since the ’70s, have a clearly visible mainstream to define themselves in opposition to, and this has benefitted me, for example, enormously I think.

But, despite the suggestion that he has been victimised by Frankie Boyle’s imaginary liberal cabal, McIntyre is a very powerful figure. Indeed, I once, mistakenly in retrospect, pretended to be Michael McIntyre and, for a joke, rang up a famous comedian who had made fun of him. The panicked 15- minute apology he gave me before I’d even had a chance to reveal myself spoke volumes about the influence he is perceived as wielding.

The downside of all this nonsense, apart from having to change my phone number and waste a whole morning during Edinburgh preview season writing this righteous blow off, is that I would still really love to do a tour re-interpreting Michael’s routines, but I expect all this makes that dream even less likely to be fulfilled.

On the positive side, my wife worked for The Daily Mail as a researcher in the early Noughties and, as a punishment for this, whenever it runs a stupid made-up story about something I’ve worked on, I make her have sex with me.

So far The Mail has made up stuff about Jerry Springer The Opera and the 41st Best Stand-Up set, and so now we have two beautiful children. A third will soon be on the way. And I will name him Michael. Michael McIntyre Diarrhoea Lee."

Comedians slagging each other off is standard stuff. Even the ones who like each other. Not many of them do it publicly, but competitiveness/resentment/whatever you want to call it - is a pretty standard personality trait amongst comics.
Some would say that's why they're usually bitter, miserable swine but that's a whole other thang.

Write something nasty about Mr Lee on the blog and you can end up being quoted on his website!

When asked about Dawson.

Manning: "Ah yes, the transvestite comic."

When Dawson was described as being like Bernard Manning.

Dawson: "How dare you compare me to that fat fool!"

Comedians have always wound each other up.

just want to pick up the new comments, I always enjoy this thread whenever it comes round

..it works, but its all so carefully rehearsed, and fake looking. I would venture to suggest thats what annoys many comedians about the duffer. The material is not that great. He is also very competitive. There are many stories about this. I remember reading one where someone goes round to his house on a Sunday night. His wife answers the door, "Michael will be around soon, he is working".

.... Stewart Lee's just not funny !

Stewart Lee appeals to people who are too pleased with themsleves, the kind who clap in all the right places at classical concerts and laugh at the 'in jokes'. MM seems a nice guy who is funny at times, doesn't really deserve all the bile.

Daily Mash etc...

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/arts-%26-entertainment/stewart-lee%11...

From Simon Hoggart's column in today's Guardian:

Everyone is being very kind about Michael McIntyre, the incredibly popular comedian who is publicly loathed by other "edgier" comics. His defenders say that while his opponents make jokes about paedophiles, sex and Katie Price's disabled child, McIntyre talks about everyone's daily life: broken toasters, family holidays, stroppy teenagers.

Up to a point. I recall one lengthy McIntyre routine about the annual blow job his wife gives him as a birthday treat. I have no objection at all to blow-job gags (so to speak) but he may not be quite as pure and wholesome as the Daily Mail seems to think.

Who is Stewart Lee?

I can safely say that, originally being agnostic to MM's talents, I now find him a vaguely unpleasant person. His admitted stalking of the woman who is now his wife, his admission to needing more looking after than his young children, his petulant dismissal of those who spoiled his night because his wife had bought a new dress ...

In short, even without the comment about other comedians' reaction to him, I came away without any desire to see him anyway.

I have a suspicion of anyone who grins and sniggers almost permanently, regardless of the topic of conversation.

as I was about to switch the TV off, a repeat of MM's Comedy Roadshow came on.

OK, I thought, I've seen bits of him, but never watched a whole routine. So I sat back and watched. I thought I should see which side of the fence I'd come down on.

Well maybe he wasn't on form for that show, but dear, oh dear, he was poor.

I tried the same, I tried to watch it with an open mind. My wife was reading and she said "why is that man speaking in that annoying voice, turn it over I can't concentrate..."

I must say I couldn't get past his extremely irritating voice and mannerisms either so can't even say if I found him funny or not!

Woman queues for seven hours for for Michael McIntyre tickets