Stewart Lee is popular again, much to his annoyance. Richard Herring is also popular but less so, much to his annoyance.

It's been an absolute pleasure to have been able to watch both Richard Herring and Stewart Lee performing live in Leicester within a month of each other.
Their double act in the 1990s was edgy, cool and above all superlatively funny. Having recently watched some old episodes of Fist of Fun, I'm very pleased to say it's still just as funny almost 20 years on. I strongly recommend you visit  http://www.gofasterstripe.com/  and buy Series 1 of Fist of Fun, which has been finally released after Stew and Rich, along with Chris at Gofasterstripe bought the release rights from the BBC after they'd repeatedly refused to bring it out on DVD (utter madness, obviously).
Anyhoo, I reviewed Richard Herring's 'What is Love Anyway?' show at Curve for the Leicester Mercury on February 15th (aka St Skeletor's day) - here's the link http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/St-Valentine-s-Day-gets-massacred-restored/story-15254959-detail/story.html and last night his erstwhile partner-in-crime put on a cracking show to a near-sold out and very appreciative DeMontfort Hall. I was reviewing that one for the Mercury too, I'll post the link as soon as it appears online.
I've tried not to gush too much in my newspaper review and stay fairly objective, but it was a fantastic show, and an absolute delight to see him performing in front of the sort of large, knowledgeable crowd he deserves, whilst still being able to mock said crowd continuously for not really 'getting' him, or just coming along because he'd won an award. I remember seeing him in the comedy tent at Glastonbury in the late 90s, when he was first starting to develop that slow, repetitive style that so characterises much of his recent work, and the festival crowd were really not going for it. He was getting booed by the majority of the audience, and yet the more they disliked it, the slower and more repetitive he became, as if feeding off their contempt. I guess this means he was ahead of his time, because now people regularly call him a genius for doing the same sort of material.
Having said that, last night's show did seem slightly more tailored for a larger, perhaps less knowledgeable audience. There were many references to his style, and lengthy, weary-voiced explanations of how his jokes work to an imagined section of the audience whose only experience of live comedy is watching Michael MacIntyre's Comedy Roadshow. Nothing new there, of course, but perhaps more surprising was his frequent use of fairly conventional observational gags and fairly snappy topical gags in the first half of the show. But of course being Stewart Lee, he didn't just leave it at that - any standard gags were generally used a springboard for more deconstructive material, either explaining at length why a poor gag didn't get a great laugh, or berating his audience for laughing louder at obvious, Mock the Week-style jokes than his more cerebral material.
Of course this is what makes him a great comic, this ability to deconstruct jokes, routines and the nature of comedy itself whilst still making the audience laugh. He has taken the old notion of a joke not being funny if you have to explain it and proved the exact opposite, and as a result I'm sure we'll see a whole raft of Lee-inspired 'deconstructionists' on our comedy stages in the years to come. I doubt if any of them will do it as well as he, though - after all, he's had 20 or so years practice...