Deadpan, unfazed, poker-face comic Stewart Lee is exactly the same in interviews as on stage.

He talks slowly, rarely changes pitch and delivers long answers, usually with a sardonic payoff.

When he laughs, you take a deep breath: a small part of him, far below the surface, might actually be enjoying himself.

“I think it’s funny when a comedian does a miserable joke then steps out of character to let you know it’s a joke,” he says, speaking to The Argus from Hackney.

“I like it when they hold their nerve.”

Often it is the listeners who need to hold their nerve after a Lee workout.

“I don’t want to be their friend. I want them to know I am going to do the show whatever. It’s not necessarily to please them but if they like it they are welcome to enjoy it.”

He breaks into a childish laugh and admits that be it on stage in Sheffield or Glasgow or Brighton, with off-the-cuff prods or more formal and stylistic methods and longer jokes, he likes to see how far he can push the crowd.

“It’s good fun getting something to work that you thought wouldn’t.”

He often gets criticised because his material confirms the prejudices and reaffirms the beliefs that people already have. Two nights of Brighton crowds, much of whom could be called his target market, sounds right up that street.

“Brighton was one of the first places to really pick up with me. But it’s funny, you say ‘target market’, and you’d think it would be. The stereotype of my audience is Guardian-reading liberals, but actually over the past year it has become a lot more diverse.

“I like to pretend it is all Guardian-reading liberals, and to berate them for their predictability in coming to see me, but I think it’s slightly more jumbled up than that now.”

That is partly thanks to his hugely successful BBC show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

“In Edinburgh I noticed there were a lot of shirt-wearing lads coming in, the sort of people you would expect would be at Jimmy Carr, wanting their photo taken with me.”

New audiences are the last thing on his mind.

He’s never done panel shows or chat shows and avoids social media.

Last year’s Carpet Remnant World was two hours of a man at the point of breakdown, looking at the pointlessness of his life, worrying about getting older, wondering what he had to write about.

The show’s conceit was that it was about nothing because very little happened to Lee.

“But it was about that exact thing: the idea of who are you if you are a parent, an observer of life, what are you supposed to talk about? It met that problem head on.”

Lee artfully weaved a complex narrative over two hours.

“I’ve done that once – and at the moment I am trying to work out if there is a way of carrying the flavour of that into what I write for the next series of Comedy Vehicle, which is what this tour is.

“This tour will become series three of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, and at the moment I have one half hour which is about that feeling of nullification that being a parent gives you.”

He has two children, aged two and six, with the recent Foster’s Comedy Award winner, Bridget Christie. A gag in Carpet Remnant World ran as follows: “Winning a British comedy award is like having a sign around your neck saying, ‘Hey d****, come to this!”

Did he pass on the advice?

“I do worry, as anyone worries, that if you have an award you don’t necessarily want people coming to see the award winner, because it is inevitably going to be a disappointment for them.

“I remember when Phil Nichol, who is a great comic, got the Perrier Award and a load of people came along and were angry and hated it."

It was the same when he directed The Mighty Boosh in Edinburgh in 2000.

"After the award nominations were announced all these people started coming to see it and there was silence because the wrong people came.”

Lee has many signs around his neck. In 1990, barely out of Oxford, he won the Hackney Empire New Act Of The Year competition.

In 2012, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle won a BAFTA for Best Comedy Programme.

And there was little except admiration from other humanists (and abuse from Christians) for his spoof musical, Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Neither Lee not Christie were aware that the latter’s show, A Bic For Her, had the buzz around Edinburgh this year though.

“We don’t go out at night and talk to anyone. I also imagine the sort of satirical articles I have written about the Foster’s and Perrier awards would count against her.

“But it’ll make it easier for us to organise our lives, and as I start to visibly fade away and become prematurely senile it would be great if she could do a tour next year.”

He might even be able to tour biennially now.

“What I would like to do is do it every other year now and my wife could do the years in between.

“As I get older I find it harder to have ideas, partly because I dismiss things out of hand more quickly, and partly because nothing really happens to me any more.

“I don’t have adventures. I don’t interact with culture in any way. I just read newspapers and look after children. I don’t have any experiences that I can write about so it’s harder to come up with things.”

So expect more invention from the comic’s comic, because children are not a good source, for two reasons.

“Firstly: It is a fairly clichéd, well-worn subject. Secondly: it is someone else’s life. The stuff I do ends up on television and YouTube now, so I can’t talk about them because it is their lives, and their friends’ parents will see it.

“Your children are a brilliant comic resource in your life, but they are other people so I don’t think it’s fair to go into too much detail. They’re not a resource for me to pillage.”

And while “the lack of material” means the first few weeks of a new show can be frightening, at least he gets a break from the offspring.

“At the beginning of a new show you feel sick and frightened. But by the time I get to Brighton I will be all right. And I do really enjoy it. Because for three hours no one is asking you any questions or getting you to do things or talking to you. So it’s quite relaxing really.”

  • Stewart Lee – Much A-Stew About Nothing, Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Thursday, September 19, and Friday, September 20
  • Starts 8pm, tickets £21. Call 01273 709709