The 61st Edinburgh Fringe has begun, offering more than 2,000 shows. And though the 250 venues can be stifling and the rates for accommodation appalling, this is still the only city to be if you’re keen on theatre or comedy. Last year, more than 1.5 million tickets were sold - more than twice as many as were sold ten years earlier. Landlords aside, everybody claims to lose money here. But the Fringe is a big deal and it’s still getting bigger.

And yet, give or take a Ricky Gervais or a Frank Skinner, there aren’t too many telly faces in town. At the Pleasance, culty figures such as Lucy Porter and Mark Watson are playing the big room. At the 320-seater Udderbelly - the upended purple cow in its second year of aiming its inflatable teats at the sky - Stewart Lee is milking the almighty acclaim from his previous pair of Edinburgh shows.

They helped make him No 41 in a Channel 4 poll to find the 100 favourite comedians. Lee can spot bogusness at 50 paces - he is “officially” funnier than anyone at the Fringe apart from Skinner, Jimmy Carr, Daniel Kitson and Jerry Sadowitz. He can also see the fun to be had from such spurious statistics. “I chose to embrace it head-on as fact,” says Lee, “to use it as a marketing tool.”

Well, first the bad news. 41st Best Stand-Up Ever! is not as thrillingly provocative as Lee’s previous show, which looked at his own hounding by the Religious Right after he co-wrote Jerry Springer: the Opera. Some of his repetitiveness can be genuinely tedious rather than mock-tedious.

The good news? Lee is still as cheerfully heretical, rapturously rhythmic and inspiringly intelligent as a comedian gets. He contrasts his status as a hero of mockery with his mother’s preference for Tom O’Connor. He takes delectably overstated aim at the decadent flatulence of television: “run by 20 or 30 people who are insensitive to beauty, truth or thought in any form”. Now 39, a new father with Reed Richards grey temples, Lee has added a more conversational quality to his old deliberateness.

He’s acidic about show-business folk, from Russell Brand - “condemning racism on Celebrity Big Brother while dressed as a cartoon pirate” - to list-show rent-a-rant Stuart Maconie. But Lee is his own prime target too. One of his biggest beefs with television is that it won’t commission him any more.

References to Marvel Comics and jazz go over the heads of some, as he knows they will. “The interesting thing about being upgraded to a larger venue,” he suggests slowly, “is that there will be a lot of people who won’t like this show.” Much of the sold-out crowd greet Lee’s set with respect rather than roars. His story about racial tension at his branch at WeightWatchers brings up a defence of political correctness that would benefit from an hour to itself.

This is the most relaxed show that Lee has done. Occasionally it stalls. But he is sharp, surprising and self-aware like nobody else. He remains the standard by which his fellow Fringe comics must measure themselves.

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