Should standup comedians write all their own jokes?

Have you ever laughed at a comedian's pithy joke and then felt dirty and used when you discovered they had not actually written the gag? No? I thought not. In an ideal world, standups would write all their own material but, regardless of who wrote the joke, we still laugh as long as it is funny. Yet as Stewart Lee controversially highlighted in a recently circulated talk he gave to students of his alma mater St Edmund Hall Oxford, some top comedians, among them Frankie Boyle, have used writers.

This will not shock comedy buffs. Television's insatiable thirst for new gags has inevitably led to some using help. Lee suggests that writers should be more clearly credited, which is fine, but his suggestion that comedians who have help are like drug-taking athletes and perhaps should have to return their awards is well wide of the mark.

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The phenomenon of using gag-writers is not new either. Music hall personalities bought their banter off-the-peg and even shared quips. One would use the mother-in-law gags on the northern circuit, another would use them on the southern circuit. If they were on the same bill in the Midlands, they would divvy up the punchlines. Bob Hope used to ring his retinue of writers in the middle of the night and say: "Thrill me."

Lee is being nostalgic for the era that most inspired him, mourning the demise of the auteur, who flourished following the alternative comedy boom in the early 1980s. "I already feel like a relic. The lucrative opportunities to fill hours and hours of television with standup comedy in little bite-size bits have pushed the writer-auteur-comedian aside," he said in his talk.

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He protests too much. If he is a relic, he is not alone. There are plenty of other "auteurs" around, from Daniel Kitson to Josie Long to Tim Key to original 80s auteur Alexei Sayle, who is now back. He probably books a lot of them for his own Comedy Central show, The Alternative Comedy Experience. What Lee is banging on about is the difference between comedy as art and as entertainment, the difference between Samuel Beckett and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

There is an air of puritanism here. Or an air of "old man", as Lee calls himself. It is not as if there is a factory, a former mill in the north maybe, using cheap labour and churning out chuckles for panel shows. It would be lovely if everyone wrote their own material, but with comedy being such big business it is not going to happen. The most important thing is that comedians are funny. And if money has to change hands to make it happen, that should not be a problem.

Bruce Dessau is the editor of beyondthejoke.co.uk