Heard the one about the grumpy comedian with a big bank account? This, presumably, goes some way to explaining the behaviour of Sarah Millican, the irritable stand-up in question. The 36-year-old former civil servant is on a high, having won Queen of Comedy at the British Comedy Awards in December. Her first DVD, Chatterbox Live, was released the previous month and was soon the bestselling DVD by a female comic. This year she is performing a nationwide tour, much of it already sold out, and is also starring in a Radio 4 and a BBC Two series. The joke will be on her if everyone has already seen the best punch-lines on YouTube before she can release her second DVD. So is she just greedy then? No, says Sarah Bennett, who runs comcomedy.com, a website which shows interviews and teasing video footage of about 300 stand-ups, including Jimmy Carr and Terry Alderton, but is careful not to reveal too many punch-lines. "I completely sympathise with her," says Bennett. It can take a new comic a year to get their first 10 minutes of material together. It's a real concern if that's all suddenly available online. It's not like filming a music gig where everyone knows the songs. Comics are very wary of cameras, and this sort of thing happens a lot. Interestingly, Millican is not the first stand-up to lash out. In February 2009 the comedian Lee Hurst was fined £60 after pleading guilty to smashing an audience member's mobile phone. He claimed other writers were copying his jokes and selling them to television shows. One wonders, though, if the likes of Hurst and Millican aren't trying to lock the stable door after the horse has bolted. Look up any comedian on YouTube and there are numerous pirated clips. One of Millican, viewed by 315,000 people, shows her at the Hammersmith Apollo. It wasn't uploaded by the BBC. According to Bennett, however, the internet is an opportunity, not a threat, for the future of comedy. "There's a fine line to tread," she says. Obviously, you have to respect people's work, but comedy also has to wise up to the internet age. It's got some way to go until it catches up with the music industry. In the meantime, a neutral bystander could be forgiven for thinking that life would be a lot easier if those attending a stand-up gig simply watched the damned thing, instead of constantly waving their mobiles in the air and blocking the view of everyone else.