What’s going on out there? You may as well ask a pigeon - April 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 19th, 2020

Here inside, I am losing it. I watched Carry on Screaming and enjoyed it unreservedly. My right arm seems to have stopped working, making it difficult to do Nazi salutes at the television whenever a government minister comes on. And I found myself asking a pigeon, sitting on the fence outside the kitchen window, how…

Will my son’s head lice save us all? - April 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 5th, 2020

“Am I right in remembering you cultivate a colony of head lice in your cellar, Lee?” Nicola Bridgens, former artist in residence at London Zoo, for whom I once provided the voice of a depressed black widow in an insect house installation, called me, coveting my Pediculi humanus capitis. Ten years ago, my little boy…

Out with pub bores, back in with the experts - March 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 29th, 2020

“When the government closed the pubs, I said – I didn’t mince my words, I said to them myself, HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” MS Toilets, The Wetherspoonland, 1922 A public health official friend tells me her colleagues now call the Covid-19 virus “Wetherspoon’s Mumps”, a darkly comic response to Wetherspoon boss Tim Wetherspoon’s initial…

What Boris Johnson’s advice to theatregoers did for me - March 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 22nd, 2020

In a Southend Oxfam shop last week, I found a decadent 70s paperback of Clark Ashton Smith’s Lost Worlds collection. In the 1932 story The Empire of the Necromancers, the Silver Death plague ravages the land of Zothique, and necromancers make the zombie survivors “labour in the vaults and serve their necrophiliac lust”. Within days,…

Is Boris’s baby Cumming’s best coochy coochy coup yet? - March 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 8th, 2020

My friend Paul is revered in DJ circles for his vast collection of novelty singles, and his team of ironic selecters, wearing masks of 70s cartoon characters, regularly appear at hipster clubs laying Indonesian porno grooves on the jaded ears of the weird beards. “I’ve got the strangest gig,” he said, “so you’re going to…

Can it be right to silence Toby Youngs? - March 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 1st, 2020

On Wednesday, I sat in a disabled toilet cubicle, listening to a lifesize effigy of the perpetually silenced free-speech crusader, progressive eugenics enthusiast and regular BBC broadcaster Toby Youngs as it lolled back and forth inside a glass cabinet, a fortune-telling puppet at a fair. “Five-months pregnant Padma Lakshmi’s boobs are massive. Actually mate, I…