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…

Downing Street – a haven for weirdos, misfits and comic-book villains - February 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 23rd, 2020

The Hate-Monger is a minor Marvel comics villain, first documented by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in December 1963, who is a clone of Hitler and wears a purple Ku Klux Klan robe. In Fantastic Four issue 21, The Hate-Monger bounces his Hate-Ray off the moon, amplifying people’s feelings of dread, fear and anxiety, inflaming…

Coronavirus is ruining my happy memories - February 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 16th, 2020

Why must things change, I wonder? Why can’t they just be the same for ever? It is a common grievance, and one of the main factors that drove the pro-Brexit vote. Thankfully, soon “things” will be able to go back to being “like they were”. A Clarks Commando shoe, with white dog muck in the…

Roll over Fleabag, Mrs Brown got the priest first - February 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 2nd, 2020

Ant and Dec had barely hosed the protective goose fat off David Walliams’s semi-aquatic body at the National Television Awards on Tuesday, before the furious Twittersphere exploded as Mrs Brown’s Boys beat both The Flea Bag and Ricky Gervais’s Afterlife for Best Comedy. Furious alt right incels, whose loyalty Gervais cultivates indiscriminately online, were outraged.…

Boris Johnson turns politics into a puppet show - January 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 19th, 2020

My metropolitan liberal elitist friends here in 78.5% Remain-voting Hackney do not hold BBC news in high regard, its election coverage considered biased in favour of the government and Laura Kuenssberg merely a horrid flesh trombone through which Dominic Cumming honks his reverberating falsehoods. The news seemed skewed. During the election, the prime minister declined…

Ricky Gervais and Jeremy Clarkson are no laughing matter - January 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 12th, 2020

Last week, in a much-needed and well-timed satire of snowflake hand-wringing over the Australian bush fires, the Sun’s politically incorrect columnist Jeremy Clarkson declared the continent unfit for human habitation and welcomed scorched whiteys back to the motherland, unaccompanied minors and all. The inevitable complaints will have already been offset by Sun accountants against the…