Context is vital. That’s why I’m filming everything I say and do from now on - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 28th, 2024

The terrible massacre of innocent Israelis by sadistic Hamas agents on 7 October last year has set in motion a dreadful chain of events, exploited by bad faith actors on all sides to sow division and hate. Last week the campaigner Gideon Falter tenaciously stage-managed a confrontation with the Metropolitan police by demanding to walk…

Andrew Neil needs to be more Vorderman, less Voldemort - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 21st, 2024

The discredited television personality Andrew Neil, formerly the laughing launch-face of the seemingly Ofcom-untouchable, fun-packed, fact-averse, rightwing TV station GB News, floats contentedly in a foaming brown bathtub of bubbling human waste, his Weetabix hair matted with muck, and yet considers himself clean, the nutshell king of infinite filth. On 10 April, Neil told his…

I value Brummie art, but who else does? - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 14th, 2024

Why should the people of Birmingham have 100% arts cuts imposed on them? Brummies are quite capable of devaluing their own art without official encouragement. In 2020, the director Michael Cumming and I completed King Rocker (“One of my all time favourite rock docs” – Mark Kermode; “the new gold standard for rockumentaries” – the…

The right is as stale as its ‘woke National Trust scones’ gambit - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 7th, 2024

William Blake wrote that we can see heaven in a wild flower and hold infinity in the palms of our hands. He also thought a massive flea with a bald man’s face and no pants on came into his bedroom at night, and I speak as a fan. But, like Blake would, I think we…

Which will melt away first, the snow or the arts? - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 24th, 2024

Nineteen years ago now, I was asked to perform my standup high in the Colorado Rockies at the Aspen comedy festival, a trade fair for the American comedy industry patronised by wealthy locals. In super-affluent Aspen, I discovered, to my horror, economically uncompetitive service industry workers were homed in special “employee housing projects”, like castrated…

Cabbies have given me some great lines, but they have nothing on Frank Hester - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 17th, 2024

I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick to death in my standup comedy, from the lofty position of a patronising north London liberal elitist with his own column in the Observer. But there’s no need to invent them. My…