Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid just needed Trump - April 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 13th, 2025

I first saw the Danish Dogme 95 film Festen in 1998 when I was 30. You had to go to the cinema to see films in those days, when small boys ran barefoot on a conveyor belt to turn the reels, and it’s possible I watched its depiction of a family torn apart by violence,…

Orange Juice? Keir Starmer is on the Kool-Aid - April 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 6th, 2025

On 1 April, the TV comedian John Richardsons, who you will have seen on many panel shows, announced he was becoming a teacher, having already completed the training in secret. I was humbled by Richardsons’s decision to do something genuinely worthwhile and by his foolhardy bravery. How would he control a class of teenagers pre-armed…

Trump chose the wrong hill to DEI on - March 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 23rd, 2025

In the second world war, Navajo code talkers transmitted sensitive US military information in their own undocumented language. Which was nice of them, as their immediate ancestors had been dispossessed and destroyed by white settlers, and then had all their water poisoned with uranium. “Were it not for the Navajos,” concluded major Howard Connor, at…

Trump has microwaved my Cornetto of hope - March 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 9th, 2025

I’d say writing comedy about the ever-shifting opinions of Donald Trump, the Speedy Gonzales of on-the-hoof policymaking, is like playing pin the tail on the donkey, but it’s unfair on donkeys. No donkey ever sexually assaulted someone in a department store changing cubicle. It’s 4.30pm on Wednesday and I’m done. Last week I filed this…

Trump has turbocharged the news cycle and I’m struggling to keep up - March 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 2nd, 2025

The smelly thoughts of Donald Trump bubble up like brown burps in the sort of bombsite pond Chopper bike-riding children were advised to avoid in 1970s public information films. Do they indicate concrete plans, are they designed to provoke, or do they have no meaning, like the gurgles and gasps that can inadvertently escape from…

Trump’s bullshit blitz has Europe on its knees - February 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 23rd, 2025

Was it really only a month ago that the pole-dancer patron, fridge explorer, Brexit get-doer, model bus maker, sofa-strainer, wall-spaffer, current Daily Mail columnist and former British prime minister Boris Johnson eulogised the inauguration of Donald Trump in the Mail, recounting how, as the “invisible pulse of power surged” from the battered bible into the…