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,…

Oi, Cummings! Leave those lefty kids alone - March 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 15th, 2020

For a small fee, the opaquely funded Policy Exchange thinktank will exchange your old worn-out policy for a more rightwing one, chopped out in a pub toilet by co-founder Michael Gove. Nyaaaagh! Gerard Lyons’s uncut analysis of our thriving economic prospects under World Trade Organization tariffs has burned out my septum, and I’ve sneezed snot…

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…

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…