Chronicle of May’s fiasco foretold in a urine stain - June 2017 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - June 11th, 2017

It’s 8.29am on Friday now and I have to file this column in two hours 31 minutes. I awoke at 6am, to watch the bloody election results coagulate, in a hotel room in Tunbridge Wells, a town so solidly middling it has been twinned with a branch of Carluccio’s. But last Sunday, I had seen…

It’ll take more than cheese and ceramics to reunite our divided country - June 2017 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - June 4th, 2017

Wake up and smell the covfefe and tell the spinning corpse of Robin Day the news. The old politics is over. This election is no longer a choice between left and right, between traditional working-class or middle-class allegiances, between self-interest and concern for others. It is a new kind of choice. It is a choice…

A papal encounter with the bat-faced duck-lion - May 2017 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 28th, 2017

Beelzebub, the gluttonous emperor of hell, master of calumny, foremost in wickedness and crime, is a fallen angel who presides over the Order of the Fly. Some say he is as high as a tower. Others say he has the figure of a snake, but with the generative organs of a young woman, and the…

When Boris Johnson’s inner monster goes on the rampage - May 2017 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 21st, 2017

Last Wednesday our chief Brexiter Boris Johnson dressed up in a Sikh costume to visit a Bristol gurdwara. There he told the alcohol-abstaining supplicants to take bottles of Johnnie Walker to Indian relatives to speed post-Brexit booze exports, leading one to comment that had he made that suggestion in India the foreign secretary would have…

How a sex robot ended up on The One Show sofa - May 2017 The Observer - May 14th, 2017

Artificially intelligent humanoid sexual partners are now commercially available. And indeed, I have often wondered if I myself am in fact one such “sex robot”. My lovers always disengage from me in silently satisfied wonder, and rarely request second encounters, having had their expectations soul-shatteringly exceeded, their sexual futures rendered endlessly disappointing. I’m joking of…

Even standup has been weaponised by fake news - April 2017 The Observer - April 30th, 2017

Last Sunday, Le Pen was predicted a 92% landslide; Serge Gainsbourg’s zombie corpse, barely discernible from his living form, rose from the grave and endorsed the Front National; and, apparently, 10-hour queues meant it wasn’t worth busy French metropolitan liberals turning up to vote, as they would not then have time to drink absinthe in…