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…

Jeremy Hunt’s budget mixtape is no match for Brexit’s greatest hits - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 10th, 2024

On Wednesday, I watched Jeremy Hunt unveil the budget live on TV, though a carefully coordinated campaign of leaks to client media outlets meant it held little of the excitement it did in the 1970s. Where’s the fun in that? If Hunt’s 2024 budget was a 19th-century Parisienne burlesque artist, she would have walked on…

How do civilisations collapse? Ask Lee Anderson - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 3rd, 2024

Last weekend, I stood on a remote Derbyshire moor with my flask and surveyed the romantic remnants of a once-flourishing society that faded out, forgotten, 5,000 years ago. Civilisations hang by threads and can collapse, as Hemingway said, “gradually and then suddenly”. Watching the Conservatives and their media allies dissolve objective notions of truth before…

We swallow Sunak’s pasty gaffe but still dine out on Miliband’s bacon butty - February 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 18th, 2024

Earlier this month, Rishi Sunak went to the economically depressed, wealthy second-home owners’ paradise of Cornwall, which is now £230m down as the Conservative government’s promises to replace funding lost from the EU because of Brexit remain predictably unmet. Take back control! Enjoy your fish!! What did the EU ever do for us? The Eden…

The chilling soulless cruelty of Rishi Sunak is the stuff of nightmares - February 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 11th, 2024

On Tuesday morning I woke in Liverpool with a start, my heart hammering after a night of the most wretched thoughts. The last thing I had seen before I lurched into a fitful sleep had been a foul thing – that Rishi Sunak and Piers Morgan summit – and the day had begun in the…