Another goddamned appreciation of the late, lamented Bill Hicks - March 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 1st, 2014

Twenty years after the tragic injustice of his goddamned death, isn’t it time we canonised Bill Hicks as the best goddamned stand-up comedian contemporary broadsheet newspaper critics have ever heard of? If only for belatedly providing dozens of desperate hacks and pro-celebrity columnists working in the last days of dying print media with the opportunity…

What to do if millions of Romanian vampires pitch camp at Marble Arch - January 2014 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 5th, 2014

During the Thatcher era, wealthy British people leaving the National Theatre skirted British homeless people in the cardboard cities of the South Bank subway. Today, wealthy Arabs, Russians and Europeans, leaving the Princess Diana memorial playground, skirt Romanian homeless people in the Marble Arch underpass. Can there be any better proof of the astonishing progress…

Stewart Lee: what the National Theatre means to me - October 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 20th, 2013

Jerry Springer: The Opera. ‘The staff at the National are like the civil servants in Yes, Minister’ says its director Stewart Lee. ‘They save you from making terrible mistakes.’ Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Comedian Stewart Lee co-wrote and co-directed the National’s first new opera, Jerry Springer: The Opera, which started life at BAC before running at…

The end of the world is nigh … anyone out there interested? - October 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 6th, 2013

Last Monday the International Panel on Planet-Threatening Demi-Gods presented the most peer-reviewed scientific paper in all human history, giving unarguable evidence that Earth will be destroyed by a malevolent super-being called Malignos at teatime (GMT) next Tuesday. I was on tour, sitting in Belfast airport departure lounge, when I read about it in the Guardian.…

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the coalition plays silly burgers - June 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - June 30th, 2013

George Osborne chewed his pencil nervously. It tasted funny. He worried where it had been. But his fellow Bullingdon boy Nat Rothschild had assured him he had burned all those pencils. Maybe this one had escaped the inferno. It was Wednesday evening. Our conscience-stricken chancellor required sustenance. Lashed by the twin madames of ethics and…

Gobbling pate allowed a nation to scoff at the legacy of Thatcherism - April 2013 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 20th, 2013

During Margaret Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, the bishop of London, boasted to all and sundry of how the late prime minister had once physically restrained him when he lunged at some pulverised ducks’ breasts. He had intended to cram into his mouth. Fatty duck pâté, it transpired, was a forbidden…