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…

Coronavirus is ruining my happy memories - February 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 16th, 2020

Why must things change, I wonder? Why can’t they just be the same for ever? It is a common grievance, and one of the main factors that drove the pro-Brexit vote. Thankfully, soon “things” will be able to go back to being “like they were”. A Clarks Commando shoe, with white dog muck in the…

Horrible Histories? We’re living through one right now - February 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 9th, 2020

”Was any of the licence fee used to produce something purely designed to demean us?”, the elderly BBC journalist Andrew Neil tweeted, regarding last week’s nine-minute European-themed compilation of the delightful children’s series Horrible Histories. In these arse-tip times, the multiple-Bafta-award-winning success is “unpatriotic”, while pouring cider on a smouldering EU flag is the tits.…

Roll over Fleabag, Mrs Brown got the priest first - February 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 2nd, 2020

Ant and Dec had barely hosed the protective goose fat off David Walliams’s semi-aquatic body at the National Television Awards on Tuesday, before the furious Twittersphere exploded as Mrs Brown’s Boys beat both The Flea Bag and Ricky Gervais’s Afterlife for Best Comedy. Furious alt right incels, whose loyalty Gervais cultivates indiscriminately online, were outraged.…

Laurence Fox is the hero we deserve – and I have just the role for him - January 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 26th, 2020

The actor and pop singer Laurence Fox achieved peak Laurence Fox this month after explaining racism to a black female academic, photographing carrots sarcastically, doubting the existence of some Sikhs, fraternising with the Cumming-trumpets of the Today programme, and warning women under 35 of all races that he would withhold the bounty of his coveted…