A knockout week for the post-shame political class - February 2017 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 12th, 2017

Knock knock? Who’s there? Benjamin Netanya. Benjamin Netanya who? That’s right, can I come in and see Theresa May please? Before you clog up the below-the-line comments for this column with criticisms, I am aware this knock-knock joke doesn’t quite work, logically. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was left standing at the unanswered door of…

With Donald Trump’s help, at least our bananas will be bendy again - February 2017 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 5th, 2017

Not everyone who voted to leave the EU wanted to see Britain immediately descend into being an unaccountable single-party state, exploiting people’s worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely. Some people just wanted to have bendy bananas. As a member of the metropolitan liberal elite in the pre-Brexit wasteland, I wake up every day, my little…

Full of nuts, watching a 70s western, I saw America’s future… - January 2017 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 29th, 2017

Can it be only last year that I was making the out-of-touch liberal elite laugh, in publicly subsidised theatres throughout pre-Brexit Britain, by saying that “Donald Trump” sounded like the kind of name Walt Disney would come up with if he was asked to invent a fart that could speak? Happy times. It seemed then…

Beyond good and evil with Gove and Trump - January 2017 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 22nd, 2017

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is able to translate the grunting of Mark Ruffalo’s incoherent Hulk into meaningful dialogue. Last Monday the Times newspaper invited us to believe that the resentful foundling Michael Gove could do the same with the contradictory snarling of Donald Trump. As a fellow adoptee I recognise…

My Paul Nuttalls routine has floated back up the U-bend - December 2016 The Observer - December 4th, 2016

I believe it was a frog who wrote, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting the American writer Elwyn Brooks White. You understand it better but Elwyn Brooks White dies in the process, ideally before completing Stuart Little.” I may have got this the wrong way round. I am a multiple British comedy and Bafta award-winning…

No more schmoozing with the enemy on TV shows - November 2016 The Observer - November 20th, 2016

The danger in meeting politicians is that they seem all right and then, as a comedian, it is much harder to summon up the manufactured anger required to despise them for personal commercial gain. I have a mortgage. I can’t afford to find myself thinking things like “You know, Ken Clarke isn’t so bad once…