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…

Brexit Britain is desperate for a decent genesis myth - October 2016 The Observer - October 30th, 2016

We are entering a second dark age. But the light that flickers on the screens of our iPhones, from a five-second clip of a dog sliding on some ice, is blinding us to the encroaching blackness. Our civilisation teeters at the abyss. We are 8th-century Lindisfarne monks, spotting black Viking sails on the horizon and…

Brexit confusion is scuppering my show – what next? - October 2016 New Statesman - By Stewart Lee - October 28th, 2016

I am a stand-up comedian, and I am in the process of previewing a new live show, which I hope to tour until early 2018. It was supposed to be about how the digital, free-market society is reshaping the idea of the individual, but we are in the pre-Brexit events whirlpool, and there has never been…

In Mel and Sue, the true spirit of punk lives on - September 2016 The Observer - September 18th, 2016

Paul Hollywood is named after a stupid place. And Mary Berry changed her surname to that of a popular cake ingredient in 1970, in a self-abasing quest for self-raising fame. We expect little moral guidance from either Hollywood or Berry, and we receive none in return. But in refusing to follow The Great British Bake…

All Corbyn needs now is a krautrock endorsement - September 2016 The Observer - September 11th, 2016

Last week Jeremy Corbyn welcomed the endorsement of the 80s Birmingham band UB40, in front of a room of baffled journalists. But then a rival version of UB40 declined to endorse the Labour leader. The Corbyn narrative became collateral damage in the titanic battle of two warring factions of the once mighty pop-reggae pioneers, supposedly…