Bard jokes: how music-hall greats inspired Stewart Lee to meddle with Macbeth - July 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 8th, 2023

Shakedowns of Shakespeare scramble the settings. Here’s Romeo and Juliet as cokehead Californians, King Lear as a cattle baron, and Titus Andronicus as an ombudsman. But the text remains sacrosanct – Emma Rice’s nibbling at the pentameters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream irking Globe purists as recently as 2016. So I was surprised when, at…

Never mind the fate of life on Earth, what about the cat-children? - July 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 2nd, 2023

At my secondary school, a friend of mine pretended to be the confidant of the tragic Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, maintaining that time away on family holidays was actually spent visiting the ailing singer at her home in Scotland. He even went as far as appearing to receive and engage in phone calls from…

If wanting fair, accurate political coverage means I’m a nerd, knit me a tank top - June 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - June 18th, 2023

On last Sunday’s BBC politics show, presenter Laura Kuenssberg spoke to the energy secretary, Grant Shapps. On this occasion Shapps manifested as himself, rather than as one of the many false identities he used to inhabit when promoting his internet business. I always find Shapps’s appearances as himself uncomfortable, a bit like when Mike Yarwood…

Never mind his WhatsApp messages – can Boris Johnson himself be disappeared? - June 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - June 4th, 2023

On Wednesday morning, Judge Heather Hallett, head of the Covid inquiry, was still dismayed by the ongoing absence of the elusive government WhatsApp messages. Like King Arthur in reverse, the government WhatsApp messages slept silently in a cave for eons, only to disappear in Albion’s hour of need. The previous week, the Cabinet Office had…

God save the king? What about the planet? - May 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 14th, 2023

As a boy, in 1977, I made a stupid monkey face at Queen Elizabeth II as she drove past us in Solihull’s Mell Square on her silver jubilee perambulations. “You aren’t funny, Stewart,” my gran said of the subsequent photograph, unaware that I would one day be declared “the world’s greatest living standup comedian” (the…

The anti-fraud Tories? You couldn’t make it up… - May 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 7th, 2023

On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak opened his tiny mouth wide, as wide as it could possibly go, and announced “a new plan to stop scams at the source and help make it easier for people to protect themselves from fraudsters”. Meanwhile, his former boss Boris Johnson, who had persuaded some mug to pay for his wallpaper…