The best gig I ever saw: Stewart Lee on the Fall, Cornwall, 1984 - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 15th, 2015

It was the summer of 1984. I was 16. I wanted, finally, to see the Fall. I’d been fixated on the group since a 1981 Peel session suddenly flipped somehow from irritating me beyond reason to enthralling me beyond imagination. Provocative repetition. Monotonous drones. Withering sarcasm. I’m lucky I was struck by something so utterly…

Sun slams Corbyn’s nod and gets a rise out of me - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 15th, 2015

Last week’s newspaper attacks on Jeremy Corbyn have moved from the dishonest into the deranged. On page seven of Monday’s Telegraph, Sir Gerald Howarth MP, who once worried that the same sex marriage bill would be seen by “the aggressive homosexual community… as but a stepping stone to something even further”, analysed Corbyn’s Remembrance service…

A pyre of burning hate in a pagan, polluted England - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 8th, 2015

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a hedgehog and known that it wanted to die? I have. But wait, I am getting ahead of myself. On Halloween, as we headed west in our Volkswagen Passat, I realised the most horrifying thing in the vicinity was our own family estate. With our car belching…

My name is Stewart Lee, and I’m an AAlcoholic - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 1st, 2015

Stewart Lee’s new memoir, AAlcoholic AAnonymous, is an honest, searingly brutal saga of a privileged and educated man in the midst of a relatively short-lived and ultimately self-induced torpor, who repays the world for his undeserved second chance at life with nothing but scorn and contempt. In this extract he writes – for the first…

Royal kisses on the cheeks of a flatulent superpower - October 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 25th, 2015

Last weekend, residents of our east London thoroughfare were told to remove their vehicles, clearing the route for an exceptionally wide and potentially hazardous load. Perhaps your mum, who I believe lives locally, had ordered a new pair of pants from Littlewoods? Rising on Tuesday to a thunderous ding dong, I saw “Free Tibet” protesters…

So David Cameron can tell lies but standup comics can’t… - October 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 18th, 2015

On Monday, the content provider Boris Johnson positioned a typically triumphant column in the Telegraph. Having had a hail of multicoloured children’s swimming pool balls flung at him by suddenly energised disabled people in Manchester, the mischievous reaver explained to Telegraph readers that people throwing eggs and calling the Conservatives scum are the same as…