I value Brummie art, but who else does? - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 14th, 2024

Why should the people of Birmingham have 100% arts cuts imposed on them? Brummies are quite capable of devaluing their own art without official encouragement. In 2020, the director Michael Cumming and I completed King Rocker (“One of my all time favourite rock docs” – Mark Kermode; “the new gold standard for rockumentaries” – the…

The right is as stale as its ‘woke National Trust scones’ gambit - April 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 7th, 2024

William Blake wrote that we can see heaven in a wild flower and hold infinity in the palms of our hands. He also thought a massive flea with a bald man’s face and no pants on came into his bedroom at night, and I speak as a fan. But, like Blake would, I think we…

Which will melt away first, the snow or the arts? - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 24th, 2024

Nineteen years ago now, I was asked to perform my standup high in the Colorado Rockies at the Aspen comedy festival, a trade fair for the American comedy industry patronised by wealthy locals. In super-affluent Aspen, I discovered, to my horror, economically uncompetitive service industry workers were homed in special “employee housing projects”, like castrated…

Cabbies have given me some great lines, but they have nothing on Frank Hester - March 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 17th, 2024

I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick to death in my standup comedy, from the lofty position of a patronising north London liberal elitist with his own column in the Observer. But there’s no need to invent them. My…

We swallow Sunak’s pasty gaffe but still dine out on Miliband’s bacon butty - February 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 18th, 2024

Earlier this month, Rishi Sunak went to the economically depressed, wealthy second-home owners’ paradise of Cornwall, which is now £230m down as the Conservative government’s promises to replace funding lost from the EU because of Brexit remain predictably unmet. Take back control! Enjoy your fish!! What did the EU ever do for us? The Eden…

The chilling soulless cruelty of Rishi Sunak is the stuff of nightmares - February 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 11th, 2024

On Tuesday morning I woke in Liverpool with a start, my heart hammering after a night of the most wretched thoughts. The last thing I had seen before I lurched into a fitful sleep had been a foul thing – that Rishi Sunak and Piers Morgan summit – and the day had begun in the…