What’s going on out there? You may as well ask a pigeon - April 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 19th, 2020

Here inside, I am losing it. I watched Carry on Screaming and enjoyed it unreservedly. My right arm seems to have stopped working, making it difficult to do Nazi salutes at the television whenever a government minister comes on. And I found myself asking a pigeon, sitting on the fence outside the kitchen window, how…

Faced with Dominic Raab, thank heavens for plague-inspired tales - April 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 12th, 2020

To combat corona, the government are reassembling the Isaac Levido-led team that won the election. The virus is sure to be defeated by cynically re-edited footage of Keir Starmer appearing confused or by faking Facebook posts and temporarily renaming the Conservative party website coronavirusgohome.com. You cannot beat Covid-19 with lies. That plague ship has sailed.…

Will my son’s head lice save us all? - April 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 5th, 2020

“Am I right in remembering you cultivate a colony of head lice in your cellar, Lee?” Nicola Bridgens, former artist in residence at London Zoo, for whom I once provided the voice of a depressed black widow in an insect house installation, called me, coveting my Pediculi humanus capitis. Ten years ago, my little boy…

Out with pub bores, back in with the experts - March 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 29th, 2020

“When the government closed the pubs, I said – I didn’t mince my words, I said to them myself, HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” MS Toilets, The Wetherspoonland, 1922 A public health official friend tells me her colleagues now call the Covid-19 virus “Wetherspoon’s Mumps”, a darkly comic response to Wetherspoon boss Tim Wetherspoon’s initial…

What Boris Johnson’s advice to theatregoers did for me - March 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 22nd, 2020

In a Southend Oxfam shop last week, I found a decadent 70s paperback of Clark Ashton Smith’s Lost Worlds collection. In the 1932 story The Empire of the Necromancers, the Silver Death plague ravages the land of Zothique, and necromancers make the zombie survivors “labour in the vaults and serve their necrophiliac lust”. Within days,…

Oi, Cummings! Leave those lefty kids alone - March 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 15th, 2020

For a small fee, the opaquely funded Policy Exchange thinktank will exchange your old worn-out policy for a more rightwing one, chopped out in a pub toilet by co-founder Michael Gove. Nyaaaagh! Gerard Lyons’s uncut analysis of our thriving economic prospects under World Trade Organization tariffs has burned out my septum, and I’ve sneezed snot…