Last month, somebody called me “self-absorbed”. Or at least I think they did. I wasn’t really paying attention. I don’t mind anyway. At the very least being self-absorbed seems hygienic. I see myself as a high-quality kitchen roll. It’s other people’s leakage I can’t stand.
But if I might talk about myself for a moment, I do find I understand the world almost exclusively through the prism of my own experience. Caspar David Friedrich’s German romantic masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1817) shows a goth-frocked poet confirming his place in the universe by contemplating the landscape. The enormity of the prospect makes him realise he must devote his life to laudanum, absinthe and thigh-high leather boots.
Historically, in contrast, I have positioned myself in the landscape and invited the universe to understand itself by contemplating me. A number of black holes, realising their insignificance compared to my massively critically acclaimed standup comedy oeuvre (“world’s greatest living standup comedian” – the Telegraph), have collapsed in on themselves as a result.
For example, this week our latest pop-up prime minister, the North Sea oil fanatic Andy “Burn Them” Burnham (Boing!!!!), has finally mentioned, in parliament itself, the objective reality of the 6% hit to our economy that being set free from the oppressive clean river regulations, hard-hat and hi-vis advice, and non-existent banana rules of the EU has cost us in backing Brexit. Take back control! Let’s Go WTO! Leave Means Leave! Beans Means Heinz! A Finger of Fudge Is Just Enough to Give Your Kids a Treat! Cowabunga! Word!
Refracting the world through my own lens once more, I understand how small the profit margins in business are. I spent all last weekend manning my own merchandise stall at the band Sea Power’s fantastic Lake District farmyard festival Krankenhaus, in between singing a Hawkwind song with the Canadian noise group EarthBall and judging a dog competition with the “voice of an angel” Charlotte Church. And yet the bloke who pays for the comedy specials at Universal says I have “no commercial appeal”.
From my economic vantage point behind a collapsible trestle table in a barn, I can see what a hit to business Farage’s Brexit benefits were
After tax, and buying in the stock, including copies of my new book Pea Green Boat (£16.99, Ebury Spotlight), my margins run at around 10%. So, from my economic vantage point behind a collapsible trestle table in a barn, I can see what a hit to business Nigel Farage’s Brexit benefits were. Luckily, if the rightwing press, or “the press”, as I call it, is to be believed, very little of my own work has any market value beyond the M25, and north London specifically, so the loss of international customers has not affected me. I never realised how prophetic my late father was when, on his deathbed, his last words to the teenage me were: “Remember only this! There is no future in British cheese.”
On Wednesday, Burn Them boldly announced a commonsense refutation of the free-market values, fanatical deregulations, profit-driven privatisations and bullshit Brexit benefits that have broken Britain. Most people’s lived experience surely proves this is a demonstrably defensible position. But it seems naive to think Burnham’s conclusions can be communicated clearly when the Daily Mail’s Lord Rothermere’s estimated £1bn-plus of personal wealth can be immediately deployed to discredit them. At this very moment, the finest newspaper cartoonists in the land are already working out how to give the new prime minister a funny big nose, flappy ears and weird bushy eyebrows.
I understand how the odds are stacked against Burn Them. In the last two weeks, in order to promote both Pea Green Boat and my new DVD Basic Lee (£25, Weird Walk), I have been obliged to make some of my rare and reluctant engagements with the horrible mainstream press, where I was systematically betrayed like a pathetic whipped dog grateful for any attention its cruel master deigned to bestow upon it. I think it will be even harder for Burnham to get his message across than it has been for me to flog obsolete physical media in a dignified fashion. DVDs? It’s not 2025, grandad.
Somewhere between one promotional interview itself and the final edit,
details were inserted into a finished Guardian piece that weren’t actually proffered, many of which will be extremely helpful to my tenacious stalkers. Currently one is sectioned, another has been bankrupted, and a third is finally known to the police, but there’s always room for more! Today I declined an invitation to host the paper’s end-of-year event. I expect they will get David Mitchell to do his lucrative Last One Laughing impression of me instead.
On the plus side, writing about what I am up to now meant the Guardian was obliged to make its first ever mention of the Nerve, a long overdue acknowledgement of its existence, given that the Nerve was born on a picket line outside the Guardian’s offices. Eventually much of the best talent at the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, split to set up the Nerve, when the venerable Sunday institution was finally taken over by George Osborne’s best buddy and a bunch of bankers.
Meanwhile, the Times, which has also called me the “world’s greatest living standup”, sent me 24 questions about culture I consume, three of which were phrased so as to invite negative responses, meaning the paper could make a clickbait headline out of one of the few non-positive comments I made. My last dealing with the paper was in 2024, when a once-respected comedy critic, who until recently could have taken a seat in the House of Lords, was spuriously sent to interview me about a tour I was already concluding, having been previously instructed, it turned out, by his section editor to get any private and personal details that would drive traffic through the dying paper’s digital gates. I now fully support the abolition of the second chamber and the immediate public execution of all titled figures except for Count Binface.
‘Our latest pop-up Prime Minister’ Andy Burnham. Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz / Future Publishing / Getty
The Times piece’s below-the-line comments included, perhaps actionably, an observation by one Mr King about how “this ‘comedian’ spoiled a special day for a Science Day (sic) at the Royal Albert Hall by belittling children’s enthusiasm, swearing and patronising their efforts and endeavours. Stewart Lee's ‘act’ was inappropriate and offensive to children as young as ten or eleven. A sarcastic embittered forty year old thinks it is fine to ruin the day for thousands of children who had loved every minute up to his appalling and misjudged finale. If you were proud of what your children had achieved only to hear them, and thousands like them, mocked for working hard, studying hard, and being enthusiastic by a snide sarcastic failure you would feel the same way. Unless you believe everything this bitter hypocritical failure dishes out is (makes quote sign) ‘irony’ of course.”
Needless to say, I have never appeared in a “Science Day” at the Royal Albert Hall, let alone headlined one in order to ridicule diligent children. Perhaps the contributor was thinking of the time a similar family event concluded with an educational display, explaining the concept of surface tension, in which balloons made from the still attached and functioning lungs of eviscerated kittens were inflated, in front of thousands of weeping infants, by the serial sex criminal Jimmy Savile.
Yes. It’s that easy to flood the zone with shit. If moderators can’t even keep stuff like the above offline, and as newspapers are owned by people who will be totally opposed to any effort to perform a national reset, what chance do we have against the kind of sustained disinformation campaigns by the bad-faith commentators and hostile rogue states that Britain itself faces, especially if Burn Them tries to steer us away from a system designed to enrich the already rich at the expense of everyone else?
And the reason I know this? It’s because I spent the last week trying to promote my new book and my new DVD (details below). I’m sorry. Does that seem a bit narcissistic?
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run.
Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available now, and so is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee.
He appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around Pea Green Boat at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October, and at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on the same project but with the dream-pop prodigy Stone Anthem, on 11 October.
And he is the guest compere in a celebration of the classic 70s acid-folk album Bright Phoebus at Hackney’s Earth venue this Tuesday (8 September), with Marry Waterson, Eliza Carthy, and Paul Weller from the Style Council