Lost count of the number of times I rolled my eyes during this:
Adjectives that sprang to mind: tedious, unfunny, centrist, safe, shallow, conformist - words I never would have associated with him before.
Lowlights include: excoriating the likes of Trump & Farage for their 'fascism' but letting Obama & Starmer off the hook, bemoaning the withdrawal of support for Ukraine, calling for 'fact checking' of all social media, implying that msm content is trustworthy because lawyers check it, admitting he watches C4 news and reads liberal newspapers, saying he won't go independent because he needs the aforementioned lawyers to check in case he might get sued for a joke that gets taken the wrong way, depicting Chappelle, Burr & Gervais as reactionary over trans comedy, even though they were the ones standing up to censorship to do so (even Guru Murthy seemed to understand this point), no mention of the genocide or those who have been censored or arrested for opposing it or the fact the msm have been lying about & downplaying it from day 1...
Apart from that it was an ok interview Don't 'meet' your heroes.
He's always seemed to me to be wishy-washy politically but treating Trump as fundamentally different to Biden, Obomber, Bush II is blasphemy. The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
True, he even invoked the pearl-clutching '1930s Germany' that all the liberal gobsh!tes reach for any time something doesn't go their way. Of course, now I've said that Trump is going to go full-on fascist just to make me look stupid... but even if he did it would only be because all of his predecessors laid the groundwork for it.
Katy Perry got into space but I can’t get to Norwich The pop star is back on Earth, the tech bros are wrecking everything, and my tour isn’t visiting that fine city of the east. Surely doomsday is nigh By Stewart Lee in The Observer Posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2025
A group of six women returned to Earth from space on Monday, including Katy Perry, the former wife of the Trump cheerleader Russell Brand; and the former Fox news presenter and philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, fiancee of Donald Trump’s media lapdog Jeff Bezos, who bent Washington Post editorial policy to favour the New American Fascism ™ ®. It’s a shame they didn’t fly straight into the heart of the sun.
The six compliant women were sent to space as a costly PR exercise for Bezos’s commercial space flight ambitions, although Perry said it was actually about “finding the love for yourself” and “feeling that divine feminine”. Tell that to all the women worldwide whom Bezos’s pal Trump’s policies are penalising. Singing idiot. Katy Perry said she kissed a girl and she liked it. As Trump rolls back on LGBTQ+ rights I’m surprised the Trump-adjacent Bezos allowed a bi-curious woman into space. I suppose discussions of sexual identity don’t matter if they’re mere titillation. And if Perry is bisexual, she is at least less likely to influence vulnerable young people while orbiting the Earth.
Sánchez, meanwhile, is vice-chairman of Bezos’s Bezos Earth Fund, an environmental group that ended its funding of decarbonisation initiatives in February, in line with Bezos’s support of Trump, who denies climate change while simultaneously seeing that a defrosting Greenland offers superb mineral mining opportunities. Why are all these wankers so totally and unashamedly full of shit?
So I have come to Cornwall for a week, but still I can’t escape the news. As I drove the Penwith peninsula in search of sacred underground Cornish fogous to decompress in, the dead car radio suddenly found a frequency to tell me Perry had sadly survived her Bezos-boosting spaceflight. If those women really cared about the future of the planet they’d have sabotaged themselves to discredit Trump’s big tech donor, but they selfishly chose not to. History will be their judge.
Ostensibly I’m here to see the Tate St Ives exhibition of the mighty 20th-century surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, whose greatest works were inspired by the landscapes of Cornwall, and who died in its loving arms in 1988. Like the late standup comedian Jethro, Colquhoun is indivisible from the land that nurtured her talent, and both created works called This Train Don’t Stop Camborne Wednesdays, though only one features an impressionistic portrayal of the vulva as twin columns of flame.
Thirty years ago I’d pick up Colquhoun’s signed books, their value unacknowledged by vendors, in secondhand shops and wonder at her obscurity. But tides turn, and now she is venerated, 37 years from her passing. Maybe one day I may yet help Bloomsbury’s Museum of Comedy stage that long mooted Jethro retrospective? But first, I have to file my final Observer column.
My sister asks why I am not appearing at Norwich Theatre Royal, and so do I, as my tour shows always sell it out, sometimes twice over. I begin rambling about “visibility”, and how a whole generation of us, as printed news and trustworthy current affairs television began to wither, came to rely on social media to bob us along on its churning sewage-strewn surface. Then Trump’s tech bros skewed the algorithms away from liberal content and, in Google’s case, even agreed to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to appease him. History is mutable, it seems.
I can feel people glazing over as I explain this. What does the end of verifiable information matter to them? After all, The White Lotus was fine, despite the flawed final episode, and that’s enough surely? And all politicians are as bad as one another anyway. And I realise I sound like that American bloke on acid at a Butthole Surfers gig in 1988 saying The Man is controlling our minds with miniature ear robots and hidden smells. But this time around, all those stoned paranoid imaginings are finally true!
We put our futures, and it seems the future of facts themselves, in the hands of bent balding billionaires, still nursing a grudge against the kids from their high school who played guitar or drew cool comics. The Trump administration, accommodated by the likes of Keir Starmer and Katy Perry, is the geopolitical equivalent of a football player stuffing the face of the boy who won the spelling competition into the toilet bowl. For ever.
Here’s where we, and random Venezuelans with random tattoos, start paying. Sometimes, I think one routine I wrote about immigration sometime in the early 00s was shared by socials so often it basically gave me a career, culminating in the Times calling me the world’s greatest living standup comedian by osmosis. I’m the Ralph McTell of champagne socialist satire. Let me take you by the hand.
But now everything has changed. Campaigns, comedians, critics, charities, writing careers and worthy causes that gained traction in the tiny toilet window between the downturn in print media and the twin horrors of Musk’s annexation of Twitter and Google’s apparent abandonment of its “Don’t Be Evil” mantra would never flourish today. We give birth astride the grave. The light gleams an instant as Twitter helps Tracey Thorn from Everything But the Girl become a bestselling author. Then it’s night once more.
I think someone needs to build a new global news network, disinvested from media money men and Trump knee-benders, to save objective truth as we know it. Maybe Andrew Neil could do it, using the skills he learned from kickstarting GB News? Meanwhile, sign up to my monthly mailing list at stewartlee.co.uk to find out if I ever play Norwich Theatre Royal again, or whether my permanent absence from eastern England becomes just another victory for the fascist future. So long and thanks for all the fish!
*****
Lee's admission that these are his actual, earnestly-held opinions makes the whole thing even more pathetic.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
I prefer that bloke that goes on stage, Terry Christian is it?
Still maintaining the "it's all the same" line? That "fundamentally" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I suggest reading Paul Street or Anthony DiMaggio's books on the topic or just read/listen to more Chris Hedges like the 15 minute video and article I posted yesterday. It isn't the same and it's not even close.
That doesn't mean the predecessors didn't do some of the same things but this is a whole new level. I think the fault lies in ascribing it all to Trump personally rather than the latest incarnation of executive power, sanctioned by the permanent state.The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
I remember he was booked to play a benefit for the Shite Helmets back when that was the cause de jour. although I've never been able to find out if he actually appeared or if the whole thing went ahead, and I didn't get into searching too hard to find it. I seem to remember there may have been some doubt about it happening in the end but meh just signing up was bad enough.
I hate how Bill Burr always gets roped into the Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais are anti-trans nonsense. There's a massive difference between Burr and Chappelle on that issue anyway and Gervais isn't in the same league as them when it comes to stand up even if he is one of the worst for milking the "I'm being cancelled" schtick.
I've always realised Lee was a massive metropolitan liberal so I doubt this will surpise me but it's still going to be annoying to hear it.The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
I'm commenting while watching but lumping Burr in with Rogan for responsibility for getting donny scumbag elected is insane as is the "misogony" accusation against Burr.
Rogan is a different matter given he, as the most widely watched podcast in the world at the time, interviewed both Trump and Vance and gave them a level of publicity that is pretty much unattainable elsewhere.
He just started on his "I've lost faith in BBC news" thing and no mention of their coverage of the Gaza genocide. Funny that....The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
Shite helmets? Hadn't heard that. Guess the 'metropolitan liberal elite' was a little more than a character act then...
My recollection re: Rogan was that he gave Kamala the opportunity for an interview but she / her team declined. Probably because she'd run out of scripted soundbites after the first 10 minutes and spend the next 2hr50 waffling on about nothing and cackling like a psychopath. But yeah, it seems like he gives more time to the right and/or corporate stooges these days...
The BBC comment was so weird, I had to go and look up what he was referring to. He says:
(23:55) 'I don't really listen to BBC News any more. I kind of lost faith in it during the Robbie Gibb era. I just kind of think I don't feel I can trust it.'
I didn't even know who he was referring to, though after looking him up on wiki the name must have come up around the various libel cases the JC faced (he bid to buy it as part of a consortium in 2020). He's had various stints at the BBC:
political researcher including for the television programme On the Record.
2002 as deputy editor of the news and current affairs television programme Newsnight [...] political editor for various programmes including Daily Politics, The Andrew Marr Show, and This Week as well coverage of the Budget
Probably the thing that most triggers Lee, though, is that Gibb 'was an editorial advisor for GB News prior to its launch in 2021' and 'Gibb is a prominent supporter of Brexit'.
Anyway, it's incredibly weak to base your critique of an organisation around the supposed influence on it from one person. Is he saying that if Gibb hadn't been employed by the BBC everything would have been fine and he'd still be watching it? There's zero analysis of the institutional bias of the organisation as a whole, and he provides no examples of why they might have failed to keep his 'trust'.
It must be so strange inside the heads of people like this!
What he didn't say might have been as significant as what he did. He can't be ignorant of the evolution of TradBBC into the overflowing toilet of CommercialPrivateEquitybbc but he might still have hope of another series (or had it hinted to keep him sweet). The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
He hates Gervais because Gervais lets loose then says “its just a joke” at the end? C’mon. This is the guy who wished a painful death on Richard Hammond?
In his defense, the Richard Hammond bit was Lee's attempt to turn Top Gear's callous 'it's just a joke' banter back on itself to 'see how they like it' as it were. He even breaks character at the end to explain this:
However I can't blame you for reaching that conclusion, as he often uses this 'character' disclaimer as a way of saying outrageous, risque things but always with the get-out clause that it's not his actual opinion, but something his onstage persona said. I find it a bit cowardly sometimes, though admittedly the extreme statements make for good comedy, and can be quite cathartic.
I take all the points about Lee and on the whole agree with them. However, I have to admit he is sometimes a bit of a guilty pleasure for me.
Bloody French Huguenots coming over here questioning the Eucharistic symbolism with their famed ability to weave little jerkins out of lace. We don't want your lace here. We've got corduroy.
on May 7, 2025, 11:43 pm
Don't 'meet' your heroes.