Stewart Lee: regime comedian

Stand-up comedian Stewart Lee’s onstage persona is that of an arsehole who signs cheques that his wit and intellect can just about cash. Snide, superior, dismissive, repetitive – yet enviably at ease on a stage worn thin by the circling tread of those who came before him. Those like Simon Munnery, the largely unsung genius who once played a similar character with more flair, less repetition and no meanness. The crowd at Lee’s gigs serve as both guests and galley slaves. The captain is a bully and a blowhard, forgiven only because of the supposed intellectual ballast that keeps the ship upright.

A recurring element of Lee’s act is his habit of slagging off more successful comedians and blaming it on his onstage persona when questioned later. But this ‘persona’ is, I suspect, really just Lee. The Michael MacIntyres and Ricky Gervaises of the world keep him up at night, because they’ve attained a level of success that has always eluded him, possibly because both appear to actually like the people who come to see them.

Lee popped up on my radar last week because of an interview he did for Channel 4 News, promoting his new stand-up show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf. Speaking to Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Lee fretted about working in America, claiming he was concerned he would be detained over his jokes, denied his heart medication and treated as a dissident. It’s a neat narrative. It positions Lee as a flawed but empathetic voice resisting creeping fascism. But the paint in this self-portrait begins to run under any kind of scrutiny, particularly when you consider what Lee refuses to talk about, and has actively ignored for a decade – namely, the trans debate.

Because while Lee talks publicly about his hypothetical persecution, he remained conspicuously silent as women, and a few men like me, lost their careers, faced threats and police visits, and endured relentless harassment simply for raising safeguarding concerns about women and children. Lee epitomises what I call the ‘regime comedian’: someone who aligns snugly with dominant orthodoxies, never daring to challenge them, let alone mock them. Those who have sat through any episode of Have I Got News For You over the past 10 years will be familiar with the genus.

In his stand-up routines and regular columns for the Observer, Lee avoids explicitly endorsing slogans like ‘transwomen are women’. But he nods, winks and keeps the right company. An Oxford University graduate, Lee’s comfortable perch in the establishment would be impossible if he did not pointedly sidestep current critical issues, particularly the devastating medicalisation and irreversible harm being inflicted upon children at gender clinics, and the destruction of women’s rights under the guise of trans ‘inclusion’. Instead, his columns endlessly recycle the same list of conservative targets he first drew up in the mid-2010s, making the same stale points over and over again.

The trans debate is thick with black comedy, from men in women’s jails to male athletes smashing bones on football fields. But if you watched Lee’s stand-up at any point in the past decade, you wouldn’t even know it was a ‘thing’. Even mentioning it would alienate his audience, which might wither away if his material wasn’t perpetually appealing to students. His concern over ‘fascism’ is therefore the emptiest blather. Where was he when countless individuals were punished for dissenting from trans orthodoxies? When dancer and choreographer Rosie Kay lost her dance company? When Christian Henson was bullied out of the music-software company he founded? When activists destroyed David Bridle’s gay magazine, Boyz? When musician Rósin Murphy was decreed a bigot for opposing puberty blockers? When actor James Dreyfus was blacklisted for defending gay rights? Lee affects to see authoritarianism abroad while ignoring the shadow that’s hanging over every decent person in the UK – the threat of cancellation, arrest, financial ruin or worse.

Only comfortable middle-class men like Lee could ignore the threat posed by trans ideology to the rights and safety of women and children. The working classes wouldn’t tolerate it. Lee saves his admiration for privileged midwits like Jolyon Maugham – a former tax lawyer, windmill-owner and trans-activist ally.

Lee ends up mixing in circles like this because they reliably reflect his own opinions back at him, like an endless hall of mirrors. I can picture him at his breakfast table: skipping over the Guardian’s token coverage of the Cass Review, pausing only to salivate over a competitor’s low ratings. His hypocrisy was exposed by Jerry Sadowitz’s cancellation. When Sadowitz was banned from his Pleasance spot at the Edinburgh festival for causing offence, Lee – who once praised him as a boundary-breaker – fell conspicuously silent. The silence certainly rang truer than any line in Lee’s mummified act.

Even in the Guru-Murthy interview, you can hear the panic under Lee’s laughter. He’s bluffing. He doesn’t understand what’s happening in the US – beyond the filtered morsels fed to him by the Guardian. Beneath the wheezing chortle is a man out of his depth.

This is what failure looks like – moral and artistic. A supposed ‘anti-fascist’ who turns his back on those artists who were punished for speaking up. The Stewart Lee who fears Trump’s America can’t even face his own country’s creeping authoritarianism. And why would he confront the establishment? He is the establishment.

Graham Linehan is a former TV comedy writer best known for sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. Follow him on Substack.