Latest news with #StewartLee
Times
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Times
George Osborne required home comforts are No 11 departure
All political careers end in failure, but they can be resurrected in podcasts — and so, from the political afterlife, the former chancellor George Osborne has reflected on his demise. At the South by Southwest London festival, he recalled how he needed the comforts of home when he was sacked by the new PM Theresa May, who made him leave Downing Street by the back door. Trouble was, he didn't actually have anywhere to stay. 'I had to call up my mother and say, 'Mum, can I come and spend the night in the spare room?' ' Osborne said. An ironic end for the architect of the bedroom tax. A little moment of unintentional humour cut the tension during Carlos Alcaraz's comeback victory in the French Open final. TNT Sports broadcast the deciding set without commercial breaks, and made a song and dance about this. 'How good to be ad free in this deciding set,' said the commentator Nick Mullins, before hastily adding: 'Courtesy of Rolex.' Humouring the lawyers Getting anything past BBC bureaucracy is a minor miracle. The comic Stewart Lee tells the Beeb's Strong Message Here podcast that he was once pulled up by its lawyers for a sketch where he impersonated the presenter Richard Madeley next to a shopping trolley filled with booze. As Madeley had been involved in a shoplifting case (he was acquitted by a jury after citing a lapse in memory), Lee argued the joke was perfectly legal. Eventually, he won through against a lawyer who, arguably, was working in the wrong department. 'Well, you can do it legally,' said the lawyer for BBC Comedy, 'but why do you have to make fun of people?' Thank you for the many submissions of exam howlers. A favourite came from Andrew Whiffin, who recalls a history exam which read 'Martin Luther first comes to the eye of the historian in 1517, when he nailed his 95 faeces to the church of Wittenberg'. He was at least impressed by the candidate's spelling. Public disservice Yesterday marked 50 years since the first live broadcast from the Palace of Westminster, when the nation listened to Tony Benn and Michael Heseltine do battle in Industry Questions. This was day one of a four-week trial, and some worried that the broadcasts would alter debate in the chamber. The BBC was nonchalant. 'One might get shorter speeches, or speeches rather to the point,' said Peter Hardiman Scott, its political editor. 'Only the diehards would suggest that these would be changes for the worst.' Perhaps he had a point in 1975 but, in an era where speeches are now geared to be clipped up on social media, we may envy a simpler time when politicians didn't take the pith. Cole leaves the crease The Chatty Bats, the Lobby cricket team, is looking for a new recruit after The Sun's editor-at-large Harry Cole left for the US. Such was Cole's impact on elite sport in SW1 that Politico saw fit to report on his swansong, saying he 'fulfilled his usual role by getting out for 1 and then not bowling or taking any catches'. Cole was delighted with this generous write-up. 'Usually I get a duck,' he said. Perhaps baseball will be a kinder mistress.
Telegraph
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Stewart Lee will not perform in US over fears Trump joke would lead to prison
Stewart Lee has claimed he will not perform in Donald Trump's America because he fears being locked up for his jokes. The comedian said he had recently been offered the chance to perform for a week in a Chicago comedy club, but turned it down. He told Krishnan Guru-Murthy's podcast, Ways to Change the World: 'I wouldn't work in the States at the moment. I'd worry about them going through my jokes and ending up spending two days locked up without my heart medication. I just would worry about it.' In his 2018 stand-up show, Stewart made several jokes criticising Trump. 'Because I've got a Trump bit [in the routine] I have to check at half time every night that he's not been assassinated or fallen into a barrel of porn actresses or something,' he told an audience in Southend. 'I don't know if you can make massive generalisations about Americans who voted for Trump. Because Americans voted for Trump for all sorts of different reasons. And it wasn't just racists who voted for Trump. C---- did as well.' He also said: 'Not all Americans that voted for Trump wanted to see America immediately descend into being an unaccountable single party state exploiting people's worst prejudices to maintain power indefinitely. Some Americans just wanted to be allowed to wear their Ku Klux Klan outfits to church.' Jokes on his latest routine are currently unknown, but Lee claimed the US is embracing fascism. 'I don't see a way out of where we're going. Let's call it what it is. People are pussyfooting around this idea. People are being deported, wrongly, from the United States to an El Savador jail without due process. What's that? 'Trump is doing deals for resources with dictators. It absolutely is that and we have to call it that, and we have to act in the way that we should have done more quickly in the Thirties,' he said. In a wide-ranging discussion about comedy, Lee said people may be surprised to learn that the audience at his shows is not entirely made up of Guardian-reading liberals. 'They're not exactly who you think they are,' he said. 'There's a lot of people that would fit the Guardian reader stereotype, but when I go to Southend or Carlisle or Derby there simply aren't that many people like that living there. 'People come out[to his shows] that like comedy. They don't have to agree with you. The assumption is everyone goes to laugh at things they agree with, and while I am happy to provide crumbs of comfort towards an ideologically disenfranchised liberal middle class who've been made to leave Europe and whatever, I also like the fact that people come who don't agree with you but like the skill of the humour.'
Powys County Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Powys County Times
Machynlleth Comedy Festival returns as shows sell out
Preparations are underway for the 2025 Machynlleth Comedy festival as the annual event is set to return to the Powys town this weekend. Hundreds of comedians are set to descend on Machynlleth for a weekend of performances between Friday, May 2, and Sunday, May 4, performing in 'every conceivable venue across the town' according to the festival's co-founder. The lineup includes big names like Stewart Lee, Josh Widdicombe, Ed Byrne, Zoe Lyons, Mike Wozniak, Ivo Graham, Desiree Burch and Jamali Maddix, as well as dozens of underground and emerging performers on the comedy circuit. The 2024 festival saw up to 8,000 people visiting Machynlleth for the event, with similar figures expected this weekend for the fourteenth instalment of the festival as several shows have been completely sold out. Festival co-founder Henry Widdicombe said: 'When I look back at the initial vision for the Festival, what I'm most proud of is how the event is talked about by the artists who play it, the crew who work it, and the audience who attend it. 'Knowing the Festival could never grow beyond its current size we've always tried to keep it a special secret for those who love comedy. 'We don't take for granted that visitors have chosen to spend their May Day Bank Holiday weekend with us. 'Our talented crew will be working tirelessly to make the weekend the best of the year. Alongside this we continue to work on improving our access at the festival to ensure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to attend, and we are continuing to reduce our environmental impacts as an event and ask for your help in achieving that. 'In a time that is increasingly challenging for small to medium sized festivals we want to thank our supporters more than ever. Powys County Council's increased level of support for this year's event is a welcome boost, and with Keep It Light Media and Barti Rum continuing their support we're able to bring you the event for another year. 'I believe in the power of small events to bring people together, celebrate life, and provide a valuable reminder to us all to have fun. So let's have a banger.'
The Guardian
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stewart Lee Vs the Man-Wulf review - fur flies as the beast is unleashed
'Sick of comedy, sick of me, sick of my own thoughts.' That's where we find comedy's most esteemed curmudgeon at the start of his new show, Stewart Lee Vs the Man-Wulf: disillusioned at the failure of progressive standup in a world dominated by '$60m Netflix comedians of hate'. What does the current ascendancy of Messrs Chappelle, Gervais, Burr – and indeed Trump – tell us about our relationship to comedy, to cruelty, to freedom of speech? To explore just that, Lee presents this new show in three parts, and through three personae: his normal 'metropolitan liberal elite' self; an obnoxious shoot-from-the-hip alter ego; and some experimental combination of the two. It's as improbable a show as we've any right to expect of a man 35 years into his career. The opening of its second act, which finds Lee in full werewolf costume, screaming unintelligibly into a microphone to a rock backing track, makes one wonder if he's staging his own midlife crisis. But no: this is no longer Stewart Lee, it's the Man-Wulf, a red-in-tooth-and-claw standup hawking bigotry and 'suck my dick' in a bad Noo Yawk accent. Just as unlikely is the following sequence, when Lee, new identity now abandoned, treats us to the slapstick spectacle of a knackered man in an outsized wolf suit struggling to mount a swivel stool. Lee as Mr Bean? Lee as Joe Rogan? The surprising new guises just keep coming. In response to the question 'Where are all the tough good guys?', there follows a section workshopping what touchy-feely liberal standup might look like if performed with shock-jock machismo. Well, as much machismo as a 56-year-old can muster when stood on stage in just a T-shirt, a pair of pants and a teensy prosthetic willy. There's a lot going on, in short, at least after the interval – and the novelty of Lee throwing these ridiculous shapes is quite enough to carry us through to the show's more reflective coda. Which is just as well, because the joke, both of the faux-reactionary Man-Wulf and of his lefty counterpart, is fairly basic. There's more nuance, and more of the usual pleasure that comes with a Stewart Lee show – that twisty pleasure of working out what he's up to, and why – in act one, when normal Stew tees up his project with meta material about vampires, Gregg Wallace and an encounter with a model at an exhibition of the surrealist paintings of Ithell Colquhoun. That anecdote posits an inner bully lurking behind Lee's bien pensant veneer, a conceit he returns to in the show's musical finale. The route there is circuitous, and deviates via more audience abuse, even more commentary on this or that joke's failure to land, than usual. It wouldn't be Stewart Lee (and tonight it's not always meant to be) if they were neatly packaged – but the ideas are rich in this lurid new show, which interrogates the worst evils of our nature, the left's scepticism of charisma, and the vexed relationship between cruelty and comedy. At Oxford Playhouse until 8 February, then touring.
