Wake up grandad and put your opinions in the pedal bin! If you even think you are well informed you are living a lie. What the world believes today depends on who is controlling legacy media’s last feeble news fronts, like the head-bobbing slaphead Jeff Bezos’s supine Washington Post, and on who programs digital social media sluices, such as Ketamine Ken’s Twitter, currently X, essentially an ape with a megaphone standing in a crowded marketplace shouting unsubstantiated rumours at babies, and showing pornographic photographs to children.
But was it ever thus? Did it just take the unalloyed unpleasantness of Elon Musk to make us see ourselves as we always were, toilet paper people fluttering on the whims of wealthy men’s media outlets, 8 billion dogshit golems, Frankingsteins made of farts?
A radio phone-in about social media on Monday made me understand, with sudden clarity, that horrible hysterical stories drive engagement more than thoughtful true ones. Sorry it took me so long. And so digital media surges right towards the money and JD Vance calls it freedom of speech, as if a barely sentient tapeworm reaching towards a clump of rotten offal was acting with some kind of moral imperative.
A black-cab driver tells a passenger imprisoned in their back seat that Keir Starmer defended the Southport killer’s father; your sister-in-law casually announces that most benefits are claimed fraudulently; and JD Vance informs Europe that it’s illegal to pray in your own home in Scotland. The world thinks what rich men want it to and the truth is a touring lineup of Lynyrd Skynyrd with no original members that you’re still listening to in the hope its version of Free Bird will kick ass.
So what is the point of writing supposedly funny columns about current affairs for a broadsheet newspaper like the Observer? An adjudicated sex abuser is in the American White House, Boris Johnson is in a moated manor house, and I’m supposed to poke fun at them from a three-bedroom terrace house. Liberal media has failed and it doesn’t have the funds to fight back.
I’ve been writing these columns for 14 years now, and fascism and sea levels are still on the rise despite me doing some really good jokes about both of them. I am comedy’s Cnut. Why feed myself through the news mincer when I’m still going to be looking at a world full of damp Hitlers when I die on the end of a Russian bayonet?
Sometimes these screeds take me a few hours, slipping out like baby giraffes, wobbly and slimy but standing. And sometimes they take me dead-eyed haemorrhoidal days on end to finish, baking in the back passage of my brain like something malevolent that gestates in Donald Trump’s colon after a week of KFC family bucket meals.
Over the years I have come to love negotiating acceptable levels of profanity with the patient section editors, and trying to bury odd ideas in the prose to see what the brilliant artist David Foldvari will do with them. On balance, I’ve spent 7,000 hours writing 400,000 words of remunerated sarcasm. It’s the longest piece of continuous employment I’ve ever had and is my last line of defence when people say, correctly, that I have never done a decent day’s work in my life.
I don’t think I did this job especially well for the first 150,000 words. Was there any real value in anything I wrote in those pre-Brexit days of comparative political equilibrium? How many trees died just because I found politicians like David “Dave” Cameron and George “Pencils” Osborne merely inchoately reprehensible, instead of utterly contemptible, in those simpler sillier times? And then, as Dave said, “doo, doo, doo, doo … Right.” And it was never the same again.
Brexit was the making of these spews. It sharpened them because it exposed an interconnected web of corruption worming through Westminster, and made me appreciate the privilege of having a platform to piss on people from. But how many forests fell fruitlessly, five years ago, when I finally revealed the full secret cabbalistic name of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson? I had my own viral moment in miniature. But was it worth it?
And yet, as I wandered the streets in lockdown, ordinary Observer readers and their dogs regularly stood at reasonable distances and told me these columns made them feel less alone, and for a moment I understood how Christ felt when all those lepers told him he was a really great bloke. I doubt anything like that ever happens to Giles Coren. Or to Jesus, to be honest, who was probably sick to the back teeth of all those selfish lepers.
But here’s the rub. I appreciate that, as someone who is too tight to advertise his tours, and who has not been invited on to The Graham Norton Show, the market penetration achieved by online circulation of a popular Observer column probably sells me more than a few standup comedy seats. Maybe I need this. That said, twice as many people come to see me live as read the Observer, though this can be explained by lots of angry middle-aged men bringing their bored wives with them.
But since Elon Musk showed social media how to downgrade the visibility of liberal comment and monetise the outraged engagement caused by right-skewed clickbait, I have watched my online views wither. Social media is engineered to suppress the material you are reading now. If you have been directed to this column online somehow, then somewhere there’s a rightwing billionaire that needs to rejig his algorithms.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf all year with a Royal Festival Hall run in July
