Stewart Lee > Quotes

“What's happened is somewhere, along the line, as a society, we confused the notion of 'home' with the possibility of 'an investment opportunity'. What kind of creature wants to live in an 'investment opportunity'? Only man.

The fox has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat, has, uh... his stoat-hole... but only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity. Mmm, snuggled down in the lovely credit! All warm, in the mortgage payment, mmmmm...”
― Stewart Lee

“The kind of people that say “political correctness gone mad” are usually using that phrase as a kind of cover action to attack minorities or people that they disagree with. [...] And I’m sick, I’m really sick– 84% of you in this room that have agreed with this phrase, you’re like those people who turn around and go, “you know who the most oppressed minorities in Britain are? White, middle-class men.” You’re a bunch of idiots.”
― Stewart Lee

“I’m just confusing the thrill of being young with the notion that the era in which I was young was in any way especially creative or remarkable.”
― Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

“When I was fourteen, I had a massive poster on my wall of a giant pop-art mouth advertising a Swiss exhibition of abstract art. My friends and family mocked my pretention, but I loved that poster and the hope it offered of an exciting world of thought beyond the boundaries of stifling Solihull. But one day the poster fell off the wall and the dog pissed all over it, ruining it for ever, while my mother laughed. That poster is what the Alternative Comedy dream meant to me - the possibility of a better world. And now it is covered in dog's piss.”
― Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

“In the Vatican square, they were selling lollipops. You could buy lollipops about that big with the face of Pope John Paul II on them. You could buy a Pope John Paul II's face lollipop. I bought about ten.

And I just thought... In the light of his death a few months later, I wondered whether sales of those lollipops went up or whether they went down. Did good Catholics think, 'Ah, the Pope's just died. It would now seem inappropriate... to lick a sugar effigy of his face.'

Or did they go, 'Ah, the Pope's just died. But what better way... ...to commemorate his life than by licking a sugar effigy of his face?”
― Stewart Lee

“Most Americans do not own passports. They’re not a naturally curious people. If you were to lock an American for sixty years in an empty underground bunker which contained nothing but a woolly tea cosy, the American would not even be curious enough to be tempted to see if the tea cosy would make a serviceable hat. They’re far more likely to arrest the tea cosy, intern it illegally in Guantanamo Bay, and then repeatedly anally rape it until such time that it admits that it was actually a member of an al-Qaeda training cell. Even though at the time of the alleged offence the tea cosy was actually working as a shop assistant in a branch of Currys in Wolverhampton.”
― Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

“If you are a young comic reading  this and are worried that you have sold out, or may sell out at some point, DO IT! KILL YOURSELF NOW!”
― Stewart Lee, Stewart Lee!: The 'If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One' EP

“The world of publishing is in crisis. It's no coincidence that the worst published writer in the world today is also one of the world's most successful writers... Dan Brown. Now Dan Brown is not a good writer, The Da Vinci Code is not literature. Dan Brown writes sentences like "The famous man looked at the red cup." ...and it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to break bad news. "Doctor is he going to be alright?" "The seventy five year old man died a painful death on the large green table... it was sad".”
― Stewart Lee

“Did you slip in some cheese? Did it make you hate cheese, which you had previously loved? Why not sue a cheese-maker? Sue him for all the cheese he's got, drive him out of the cheese-making business!

Did you burn your face with an iron? Why not sue Prometheus, the god that invented fire? Or an Iron Age chieftain, for having the temerity to popularise the metal.”
― Stewart Lee

“My grandad always said, "You should never judge a book by its cover." And it's for that reason that he lost his job as chair of the British Book Cover Awards panel.”
― Stewart Lee

“Within a few years these "jokes" as we comedians call them, will have been entirely purged from my work in favour, exclusively, of grinding repetition, embarrassing silence and passive-aggressive monotony.”
― Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

“I am sick of reading on Daily Mail message boards that I am 'one of these foul-mouthed modern comedians' when I am absolutely not. Honestly, who are these cunts?”
― Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

“Ironically, I am reliably informed that Michael McIntyre doesn't actually have a "man drawer", and invented the concept in order to ridicule ordinary people, for whom he has nothing but haughty contempt.”
― Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

“I just think it's fortunate that Sir Isaac Newton didn't share the sense of humor of a member of the public, because had he done so, he would of been so amused by the simple effects of gravity, that he would of never gotten round making a comprehensive study of it's causes.
That's the punchline! 'a comprehensive study of it's courses'! I worked for that! Will you be telling this joke at work? I don't think so!

And yes, I am aware that I say this to you while hanging precariously of this art-deco balcony. And I do so deliberately in the hope that I will fall to my death, and that you will learn about the thin line between slap-stick and tragedy.”
― Stewart Lee

“Writing this now, God, how I miss the cultural side of the eighties - the rhetoric, the raggedy clothes, the politics, gigs you were frightened to go into, Radio 1 when it had weird bits, Channel 4 when it was radical, the NME when it had writers, and the thrill of discovering underground music and new comedy for yourself.”
― Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

“On a good night, people would call out to tell me that FKA Twigs was a woman, and then I would accuse them of gender fascism and say they were worse than Hitler. But it didn't always happen, and it didn't happen here. That is the beauty of live performance: great moments are lost for ever, as they should be.”
― Stewart Lee, March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019

“I am a professional humorist, and objectively the third most critically acclaimed British stand-up comedian of the twenty-first century. If I write a stupid thing, on some level I invite you to assume it was deliberate, and that I have, to some extent, created a secondary "columnist" persona, in which I take on the role of the sort of person who would write the absurd things that I am writing, such as this sentence for example.”
― Stewart Lee, Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016

“Defining offence is so complicated. That's why it was thoughtful of the Telegraph to publish an actual graph of the angle of Corbyn's bow. The existence of a literal calibration of offence relieves us of the obligation of understanding complicating factors like context, intent or the agenda of the observer. Corbyn's bow was undeniably offensive because it fell outside the mathematical parameters of inoffensive bowing.”
― Stewart Lee, Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016

“There is an African fly that lays its eggs in the jelly of children's eyes, the hatching larvae blinding them by feeding on the eye itself. But the fly has no quarrel with the child. It is merely following its nature.
Likewise, Boris Johnson, a vile grub laying his horrible eggs in the soft jelly of the EU debate, has no agenda beyond his own advancement. He believes in nothing, and neither does his spiritual soulmate, the eye-scoffing African fly.”
― Stewart Lee, March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019

“I don't think stand-up should really work on the page, so the very existence of this book is an indication of my ultimate failure as a comedian. The text of a stand-up set should be so dependent on performance and tone that it can't really work on the page, otherwise it's just funny writing.”
― Stewart Lee, How I Escaped My Certain Fate

“It is understood that, for next year's remembrance ceremony, the prime minister's tear ducts are to be surgically altered so that he can cry French benedictine on demand, lick it off his own face, and then transubstantiate it in his bladder, to wee out the holy tears of the fallen.”
― Stewart Lee, Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016

“All the proper bands from then, when we were kids, yeah? The Rubettes and Mud and Chicory Tip. Yeah. Not like the bands they have now, stupid, modern bands all made out of wire and electricity.

The proper old bands. You'd buy the singles, wouldn't you? The old singles they used to have in the old days. The proper ones. Very nostalgic feelings towards Woolworths. The pick 'n' mix. Remember the pick 'n' mix in Woolworths? All the sweets individually wrapped. Proper, old-fashioned sweets, yeah? Not like the sweets they have now, all with knives in them and AIDS.”
― Stewart Lee

“In short, if Cameron said “bunch of migrants” by accident, he is a dick, but if he said it on purpose, in order to draw the eye, dead-cat-style, away from the Google atrocity, which he did, then he is a bastard, which is worse.”
― Stewart Lee

“Y'know, audiences like you ... You as good as murdered Robin Williams”
― Stewart Lee

“Reading comments below YouTube clips of my stand-up in the late noughties encouraged me to make the act even more like the sort of act the people who hated it would hate;”
― Stewart Lee, Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016

“I have explained to my children that though this act is not legal, it is nonetheless moral, in a neat reversal of Starbucks' historical tax avoidance, which though legal, was not moral. Teaching children to steal from Starbucks is a way of making ethics fun for kids and bringing philosophy alive.”
― Stewart Lee, Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016

“Now was the moment and the moment was now. For in perhaps as little as twenty weeks' time, ill-informed voters, stuffed with incoherent arguments, like hissing geese force-fed nostalgia and hate to produce an idelible pâté of groundless opinion, would be asked to decide nothing less than what sort of country we want to live in and bequeath to those who come after us.”
― Stewart Lee, Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016

“And since January I have been wearing four or five new pairs of pants a day, all of which will eventually take pride of place, when suitably soiled, in vending machines on the streets of Tokyo's most fashionable districts.
My wife, of course, finds this turn of events ridiculous, but she will be laughing on the other side of her stupid face when the flyblown briefs she currently uses as dishcloths become priceless collector's items.”
― Stewart Lee, March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019

“I will never tire of touring. Television feels like throwing shit at a wall and hoping some of it will stick. But working live, even at this late stage in my career, I feel like you are making new fans one by one in the most unlikely places and sometimes giving people new experiences they would never have imagined they would enjoy.”
― Stewart Lee, March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019