Voters are looking for entertainers. Can Binface give them what they want?
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Stewart Lee is an award-winning comedian, writer, director and filmmaker. His new stand-up show, “Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf”, sees Lee morph from a handwringing liberal to a right-wing shock jock entertainer, in a playful confrontation with the comedy of hate and anger. The show is touring until the end of 2026.
Your new show examines comedy and cruelty. Is it a human impulse to find cruelty entertaining?
The comedian Simon Munnery, when he used to perform his delusional fascist dictator character known as “The League Against Tedium” in the 90s, had a joke about a woman finding him kicking a small dog in the street. She says to him, “Stop! Don’t you know all God’s creatures are capable of suffering?” To which he replies, “Yes. And hence of providing me with amusement.”
The key element of all clowning is man’s desire to remain upright, and retain their dignity. When they fail, that is what we find funny. On the positive side, there’s also a part of humour that is about redressing balance, destabilising powerful figures in ways that, yes, I suppose might also be described as cruel.
You transform in the show into the “Man-Wulf”, an American right-wing star comedian. How does it feel to channel that energy?
It is great. It’s fun to write in the beats and tonality of those kinds of comedians. It is also easy, as I only have to think about whether things are funny, not whether they are worth doing. My showbiz friend, the actor-manager Michael Sheen, noted that the American comedians he knew only talked about if ideas were funny, whereas British, Irish and Antipodean comics worry more about why things are funny and should things be funny.
From a performance point of view, being the wolf comedian has given me an experience that I expect actors understand. Namely, from the point where I don the costume, I don’t feel like the show is happening to me. It feels like this other person is in charge, and he has got it covered. I never trained as an actor but I feel like the character takes over, and I don’t care what happens. I’m off the hook. I’ve learned on the job how to puppeteer the costume, over 150+ shows so far. Sometimes it’s like an out-of-body experience, particularly when I am in a fur suit in this climate collapse heat.
You also become the shock jock’s mirror: the mega-popular liberal comedy star, who repeats the same line, “You know what I hate?” But instead of Democrats and trans people etc, you go for the bête-noires of the left. Your audience was booing along. Were you trying to provoke that?
Absolutely. And on some level it shows how demagogues, populists and comedians can manipulate the public. But to be fair on the audience, I think, on a good night, they are joining in in a slightly knowing pantomimey kind of way. Also, the world is so ruined right now, it serves as a catharsis. Trump can’t be removed, it seems, and the damage he is doing is unrelenting, but we can imagine him being sodomised by a werewolf with a micropenis.
You’re sending up comedians like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, who would say they were “contrarians”, not right-wing. What’s your response?
I think they need to take a long hard look at themselves. The world has changed from recent times when they could make the excuse that they were taking a position against a presumed liberal consensus. Both have done anti-trans material. Well done, lads! Trans people’s rights are being stripped away systematically in the States. And if you are LGBTQ+ in a Reform council like Essex, Worcestershire or Warwickshire, you will be worried about where the removal of LGBTQ+ materials from libraries, and the removal of assistance for Pride events, will end. A gay acquaintance in Essex told me she had raised this with a Reform councillor who told her not to worry, it was just directives from head office and not what he thought. I expect similar assurances were given to Jews in Germany in the 30s as they saw things start to get weird.
Gervais also has a stupid ad campaign for his vodka brand with a joke predicated on the assumption that London is unsafe. This is the same propaganda pushed by Elon Musk and JD Vance, which seems designed to destabilise and defund a successful multicultural city. Whether he knows it or not, Gervais is doing Trump’s work for him.
Figures on the populist and far right can often be absurd. Does it help to mock them?
Populist and far-right figures are ridiculous, but I think that means people see them as a fun alternative to straight politicians which then pushes borderline politicians like Boris into creating mad personas to compete with them, pushing politics into a death spiral.
The progressives’ problem is they tend to obey the rules about not lying, and therefore can’t be as amusingly outrageous as populists. Maybe Count Binface will change this, but we can’t underestimate the heavy guns that will be lined up against him.
You’re conscious of being branded as a north London intellectual. But you also describe using your shows as a Trojan horse to do art in places where people wouldn’t normally go and see it.
I love the fact that people who wouldn’t go to experimental theatre or music will go to stand-up. And I love the fact that I can get stuff from the avant-garde past them in that form. I benefitted hugely from a grant-funded university education, and from an ancient scholarship for “orphans, waifs and strays” to a minor public school, and I feel lucky to have been born at a time where it was viable to study and consume that kind of work without having to worry every day about money. But I think I am now paying back that debt by doing a Brechtian werewolf, which is also in an ancient ritual clown tradition, to the people of Crewe and Derby at the cheapest ticket price I am allowed to offer.
Finally, you’re a patron of Humanists UK. Do you believe that comedy can be a force for good?
Good comedy is innately humanist. It asks us to empathise on some level. I don’t know how much of a force for good it can be. Peter Cook always joked, when asked if his satirical club The Establishment could affect politics, that he hoped it was as effective as the lauded Weimar cabaret was against the rise of Nazism. I don’t know if comedy can make a real difference. But I do know, on the evidence of feedback from this tour, that it can make people who are very distressed and upset about the state of the world feel, momentarily, that little bit less alone.
