It would be convenient for me, as the author of a critical piece about the comedian Stewart Lee, to say that he isn’t funny. It would be convenient for Stewart Lee, as the subject of a piece in The Critic, to be described as being unfunny. Unfortunately for both of us, Stewart Lee is very funny — one of the few great stand-up comedians of our time.

One of his funnier qualities has been his disdain for many of his peers. His unfavourable comparison of Ben Elton to Osama bin Laden, a man who “has at least lived his life according to a consistent set of ethical principles”, is a classic. His contempt for the work of Russell Howard — “observational comedy from a Victorian mental hospital” — is glorious. (Tangentially, I was once with friends in a library when I heard someone say the name “Russell Howard” and launched into a rant about what I took to be his comedic vices. Unfortunately, it turned out that they had said, “Look, it’s Russell Howard.” I felt pretty bad about this when he was just trying to find a book. Sorry, Russell.)

Another of Lee’s targets is “anti-woke” comedy. Frankly, he makes some good points. A lot of “anti-woke” comedy, as I’ve written before, is absolute trash — revelling in its supposed provocative status without being funny. Jerry Seinfeld complained about “P.C. crap” in comedy this year while writing and starring in Unfrosted — a film that was about as funny as footage from 9/11.

But Lee goes too far. He’s right that some comedians who complain about political correctness “are filling stadiums, winning Grammys, and getting $60m off Netflix”. But that wouldn’t be the case if people on his side of the political aisle had succeeded in having them censored. Dave Chappelle might not have been “cancelled” for his jokes about transgenderism but Netflix employees certainly tried. If I’m convicted of attempted murder, I can’t say, “But he’s alive, isn’t he?” (Other cancellations have been more effective, such as the long exile of Graham Linehan.)

“If [Jerry Seinfeld]’s not able to think a little bit around whatever he imagines are these current restrictions are[sic],” Lee tells Prospect, “then he’s not a very good comedian. It’s pathetic and ungrateful and unimaginative.” Some might recall the time when Lee faced protests against Jerry Springer: The Opera, a musical he co-wrote that some Christians considered blasphemous. I remember Mr Lee complaining, and rightly so, about these protests, and I doubt that he looks back and thinks he was being “pathetic and ungrateful and unimaginative” and should have thought a little bit around the protestors’ “restrictions”. If the difference is that he agrees with “these current restrictions”, he should say so. 

But Lee has had a long record of being unsympathetic to satirists who have faced censoriousness if they happen to disagree with him politically. When he was facing protests against Jerry Springer: The Opera, he rankled at comparisons between himself and the cartoonists who were facing death threats for drawing Muhammad. The comparisons were flawed, yes, but Lee was not objecting for the obvious reason that he, unlike Lars Vilks and Kurt Westergaard, was not facing serious threats against his life. He wrote:

In my new capacity as sin-eater for the religious guilt of the entire world, I fulfil a lifetime’s ambition by appearing on the Today programme, with a member of the Muslim Council to discuss the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy. Everyone’s anxious to draw parallels with the opera’s persecution by the Christian right, but the Danish cartoonists wandered into a world of protected religious symbols they didn’t understand. We have used a set of icons whose implications we appreciate, within a tradition of Christian imagery.

This read an awful lot like Lee was saying that because Muslims have more of a theological basis for being sensitive about their religious iconography, if some of them respond with violent censoriousness to offence, it’s the fault of the people who have caused offence. They should have known that people would try to murder them. 

More generously, Lee might have been trying to rationalise his sense that Muslims have been excluded enough without comedians making fun of them and their religion. That’s debatable — but what’s not debatable is that people who have made fun of Islam are a more excluded group, because they have a lot of people trying to exclude them from the realms of the living. I’m sure it was annoying for Lee to have his shows cancelled but it wasn’t as dramatic as Kurt Westergaard hiding with his granddaughter in a panic room while an axe-wielding maniac tried to kill them, still less the staff of Charlie Hebdo being shot to death. 

I suspect that Lee just hates the idea of giving the Daily Mail an inch. That’s fine. I don’t much like agreeing with the Guardian. But he doesn’t have to complain about censorship himself to stop ridiculing people that do. Recently, the Muslim MP Tahir Ali called for a new blasphemy law. If blasphemy laws were being upheld in 2003, when Jerry Springer: The Opera was released, Lee might have been prosecuted himself. Then the comedian famed for long, slow sentences might have been serving a long, slow sentence.