Know Your Enemy

"There is no story here, no facts, no names, nothing. Perhaps Jan Moir knows this, and this is why she has appended this Boyle irrelevance to the end of it, and conjured a cabal of McIntyre-hating foul-mouthed left-wing comedians, without actually being able to name a single example of anyone who fits this bill.

And, prior to Frankie Boyle’s joke about Jordan’s son, the last time the public spontaneously moved against someone on the grounds of taste and decency, it was against Jan Moir herself. To paraphrase her own comments on Boyle: ‘You might think there would not be a rock in the country big enough for (Jan Moir) to crawl under and disappear for ever.’ Moir’s piece is diarrhoea. And it’s not even warm."

Stewart Lee responds to accusations that he hates Michael McIntyre by admitting that actually it's Jan Moir and the Daily Heil he hates.

If you wanted to play devil's advocate, you could perhaps pick up on Lee's defence that his on-stage attack on McIntyre in 2009's If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One was uttered by a caricatured version of himself for comic effect. Couldn't it equally be argued that his frequent targets of scorn Frankie Boyle and Jeremy Clarkson are also performers, essentially projecting caricatured versions of themselves? Indeed, Lee has himself referred to Clarkson as expressing "views he pretends to have for money".

Nevertheless, the point about the diarrhoea comment being taken horribly out of context by Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs (or at least one of the show's researchers) rings true, and Moir's article is patently absolute foaming-mouth gibberish, a lame attempt to defend nice, safe, Mondeo Man's stand-up of choice while having a spurious pop at two of the Mail's chief hate figures, Lee and Boyle. Lee has been quite explicit in his response to McIntyre and his phenomenal success - as he says in this Chortle article, he genuinely feels it has benefited stand-up comedy in general (by generating public interest) and him in particular (by giving him something to define his own form of stand-up against).

Hopefully the idea of performing McIntyre's routines wholesale won't be scotched by the affair - that would be a fascinating experiment...

(Thanks to Simon for the link.)