Don’t expect to see top British stand-up comedian Stewart Lee performing in the United States anytime soon, because of his fear that his past gags could be used against him amid the Trump White House’s targeting of dissenters.
“I wouldn’t work in the States at the moment,” Lee told Channel 4 News’ Krishnan Guru-Murthy in a lengthy interview released this week.
“I’d worry about them going them through my jokes and ending up spending two days locked up without my heart medication,” he said, adding: “I just worry about it.”
The admission came after Lee revealed he’d recently turned down an offer to perform his new show, titled “Stewart Lee Vs. The Man-Wulf,” for a week at a venue in Chicago.
“It’s not something I’d normally do anyway,” he acknowledged, before lightheartedly quipping: “At the moment, I’d have to take a huge set of American cityscape and two full-sized werewolf costumes. I’d have to get those through American customs at the moment…”
Guru-Murthy had earlier asked Lee if he really believed his recent characterization of what’s happening in America right now under Trump as fascism.
“Oh yeah, I call it what is it. Absolutely,” Lee replied. “People are pussy-footing around this idea. People are being deported wrongly from the States to an El Salvador jail without due process. What’s that?”
“Trump is doing deals for resources with dictators,” he added. “It absolutely is that, and we have to call it that, and we have to act in the way that we should have done more quickly in the ’30s.”
Watch the full interview here:
Last month, award-winning Australian comedian Alice Fraser told HuffPost she’d canceled an upcoming trip to New York, during which she’d hoped to boost her new book, partly because she feared she may be targeted by officials over her jokes about Trump.