I’m not saying I’m the best, there’s loads of stand-ups better than me, I mean, there’s – there’s Daniel Kitson.* There’s loads.

* This joke, which follows the structure of the ‘all the different types of cheese – Red Leicester’ joke from Comedy Vehicle, is for comedians and comedy fans, for whom the consensus, certainly for the most part of this century, was that Daniel Kitson was unassailably the best stand-up in the world, but that he had chosen to remain invisible to mainstream media. When members of the public, like cab drivers, who don’t believe I am a comedian anyway because they haven’t heard of me, ask me who my favourite stand-up is, and I say, ‘Daniel Kitson,’ they become angry and defensive because they haven’t heard of him, especially if you then tell them he can crash the National Theatre ticketing website the second he announces a run of shows there. People seem to take their comedy very personally, as if you are insulting them by liking something they don’t know about.

Stewart Lee, March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019