ABSTRACT
‘Culture attracts snobs’, opined The Daily Telegraph 's Guy Stagg in August 2011. ‘But the worst snobs are found in comedy … an entire room can collapse in laughter but a comedy snob will insist the joke wasn't funny.’ The principal cheerleader for comedy snobs, Stagg continued, is the stand-up Stewart Lee who combines a ‘mixture of cynicism, vanity and unbearable snobbery’ (Stagg, 2011). A number of other journalists were quick to agree (Milward, 2011; Moir, 2011). Indeed, Lee's ‘unbearable snobbery’ was most clearly evidenced, according to these commentators, by his mockery of Britain's most popular contemporary comedian: Michael McIntyre. Lifting a quote out-of-context from Lee's 2009 stand-up show If you Prefer a Milder Comedian Please Ask for One these journalists pounced on a skit where Lee describes McIntyre's comedy as akin to ‘spoonfeeding audiences warm diarrhoea’.
