If you’re American, you likely have never heard of Stewart Lee. I hadn’t either until I ran into a quote about Dan Brown from him on the internet. The quote piqued my interest, especially so as the quote was derogatory, and I had to find its origin. Enter Mr. Lee. Stewart Lee is an English comedian with a long comedy history, a history which I will not reiterate here but instead send you to his Wikipedia entry, and was recently given his own six-run series called Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on BBC2. The show is shot mainly in the stand-up format, with short sketches illustrating the comedy inserted when appropriate.

My search for the Dan Brown quote lead me, in particular, to the first installment of Lee’s new show. This episode is about the sad state of the modern publishing industry, where awful writers like Dan Brown become megastars, celebrities publish books just because they can, the tragic memoir is king, and adults fawn all over children’s books like Harry Potter. Now throughout the episode Lee, I admit, often comes off as a cranky old man screaming for the kids to get off his lawn. And some of his bits do seem meandering for this American viewer (particularly the “rapper” bit). But the crux of his argument (and it is more of an argument than just pure comedy) is something I myself lament; where have all the good books gone?

Sure, it can be argued that people can read whatever they like to read and that’s fine. But people can only read what is given to them, and what is given to them is crap. People are given crap because it’s not challenging to read crap, people do not wish to be challenged, and the publishers are just giving the people what they want. Fine. But being motivated solely by money, which seems to be the philosophy of the modern publishing giant, is not sustainable over time. The record industry is on its way out, yielding (though kicking and screaming while doing so) to a more populist way of doing business, and if you look to our current banking crisis in which quantity over quality was the norm, you can see that doing business only to get rich creates a bubble; all bubbles eventually pop.

Lee says near the end of his act in the first episode that “a man who read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who read nothing,” and I’m inclined to think that’s true. Isn’t much of this drivel published akin to fast food? Made for mass consumption, cheap and easy, but ultimately not healthy. Fast food will rot your body, bad books will rot your brain. Maybe this comparison is going too far. Maybe you could argue that people should be allowed to do whatever they want, that we shouldn’t care about what they do or how they do it. But I tend to believe that through mass media, through advertising, people are convinced to like certain things, a way of dumbing down a population, because people who are susceptible to advertising are very easy to sell anything to. So, sure, people can read Dan Brown because they saw an ad for him on television, or he’s displayed prominently at CostCo or the airport. But there’s something subversive below it all; the desire to sell you another Dan Brown book. Because if you digested the first one without question, that next BigMac will go down even easier. Keep eating.

For your pleasure, through the technology of YouTube, I’ve included this first episode (in three parts) of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Again, I caution, some of his humor and references may be lost on the American viewer (I laughed only a few times and I’ve actually lived in England). But I think he’s saying something that isn’t often said on the public stage and for that I think it’s important that people hear him out. What do you think?