Last Wednesday our chief Brexiter Boris Johnson dressed up in a Sikh costume to visit a Bristol gurdwara. There he told the alcohol-abstaining supplicants to take bottles of Johnnie Walker to Indian relatives to speed post-Brexit booze exports, leading one to comment that had he made that suggestion in India the foreign secretary would have been killed immediately. Another successful Boris Johnson PR exercise.

That said, I don’t think Boris Johnson was seeking to pique the Sikhs. Indeed, Boris Johnson’s own wife, Marina Wheeler QC, is half-Sikh, though it is not clear which half, so it is difficult to deduce anything from this. It might be just her leg and some bits of one of her arms. I don’t know. This notion is a minefield of potentially explosive cultural sensitivities, both gender- and faith-based.

Personally, I think the Sikhs’ reaction is a perfect example of that Political Correctness Gone Mad™ that they have now. In respect of his pernicious Brexit lies, it is not necessarily wrong that Boris Johnson should be punished indiscriminately by the full force of whatever belief systems are most unforgiving, but he shouldn’t be slain for saying “whisky” to a Sikh. No one should.

Nonetheless, an expensively educated hominid like Boris Johnson, doing the sensitive job he does, should have a subliminal awareness of cultural taboos. The Sikhs’ offence is Eton college’s failure. Perhaps fewer soggy biscuit competitions after lights out, and more comparative religion, headmaster!

Boris Johnson is right to identify with the Hulk, but not for the reasons he imagines

And gurdwara-gate definitely calls into question Boris Johnson’s fitness for the role of foreign secretary, a position he is unlikely to occupy after 8 June anyway, especially in the event of a Corbyn win.

But Boris Johnson’s biggest cultural cringe happened earlier in the week, in far away Newport, south Wales. The Conservatives consider Wales invisible to mainstream media, which is why they sent Boris Johnson there in the first place. But my friend the Welsh mystic Carlton B Morgan sent me the following email.

“Apparently, Boris Johnson came to Newport market yesterday. I had sadly just vacated the place having ate a vegan breakfast with Fakin’ Bacon, so there but for the space-time continuum goes a smart-alecky remark I could have made to the odious sap.”

“Anyway,” the vegan punk visionary continued, “this have I gleaned: BJ approached the Negative Zone comics stall and said to the comics man, ‘Oh! When I was a youngster I wanted to be the Incredible Hulk™. The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets!’ I thought you might like to know. Nos da.”

Sure enough, Wales Online was now reporting the story of Boris Johnson™’s disastrous visit to the Gwentish market. Apparently Boris Johnson™ declined to eat a suspected hash cake; said, “this is one of those cakes that you can both have and eat”, but then, illogically, did not eat the cake which he had; painted some concrete letters that spelled out his name, like a clever fat baby; placated a weeping Nigerian; was booed about the miners; and having told the Negative Zone man that his favourite character was the Incredible Hulk™, was met with the response, “You’re halfway there, if you don’t mind me saying, Boris”. Pow!

In less than a minute, I found four interviews, from 2009 to 2015, in which Boris Johnson™, each time citing the comic book quote “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets”, said he would like to be the Incredible Hulk™.

Perhaps quoting a comic book is one of those little tricks clever Boris Johnson uses to appear down with the normal people, irrespective of his actual feeling for the work itself, having long since made the concepts of truth and expediency indivisible in his own mind.

Johnny Marr told David Cameron he wasn’t allowed to listen to the Smiths; Bruce Springsteen disavowed Ronald Reagan’s absorption of Born in the USA; and 80s anarcho-punks Flux of Pink Indians were privately dismayed by the Countryside Alliance’s misappropriation of their album The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks to soundtrack its campaign against rural post office closures.

And likewise, Boris Johnson™ absolutely cannot have our Incredible Hulk™ – no way man! You’ve taken our future. At least leave us our comic books.

I emailed various comics creatives to solicit their opinions on Boris Johnson™’s desire to actually be the actual Incredible Hulk™, the most succinct coming from exiled Hulk artist Gary Frank.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

“I can’t help feeling that Boris Johnson™ slightly missed the point of it all,” wrote Frank, “in that Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner, doesn’t actually want to get angry, become stupid and then smash everything to fuck. Do you think Boris Johnson™ misread the Hulk comics as a sort of Tony Robbins self-help guide to fulfilling your potential?”

But dig a little deeper into the Hulk’s genesis, and it seems Boris Johnson is right to identify with the creature, but not for the reasons he imagines. The early American comic book superheroes were authored almost exclusively by liberal Jewish visionary autodidacts, and lean heavily on Hebrew mythology.

Hulk was created by Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber) and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) in 1962, and though influenced by Frankenstein and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the character is best understood through the 16th-century tale of the Golem of Prague, as indeed, is Boris Johnson™ himself.

Having made a man-monster from magic mud to protect his community, Rabbi Loew soon finds he, like Bruce Banner after he unleashes his inner Hulk, loses control of the creature, which heads off on a psychotic rampage, destroying everything, though stopping short of telling Sikhs to buy whisky.

Finally the golem is subdued and stuffed back into the attic, leaving the rabbi – like Theresa May or Donald Tusk, depending on your politics – to clear up the mess the deranged creature has made.

At the end of the second issue of The Incredible Hulk (July 1962), Bruce Banner wakes from the fever-dream of a night spent as the monster, dimly aware of his responsibility for the destruction around him. In torn rags, he says, “Tell me – quickly – what happened? I – I can’t remember – it’s like an ugly fading nightmare!”

Banner’s haunted face recalls nothing so much as the face of Boris Johnson, as he emerged the morning after the Brexit vote, in denial of the destruction that his own inner Hulk had wrought.

Boris Johnson was always the Hulk, all along. And he always was the golem. The ancient legend claimed him at birth, and it knew Boris Johnson better than Boris Johnson knew himself, as legends are wont to do. And now his attic awaits.

Stewart Lee is touring his new show, Content Provider, throughout 2017; see stewartlee.co.uk for details