I am a standup comedian, and simply putting the words “standup comedian” in inverted commas in your below-the-line comments on this column will do nothing to change that, you Brexit-crazed cyberbots of billionaire Trump-backer Robert Mercer’s referendum-shaping Cambridge Analytica company. Sad!

Last week, in Truro, as part of the endless tour I use these columns to promote, I performed my “comedy” act at the “Hall” for Cornwall. Last “year”, at the same “venue”, a charitable “local” man, mistaking my trademark fabricated frustration for actual despair, came on “stage” for 20 “minutes” to help me get the “evening” back on track by telling amusing stories about his “cat”.

It was the kindest, and most prolonged, heckle any “comedian” has ever experienced. But, as usual, my consummate skill in weaving it seamlessly into the show made the Cornish people present assume the invader was a paid stooge, carted around the country for Equity minimum and free crisps.

It could be worse. Tommy Cooper’s faux-incompetence was so convincing that his audience rapturously applauded his own on-stage ITV death in 1984. Warren Beatty needs to realise that worse things have happened on live television, though admittedly without the racially awkward subtext. Tommy Cooper’s death did not compound the marginalisation of African Americans.

A line that receives a round of applause in Brighton might the next night, in Lincoln, see me glassed in the face

Truro’s Hall for Cornwall, where I performed, is about to undergo a £17m refurbishment, partially funded by the European Regional Development Fund, fortuitously finalised before Cornwall voted Leave. It seems that showering someone with gifts and money can make them resent you. Who knew?

I could have told the EU their gauche attempts to woo Cornwall would fail. My packed bottom drawer, full of haughtily returned boxes of Ferrero Rocher, Ann Summers gift vouchers and Katie Price™ Kissable Eau De Parfum, bears mute witness to my own inability to understand that affection cannot simply be bought. What do women want? Ah, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor running over the fields in their Hai Karate aftershave.

And anyway, the county of Cornwall elected to leave Europe in part due to a misunderstanding about the political loyalties of fish. Fish will soon swim away, or choke to death on microbeads, whether Nigel Farage gets knighted or not, as he has no power over the reproductive cycles of cod. Or women, other than his own pan-European concubines. Yet.

Last spring, Cornish Leavers were reassured that their annual £60m European funding would be met after Brexit. Last week they learned it wouldn’t be, obviously, another unravelling assurance. “Whatever your views on the referendum, we are about to go off a cliff,” said Cornwall-dwelling Labour councillor Tim Dwelly, whose experience of rhyming schoolyard taunts propelled him into the Labour party as a form of revenge.

Looking on the bright side, there are worse cliffs to “go off” than Tim Dwelly’s Cornish ones, which are among the most beautiful in Britain. I might buy one, and own a second cliff alongside my main London cliff, as a seasonal holiday cliff.

And the metaphorical cliff that European nationals, who have settled here decades ago and raised culturally British children, are to be hurled off by Theresa May makes Cornwall’s self-inflicted imminent lack of rural broadband and transport infrastructure look less deserving of sympathy.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

Perhaps the unelected Lords will stop the unelected prime minister making political sacrifices of the delightful east Europeans who prop up our health and hospitality industries. But, hating both the lower and the upper houses, I feel like Fay Wray, hysterical atop Skull Island in King Kong, hoping the chest-beating monster-ape Heseltine will save us from the carnivorous pteranodon May, the lesser of two evils.

As a fully paid-up member of the Metropolitan Liberal Elite™, I am torn between anger at my beloved Cornwall’s Leave vote and a deep and enduring affection for the mythologically and archaeologically rich county that will endure irrespective of its Boris-bewitched people’s Brexit crime.

Indeed, I have just written an introduction to a new edition of the surrealist Ithell Colquhoun’s 1957 psychogeographical study of the region, The Living Stones, priced at £9.99 from Peter Owen Publishers. Cornwall needs to understand its principal function is as a profitable dreamscape for incoming artists and writers, and not as an economically viable region serving the needs of its indigenous folk.

I thought it would be educational to be on tour in pre-Brexit Britain, testing the waters of different towns by opening with a quarter of an hour of EU referendum-themed zingers. I realised that, as 52% of the country have voted broadly against the sort of liberal position I predictably espouse, this time around I would have to write jokes that were funny in of themselves, rather than being just mildly amusing statements carried because the sycophantic audience unquestioningly agreed with them. This was a whole new area for me, and I relished the challenge.

How could I write a one size fits all touring, two-hour, standup show that would play to all of divided pre-Brexit Britain? A line that, on Tuesday night, might receive a round of applause in Remain-voting Brighton, Harrogate or Glasgow might the next night, in Lincoln, see me glassed in the face by a man with a full transcript of Amber Rudd’s last Tory party conference speech tattooed along the full length of his erect racist penis.

I initially played the show for four months to the metropolitan liberal elite of Remain-voting London, who lapped up my Brexit bit greedily, as if it were a newly spiralised courgette.

Then I went out into the wilderness of Brexit Britain, where the Remain-voting towns loom out of the darkness like fantasy citadels in a Tolkienesque landscape, wondrous walled cities full of wizards and poets, and people who could understand data, in the middle of a vast bubbling swamp with “Here there be trolls” written over it in curly pirate script.

I am writing this now, at 2am, having come offstage earlier tonight in Poole, the most Brexit-y town I have played so far. People laughed along. They bought books afterwards. Some audience members told me the friends they had brought with them had left annoyed, like it was a badge of honour.

I felt torn between not wanting to entertain any stray Leave voters and understanding that, like me on one of our rare nights out, they might be just parents who had booked a babysitter and hoped for the best, and deserved it. I made my colours clear. Nobody died. I don’t know. Ask me in two years.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is now touring; see stewartlee.co.uk for details