Last Sunday, Le Pen was predicted a 92% landslide; Serge Gainsbourg’s zombie corpse, barely discernible from his living form, rose from the grave and endorsed the Front National; and, apparently, 10-hour queues meant it wasn’t worth busy French metropolitan liberals turning up to vote, as they would not then have time to drink absinthe in Saint-Denis, dance with Moulin Rouge showgirls and pursue their extramarital affairs before bed.

Google the word “France” in the hours up to the first round of the French election and you’d find fake news stories, skewed in support of the anti-EU far right, all over Twitter and Facebook. Writing in this newspaper in February, Carole Cadwalladr revealed how one-third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was generated by automated “bots” programmed to trend pro-Leave topics, a story that should have gained more ground except that, well, it wouldn’t, would it, obviously.

I parody the right’s expectations of liberal comedy, only to have them thrown back at me, free of their moorings

Sometime around the weekend of 1 April, the comedian Marcus Brigstocke blogged that members of his audiences “walked out every night” when he mocked Brexit. Within days, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, Breitbart, ShortList and Spiked all had fake stories suggesting Brexiter audiences also deserting en masse shows by me and a host of unnamed “far left London comedians”(Breitbart). “It’s nice of them to wait until the end and applaud while doing it,” my tour manager noted, drily. But by now, the fake news tsunami was blowin’ hard.

The male grooming freesheet ShortList was among many sources that decontextualised self-aware jokes I had made about my perceived liberal impotence in the face of Brexit, even going so far as to congratulate me for “substantial self-awareness”. Here and on stage, I parody the right’s expectations of liberal comedy, only to have them thrown back at me, free of their moorings, to confirm its ignorant assumptions. In Brexit Britain, we are post-fact, post-irony and post-nuance.

To its credit, the Daily Express changed its timid assertion that I was receiving “scornful glances” from audiences to my suggested correction: “Comedian Stewart Lee, in contrast, claims his career has only been strengthened by Brexit. He has been performing nationwide, with a set that includes 20 minutes of anti-Brexit material and describes Leave voters as ‘c***s’.” Like my twin heroes Eminem and Christ, “I am whatever you say I am!”

I emailed the first 25 standup comedians in my address book to ask them about any experiences of doing Brexit material, which is perhaps the sort of thing you could do if you were a journalist covering the story for a newspaper as part of your actual real job.

Thirteen responded immediately, all but one of whom work nationwide, and all had done Brexit material. The survey comprised, to my tremendous satisfaction, only three heterosexual white English men, alongside a female Irish immigrant, a female white English feminist pensioner, a Northern Irish Catholic heterosexual man, a Jewish American immigrant, a bisexual Englishman, a British Baha’i man, a British Muslim woman, a Canadian immigrant heterosexual man, a white Scottish male Buddhist and a British Hindu man who has nonetheless been vilified for looking like a Muslim in an internet meme.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

A majority of 10 of the standup comedians took specifically anti-Brexit positions. “I disagree that it’s career-ending. Comedians have coped with massive political changes before and there’s comfort in using your skills to meet new demands,” said the Irishwoman, philosophically. “I’ve yet to see a reaction to a Brexit joke even ruin a gig, let alone a career. I know there’s a huge change in the country’s attitudes but I still think there’s more non-cunts than cunts,” the Northern Irish Protestant man concluded, with characteristic regional ferocity.

“I had no idea my career was over if I did Brexit material. I thought things were going quite well. My experience is that audiences expect it,” reflected the Muslim woman. The Muslim-looking Hindu comedian, however, revealed that a fight had broken out in Leamington Spa during his anti-Brexit routine but, with shades of high-level Ukip meetings, it had been between two Leave voters who differed over whether he should have been allowed to make jokes about Brexit at all.

I looked at the Twitter identities that had driven the spread of the fake story. Was “Brexpats” a real thing or a lie platform generated by a pro-Brexit data company such as Cambridge Analytica, which currently features in an investigation into whether it gave undeclared free cyber assistance to Leave.EU? Was someone called “Luca Saucedo” really interested in the supposed failure of Brexit comedy, when the rest of his Twitter timeline concerned beachwear and phone wallets? Did “Luca Saucedo” even exist? Was he an anti-EU Kremlin bot, perhaps infected with some kind of sandal and swim trunk virus?

By the end of the fake news week, the anti-EU Daily Telegraph, as if to shore up its dubious story, ran a consolidating opinion piece by “Brexit comedian Simon Evans”. But Evans immediately admitted on Twitter: “The article as I wrote it is more about acknowledging nuance, perspective and not taking consensus in the room for granted. However, a lot of the nuance has, predictably, been stripped and I’m not entirely happy with how it reads… Just wanted to distance myself from ‘Brexit comedian’, which wasn’t the point to me at all.”

Bizarrely, the more moderate Twitter version of “Simon Evans” was now in conflict with the hard Brexit “Simon Evans” identity, created by the Telegraph through judicious subediting, misrepresentative headlines and manipulative picture captioning of irrelevant photo-montages.

I emailed what I assume is the real Simon Evans nearly three weeks ago now to ask him if he had been solicited by the Daily Telegraph, with the brief of substantiating its position, but he does not respond. Does “Simon Evans” even exist? Are he and sandal- and swimwear-loving Luca Saucedo different manifestations of the same algorithmically generated, Putin-backed, anti-EU mechanism, weaponising falsehoods to destabilise Europe and crush the saboteurs?

Or am I the fictional entity, braindead somewhere on life support, dreaming of nightly applause for my anti-Brexit witticisms as I pass 100,000 tour ticket sales, when in fact I made a failed suicide attempt weeks ago, sick of being booed off from Land’s End to John O’Groats, just as the papers said?

And who are you, reading this and choosing to retweet it? Are you real? Would you even know if you weren’t? Are you a program created to think like a person? Am I? Is this how it is now? For ever? Fake news all the way down.

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