My usual methods of decoding experience – art, literature and old punk rock records – have been rendered irrelevant by the sheer unscrupulousness of our public figures. We are in a post-Thick of It world, where the fictional PR attack dog Malcolm Tucker seems, compared with those schooled by Lynton Crosby OBE, dancing in Dionysiac reverie on the ruins of democracy in a downpour of dead cats, to have been charmingly hampered by principle.

But help is at hand. Pretty much all I have watched since Christmas 2014 is Italian westerns of the 60s and 70s. I have seen 108 now. And I started pursuing this monomaniacal psychological experiment long before Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook told us this week that we should all live “post-choice”, demonstrating his commitment to his aesthetic by displaying a wardrobe full of dozens of expensively identical shirts, all presumably tax deductable and purchased online via an account in Luxembourg.

I’ve pretty much given up on 21st-century films, which are all about either outer space or a man being sad. But the so-called spaghetti westerns espouse a bleak, fatalistic view of humanity where no one is motivated by anything other than naked self-interest and everyone has a price, and none of them feature Eddie Redmayne giving a heart-rending performance as someone with some kind of issue.

Cameron is like those sleazy guys who call your attention while pick-pocketing your wallet and grabbing your genitals

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that Gianfranco Parolini’s If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (1968), in which the eponymous anti-hero slaughters all who stand between him and a coffin full of stolen gold, tells us more about 21st-century business and politics than David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), even though I have seen neither.

Since Lynton Crosby OBE started showing off about his “dead cat” news management methods, we can now see dead cats coming a mile off, like smallpox-infected pigs catapulted over the walls of a besieged medieval citadel, and a political gaff one might once have forgiven as a thoughtless slip of the tongue, we now realise is in fact a cynically scripted media misdirection strategy.

In short, if Cameron said “bunch of migrants” by accident, he is a dick, but if he said it on purpose, in order to draw the eye, dead-cat-style, away from the Google atrocity, which he did, then he is a bastard, which is worse.

Increasingly, the once proud visionary dreamer of the “big society” is like those sleazy guys they warn you about on posters at railway stations, who call your attention to an imaginary problem while pick-pocketing your wallet and grabbing your genitals. David Cameron is the Cologne New Year’s Eve of British politics.

Contemplating my tax returns, in the light of George Osborne’s pitifully cautious pencil probe into the rectum of Google’s financial affairs, I struggle to make sense of my obligation to contribute vast swathes of my income to the maintenance of a society whose leaders seem to hold its citizens, its flora and fauna, and those stranded in limbo at its borders, in haughty contempt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

I have considered my options. Presumably, as a standup comedian, I am paid to generate laughter, which I do, almost nightly, in rooms all around the country, and simply putting the word “comedian” in inverted commas in your below-the-line comments about me will do nothing to alter that demonstrable fact.

If there were some way I could move the point at which the laughter I produce was released from, say, William Aston Hall, Wrexham, to Luxembourg, could I then say that the end point of the financial transaction I had entered into with my paying audience was in a region where UK tax did not apply?

The initial outlay of developing a system where the audience laughed into airtight, sound-proofed bags, which were then driven to Luxembourg in a van, and opened noisily but harmlessly on an Alpine meadow to the bewilderment of billy goats and trolls, would be costly, but in the end I would be able to avoid paying tax on the vast majority of my income.

It’s a system that Google’s creative accountants, Ernst & Young, could doubtless find a way of making legal, laughter being as invisible and slippery a commodity as the online transactions whose virtual existence they magically transport from one theoretical taxation zone to another, but would that make it moral, a distinction that seems to have been deliberately obscured this week? Perhaps the oracle of spaghetti westerns could tell me.

On a midnight train out of Brighton on Wednesday, I watched most of a 1971 film called Black Killer on my laptop. It’s an incoherent effort, but its low opinion of officialdom and its nihilistic worldview meant its barely competent director, Carlo Croccolo, reached across the decades directly into my current anxieties in a way that Star Wars: The Force Awakens did not.

Corbyn v Cameron at PMQs: was 'bunch of migrants' jibe intentional? Read more

Black Killer concerned a corrupt and unaccountable judge, who makes farmers sign over their lands and then has an outlaw band, the O’Haras, kill them. The O’Haras, despite having an Irish name, look totally Mexican. Perhaps they are a multinational outlaw band, advised by Ernst & Young to stash the judge’s blood money in an iron safe in Luxembourg via a complex network of carrier pigeons.

A lawyer, played by a misspelt Klaus Kinsky, arrives and spends the whole film arguing with the judge in an office, trying to get him on legal technicalities. I thought he was supposed to represent powerless justice, to 70s Italian audiences as familiar with Mafia corruption as we are with Google and Osborne today.

Meanwhile, contrasting the apparent impotence of proper procedure, an arrow-slinging Native American woman (Marina Malfatti), who keeps getting injured and having to undress to receive treatment, usually to her bottom, takes matters into her own hands, picking off the officially sanctioned O’Hara Gang plc one by one.

It is here that Croccolo’s clumsy fable parts company with our experience. There is no intermittently naked Native American woman to come to our aid against Google and Osborne and all the tax-dodging multinationals. There is only Eva Joly, vice-chair of the special European parliamentary committee on tax rulings, who has defied death threats in the past to investigate big business corruption. And who, one hopes, can dodge any of the dead cats David Cameron’s own hired thugs can throw at her. I don’t know what will happen. I fell asleep before the end of Black Killer, and woke up at 3am in Bedford, itself a vast filmic metaphor for the unknowable.

A Room With a Stew plays Bournemouth Pavilion on 4 February and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (Series 4) will be on BBC2 soon