I believe it was a frog who wrote, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting the American writer Elwyn Brooks White. You understand it better but Elwyn Brooks White dies in the process, ideally before completing Stuart Little.” I may have got this the wrong way round.

I am a multiple British comedy and Bafta award-winning “comedian”. Once my “comedy” routines were written, performed and then largely forgotten. Now they hang around the street corners of YouTube like homeless drunks, shouting and shorn of context, detached from the peculiarities of the times that shaped them, their relative merits debated enthusiastically by furious and illiterate racists from all over the globe. Isn’t technology amazing!

Whenever Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips hits the news, a routine I wrote about him on 25 April 2013 lurches back into involuntary digital circulation. Indeed, “Stewart Lee” is now the third most popular Google appendage to Paul Nuttalls, below “MEP” and above “wife”. (The “wife” search is presumably the result of patriotic women all over England, keen to be the broodmares for a better tomorrow, checking to see if Mr Nuttalls of the Ukips is available.)

The personable Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips seems eminently electable in post-fact, hate-fuelled Britain

Every time I think my Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips bit has been forgotten it returns to the public consciousness more powerful and frightening than before, like a horrible Frankingstein, a persistent faecal clod that keeps floating back up the U-bend, or Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips himself.

In 2008 I wrote a 45-minute routine on Top Gear, imagining the presenters’ Christmas drinks ending with Clarkson kicking a tramp to death, while Hammond and May fail to intervene, laughing and filming the attack on cameraphones.

Predictably, every time Clarkson was nasty, the Top Gear bit accumulated more hits, the routine oddly foreshadowing the assault which was to end his BBC career. Sometimes I wonder if I am some kind of God. Does my work reflect reality, or am I actually shaping it? Was my 2008 routine a sort of sigil that ultimately drove Clarkson’s steak-crazed fists into the face of his cheese-proffering servant?

And, in turn, was it the traffic my Paul Nuttalls routine generated over the past few years that actually raised his profile to the point where he was able to become leader of the Ukips? I wonder, typically as one of today’s self-lacerating liberals, was it I who baked this golem and sent it out to rampage around the ghetto?

Some routines take years to write. But the Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips routine shot out hot and fast, in one unbroken coil, like a good shit. I was running late on the morning of 25 April 2013 and so I drove my son to school, with the Today programme on the radio.

Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips came on and said something odd about Bulgarians, which seemed to me an attempt to portray his hostility to immigration as a genuine concern for the Bulgarians’ own welfare. I went home and transcribed the interview from the iPlayer and by midday the 10-minute bit, imagining the escalating absurd rhetoric of the Ukips’ opposition to Britain’s historic waves of immigration, was done.

In performance, I played up self-consciously to a stereotype of myself as a metropolitan liberal, angry that the lack of east European immigration would affect my ability to get cheap cups of coffee in central London. And I extended hostility to Huguenots and Anglo-Saxons and Neanderthal man to a general hatred of matter itself; to a longing for a better time where not only were there no immigrants, but there was actually nothing, just a vast void. A void in which there was no crime. Obviously.

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Because behind the practical critiques of immigration offered by the far right of today, there seems a more mysterious backstory, a kind of gaseous nostalgia for an imagined England that maybe never quite was, of warm beer, and old maiden aunts on bicycles, and the satisfying thwack of willow on a Gypsy’s brown face.

The routine now bobs beyond my reach on YouTube in a variety of different edits, some without the metaphysical coda, some with the removal of a burst of choice swearing, directed at an insolent prehistoric fish daring to come on to our land, which served crucially to leaven the polemic with ludicrous obscenity.

My showbiz friend Andreas Schmid, of krautrock legends Faust and Birmingham post-punks the Nightingales, even alerted me to a German standup whose verbatim translation of the routine had scored 10 times more YouTube hits than my own original, for which the young comic has since apologised.

Ukip leader Paul Nuttall is 'game changer' for Labour, says Frank Field Read more

The Ukips routine generated a flurry of oddly literal critiques, mistaking its intended effects for the writer’s unintended errors, their blank analysis funnier than anything one could contrive: “Lee is becoming so absurd,” offers a contributor to a website called Western Defence, “that one does have the impression the audience is laughing as much at him as with him. He adopts a (more) juvenile tone and begins singing a childish song, repeating himself all the time as usual. In an incredible display of immaturity for a 45-year-old man (perhaps befitting of the old children’s television programme Rainbow), Lee continues his song. We are now supposed to laugh at the fact that Lee is really not making any sense at all. His arguments have been fully taken to absurd extremes.”

I am glad the bit has a second life and I hope it cheers people up, and perhaps takes away their fear for a moment or two. Maybe it will even sell me some tickets! But I don’t know if I could write it today. Despite having been photographed hobnobbing with the EDL, claiming he wants to see the NHS dismantled, denying climate change, not supporting the ivory trade ban, and refusing to quite disavow the BNP supporters he accepts the Ukips may have assimilated, the personable Paul Nuttalls of the Ukips seems eminently electable in post-fact, hate-fuelled Britain, even with his inexplicable loathing of elephants.

It’s not inconceivable that, in a few years’ time, former Labour supporters might be tactically voting Conservative to keep Nuttalls’s far right out. Dancing around, singing childish songs, and swearing at imaginary fish as a response to the Ukips seems to belong to simpler times, when Paul Nuttalls’s avowed intent to ban comedians who did jokes about the Ukips from theatres seemed laughable. I don’t know where I’d start a half-hour set on the Ukips today. I feel depressed, defeated, and often more than a little afraid for the future. This frog is now dead.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is at Leicester Square theatre until 28 January and touring throughout 2017. See stewartlee.co.uk for details