Stewart Lee is somewhat fretfully tidying his kitchen. Nothing is exactly where he left it two months ago to go on tour. Plus, he says, “I’ve come back with a load of records that need to be alphabetised, and that’s really stressing me out.” His house is miles from minimalist – posters everywhere, for spaghetti westerns, avant-garde Welsh harpists, the Fall (who he said in an interview in 2005 were the love of his life ) – but if anything was an inch out of place, he’d notice. He puts things away with theatrical flourish, like a guy doing an impression of a guy who needs things just-so, for the comic effect of how absolutely impossible that guy would be, but at the same time, it’s funny because it’s true.
In the show he’s been away for, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, he – a 58-year-old lefty – enters into breakneck dialectic with toxic masculinity in werewolf form (age unknown). “Things have got worse in the 18 months I’ve been doing it,” he says. “I need to really amp the werewolf up. He would be much more explicitly racist and homophobic and transphobic now. But you don’t want people to be really upset in the room.” It feels quite a 2026 dilemma, being unable to even satirise the right without causing the distress it lives for.
Then he went with his girlfriend to a treehouse in Scotland he found on Airbnb, but was surprised to find it was an “actual treehouse – to get out of it, you went down a slide”. He gestures vaguely at himself, as if to ask, “Can you imagine me going down a slide?”, although the answer – looking at his skater-boy aesthetic, record‑label T-shirt, shorts – is, in fact, yes. “It was quite good. You couldn’t really cook there. It had a bed.”
After my divorce I’m in the whole house rather than one bit of it. So I’m one of life’s winners. Look at all these posters I can put up. It’s great
He was there to join his half-sisters, who “had instructions to put their father’s ashes – I didn’t know him, really – in a river in the west of Scotland where he used to go fishing”, he says, “and they invited me. The actual village was the location base of The Wicker Man. So I went and looked at its feet, which are still in the cliff.”
What, the Wicker Man’s feet are still in the cliff? I ask, since it seems impossible. The film came out in 1973 – those feet are the same age as I am (53) and made of wicker.
“Yeah. You’d have to know what you were looking for.”
His other project is Pea Green Boat, a book based on the show he devised in 2001 , which became a pared‑down radio version of itself in 2004 , and has come back to life a quarter of a century later thanks to some surreal and engrossing illustrations by David Waywell. It’s a retelling of The Owl and the Pussy‑cat by Edward Lear in which – spoiler alert – the mince that the owl eats at the end is actually the deceased cat, rotting in a bag. To introduce it, if such a simple thing were possible, Lee has written a candid essay about the state he was in when he first wrote it.
One minute he was on the brink of screenwriting success, and the next his toilet had broken down and he was shitting in plastic bags that he left in bins in Finsbury Park, north London, the next morning. Can all that possibly be true? “In fact,” he says, gesticulating emphatically, “it was about 500 yards that way when I lived above a shop, where I had to shit in the bags. It’s funny – after my divorce, I’ve ended up living so close to where I lived in the 90s. But I’m in the whole house rather than one bit of it. So I’m one of life’s winners. Look at all these posters I can put up. It’s great.” He and the comedian Bridget Christie married in 2006, separated in 2021. They have two children, who are 15 and 19, and appear to be the platonic ideal of amicable divorcees. For a while he dated the comedian Rosie Holt, who he worked on a show with , but he is now seeing somebody else.
The introductory essay concludes with a thought Lee absolutely must mean, because it’s poignant enough that it would choke him if he didn’t. “Never really having thought Pea Green Boat had meaning as such, it’s obvious to me as an older man what it’s about. We drift through life. We impose our hopes and desires on others, hopes and desires of which they are often unaware, or care not to reciprocate, or cannot reciprocate in the way we would wish. And then we die. Alone. But the journey to that ultimate destination can be beautiful, full of weird sights and strange creatures. And we should not wish it to be any other way.”
But what slings and arrows of the past 25 years taught him that?
He describes his “road to Damascus moment at 16”, when he saw a comedian supporting the Fall: “Before that, I thought you had to be a confident performer. I thought you had to run around like Ben Elton. Ted Chippington was silent and still to the point of having almost no presence whatsoever. A quarter of the audience would be in tears, and everyone else was really annoyed.” Lee was an immediate success in the 90s, on TV in a double act with Richard Herring , out‑deadpanning each other; but the purer distillation of Stewart Lee-ness was Comedy Vehicle , which ran for four seasons on the BBC, from 2009 until 2016: half‑hour routines in front of a live audience, televised. Chris Morris script-edited and Armando Iannucci was an executive producer, and it was a high-water mark for the sheer art of comedy; incredible rigour and intellect and coherence, applied to the most ludic, surreal constructs. Later, he became the guy you read about politics (well, Brexit) if you wanted to keep yourself sane, and in his most recent tour, he is a guy nearing 60 whose intricate, absurdist satire has been out-absurded by the world around him, cracking open a new truthfulness that is both serious and incredibly funny.
When Lee, less than a year out of university, in February 1990, won the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year, the judge (the comedy editor of City Limits, a huge tastemaker job back then) said, “That was great, mate. We need acts like you to get rid of all these Oxbridge wankers like David Baddiel,” Lee remembers now. “But I did go there” – he studied English literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford – “and all the things I was supposed to get, Saturday Night Live, a paid gig at The Comedy Store, just disappeared.” In the 70s, if you were posh you might be the next Monty Python, “so you’d get a hearing. Whereas what we had was the misplaced arrogance and undeserved confidence that comes with having gone to a top university, but those doors were being gatekept. By people that wanted to be more fair, right?”
But what class is he, because he doesn’t read posh? He was adopted at the age of two, having spent his early life in foster care: “I know that I’m from the exact centre of society because the way that religious charities engineered adoption in those days was they were trying to place you in an entirely neutral environment.” His adoptive mum left school at 14, worked as a medical secretary, went to night school after she divorced his dad when he was four, worked her way up to being a GP practice manager. His dad was a rep for a cardboard company. He says of his birth father: “One of the few conversations I ever had with him was when he said an English degree was a colossal waste of time. I thought, ‘Well, actually, someone needs to know about Beowulf.’” Lee’s son is now studying English at uni; but he feels it’s becoming a luxury degree: “He’s relatively privileged. His parents have got two houses, and he can live in either one of them.” (Though this is not the typical take on being the child of divorced parents.)
Lee’s route to Oxford came via a part-scholarship to Solihull, a private school, with the shortfall made up by “a masonic charity that provided educational help for orphans, waifs and strays. And I technically was an orphan, waif and stray, because I spent the first two years of my life in care.”
I’m not genetically connected to the world. It means you view it as other
He didn’t give much thought to his origin story until he was about to become a dad himself, in 2006. “When Bridget was pregnant, I’m such a man, I thought, Oh, it’s quite hard work, isn’t it? I expect, if you had a baby, you would want to know what happened to it. Not even for me, but I thought I should find my mother just to tell her that I was all right. It opened a bit of a can of worms, really. But I’m in touch for 15 years or so now with my two half-sisters – my father’s children – and they’ve been great, I’m really glad I met them.”
Not the half-sisters you’ve just been away with?
“Yeah. It’s interesting, when you’ve got nothing to go on, things seem hugely significant. Maybe that’s why I like The Wicker Man, because that’s where I’m from. My birth mother’s family can trace their roots back to leaving the village of Clonakilty in the west of Ireland during the famine. It’s famous for black puddings, which I really, really like.” The thinking around adoption has changed immeasurably since the 1968 Adoption Act. “Now, people view that as a very problematic start in life. Everyone in care for two years has post-traumatic stress disorder and we’re all drunk.” He’s still quite insistent that he was unscathed. When he was young, he read a “brilliant” book, Mister Fairweather and His Family, written as a tool to help adoptive children understand their origins. “It was about a bloke, and he was bored, so he got a cat. He was still bored, so he gets a dog, and he’s still bored, so he gets a wife. He’s still bored. And then they go, ‘Well, let’s get a baby’. That book is considered an absolute disaster now because it’s not child-centric. The baby isn’t supposed to be a pet for the parents. Anyway, I looked it up on Amazon, everyone was slagging it off, ‘This book ruined my life. I wanted to kill myself.’ And then there was one really good review of it. I thought, ‘That’s what I think. It’s a really nice little book with really nice pictures.’ And I’d written that review myself, 20 years ago, and forgotten.”
Yet at the same time, what he describes is not an unscathed person. “Lots of comedians go, ‘We all do this, don’t we? Why do we all do this?’ Michael McIntyre, love him or hate him, is the king of that. Whereas what I do, I go, ‘Why do you do this? Why don’t you do what I do? Because I’m right.’ I think that’s partly through not being genetically connected to the world. It means you view it as other. I also think you view it as other if you’re a little bit on the spectrum, but that’s a hole that I’m not prepared to go down. Even though people have said I should.”
Lee’s 90s looked like living the dream – the successful double act with Herring, a TV series ( Fist of Fun ) – “but we were in a weird loop, the only way we could afford to do live work was if we were doing telly or radio. The last tour we did as a double act in 98 lost money, and the TV series didn’t get recommissioned, so it was just over, really.” He’d had mixed feelings about telly, anyway: “We were becoming much more like light entertainment, under pressure from the BBC, which wasn’t something I wanted to do.” But standup was his life, and his experience with a big comedy machine – where you’d always end up in debt no matter how big your crowds were, because comedy is always loss making – sounds as if it still stings. “We were only ripped off in the way that people in the music business are,” he says. But people in the music industry are ripped off royally.
So by 2000, he was miserable. He’d stopped standup, about which he had a zealous perfectionism – “I’d gone to university, and I thought it was an incredible privilege. And I felt that I should ultimately try to do something with standup that was like a writer or someone creating a body of work” – and he was scratching a living reviewing music for Q magazine. Then he started working with Richard Thomas on Jerry Springer: The Opera.
A few things have been lost about that musical and the controversy that followed: mainly how successful it was. It won a huge number of awards – Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle, Laurence Olivier, Theatregoers’ Choice – and musicals, when they fly, are career-defining. When the Christian right came after it, for blasphemy, it seemed almost like a curiosity – yes, there was a lot of profanity, it featured Jesus in a nappy, had zero respect for the crucifixion or any other sacred moments, but these were jokes-within-jokes, the butt of them never felt like Christianity at all. Legal actions brought against the BBC, for filming it, were given short shrift by the justice system. But, ultimately, the musical was brought down. Activists put pressure on local councils to pull it from theatres, a tour became impossible. For years, Lee was as likely to be approached in the street by someone wanting to know “Why didn’t you do it about Muslims?”, as by an obsessive fan. “Those people are still in play now,” Lee says. “Stephen Green, who was the self-styled reverend that led the campaign against it, was recently put up by the fake grassroots organisation Restore Trust to be on the board of the National Trust.”
It was an inflection point in Lee’s career, just not in the way he’d have planned. “After that, I thought, right, things can get banned. You can be stopped from saying things. So it’s quite important that the things you say are worth saying. I didn’t become Mark Thomas or Lenny Bruce overnight. I did just start to think, there should be something important in this.”
Even at his most political, Lee’s routines are never agitprop, being too surreal, resisting interpretation, not colouring within the lines; but for years, since Comedy Vehicle, when he takes an issue head‑on, it’s been magisterial. His immigration monologue (“Bloody Indians, coming over here, inventing us a national cuisine … bloody French, coming over here, doubting transubstantiation …”) – “That’s become my parrot sketch.” He traces its origins to being in the car, listening to then-Ukip politician Paul Nuttall “say a really stupid thing about Bulgarians, so I went home, listened to the programme on catch-up, transcribed it, and the whole thing was done in half an hour. Whereas some things take years.” There’s a bit that’s resurfaced recently, since Rod Liddle died : “It was basically 20 minutes of me, trying to talk about him, but I keep getting distracted by bits of food on his clothes. Loads of people didn’t know who he was, either, which made it even funnier – this long routine about a man nobody had heard of, with suet on himself. I remember one of those rightwing papers said the whole point of the routine was that the foods were working class. So I despised the working class. But, actually, I was thinking about things that were quite oleaginous: Angel Delight, pork pie jelly. It never would have occurred to me that it was a class warfare statement.”
Brexit reradicalised him, and out of that came his Observer column, which was and remains a completely unparalleled display of what comic polemic can do (he now writes a column for The Nerve , an online magazine funded by Carole Cadwalladr and others. “What I learned from that was that you couldn’t afford to leave room for doubt about what you meant, because if you did, bad faith actors on the right would take legal action. You can’t be funny in the same way. You have to make sure that the sentence is bulletproof.”
He now looks at the comics and personas his children “would call ‘edgelords’”, at Jeremy Clarkson, “suddenly going, ‘Oh, everything’s died in my farm. I spent a quarter of a century saying climate change was not worth worrying about, and only snowflakes cared about it.’ Dave Chappelle has started saying, ‘When I was taking the piss out of trans people, I didn’t mean for you to restrict their rights and kill them.’” Doing gigs in Colchester, he went to Wivenhoe, “the hippy town of Essex”, which now has a Reform council. “A councillor had said to a woman I know there, a lesbian, ‘Oh, withdrawing funding for Pride is coming from head office. We don’t feel like that. Don’t worry about it.’ But they’re still enacting the policies. And I expect, at the risk of committing the nuclear option, there were probably Nazi officials saying that to Jews in the 30s. ‘You’ve got to wear this badge, don’t worry about it, it’s coming from Berlin.’ All those people that played with that stuff – congratulations. The world’s on fire. Trump’s showing no sign of withdrawing from fossil fuels, there are councils where they’re literally enacting policies against LGBTQ+ people and removing references to climate change from council literature. So you’ve won, haven’t you? Is that what you wanted?”
When Stewart Lee is out and about now, “pretty much everyone that stops you” – he always says “you” when he means “me” – “is really nice. They say it’s important to them, because they feel that no one talks about the things they’re interested in. They say they’ve watched me for a long time, or that they were going to kill themselves and they laughed their way out of it. Someone online said that I attracted an insular cadre of pseudo-intellectual, prematurely bald middle-aged men. I thought, ‘Yeah, that’ll do.’ I wish more women would come, though. I think it’s sort of perceived as something women wouldn’t like.”
I think women think it’s going to be laced with references that they don’t get, I offer. Then there’s a bit of a pause.
“ I do joke about that,” he says eventually. “When I say, ‘You can’t come if you haven’t read this book’, that is supposed to be a joke.” Then he says, out of nowhere: “I think I was miserable for a lot of this century. It’s not really anyone’s fault.” He says it so matter-of-factly I have to double check.
“Yes, the whole of the 21st century, until a few years ago. I like my kids, my kids are good fun.”
The idea of leaving a legacy is entirely spurious because there’s obviously no future for humanity
Returning to Pea Green Boat, he says: “The Owl and the Pussy-cat seems to be about a pair of characters of indeterminate gender, going to a place where normal laws are suspended, where a cat can marry an owl. I think it’s about the tragedy of Lear ’s own life [he could never live openly as a gay man]. When I read it now, having lived a life, it’s also a little bit about me. I don’t really seem equipped to do certain sorts of things in life.”
“That owl doesn’t know how to deal with another person and ends up eating their decomposing corpse out of a bag. There’s something in that about a failure to relate to people.”
You don’t really think you can’t relate to a person?
“Why do you end up choosing the life you’ve got? I spend most of my life on the move on motorways. I know a lot of people had a bad time in lockdown, but when I couldn’t do that any more, I found it really difficult.”
So being on the road was an escape hatch from intimacy, and once you lost it, you found yourself unequal to the overall task?
Mindful that he’ll be 60 soonish (in just over 18 months), he wants everything he’s done to be compiled into “some kind of physical media package, 13 DVDs with the same spine design, numbered”. It sounds kind of modest, but important. “Partly why I went round the bend in the mid part of this century, between about 2005 and 2015, was because I wrote about 15 hours of standup in eight years. No one’s ever done that. And now I think I’d like to at least show that I did that. Although the idea of leaving a legacy is entirely spurious because there’s obviously no future for humanity.”
Hang on, I say, you say you went round the bend between 2005 and 2015, and you went round the bend in Covid?
So was there a period between 2015 and 2020 when you were the right side of the bend?
“No.” He smiles. It’s funny because it’s true.
• Pea Green Boat by Stewart Lee, illustrated by David Waywell, is published by Ebury on 3 September (£16.99). To buy a copy for £15.29, go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.
In the show he’s been away for, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, he – a 58-year-old lefty – enters into breakneck dialectic with toxic masculinity in werewolf form (age unknown). “Things have got worse in the 18 months I’ve been doing it,” he says. “I need to really amp the werewolf up. He would be much more explicitly racist and homophobic and transphobic now. But you don’t want people to be really upset in the room.” It feels quite a 2026 dilemma, being unable to even satirise the right without causing the distress it lives for.
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Zoe Williams. Published 30 Aug 2026, 05:00 am.
