Stewart Lee Reflects on Life, Art, and Personal Growth in New Book

London, United Kingdom Aug 30, 2026 ALN: 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.”

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 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 closed to us.”