‘I was miserable for a lot of this century’: Stewart Lee on divorce, his adoption and the twisted children’s poem that explains his life

After a rocky few decades, the standup is nearing 60 – and finding contentment at last. But what does his grotesque retelling of The Owl and the Pussy-cat tell us about his inability to connect with people?

S tewart 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.

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.