'Cancer is very funny!' – Mark Steel on finding the laughs in life's darkest moments

“It’s very funny! There’s nothing more amusing than puncturing the pomposity of a situation, which is why I don’t think I’ve ever been to a funeral where there’s not been a really good joke because someone has said something outrageous. My copy of the book [The Leopard in My House, Steel’s memoir of his “Adventures in Cancerland”] just arrived this morning, and I’ve been dipping in and remembering all the funny things that happened – like the Polish man next to me in the critical care unit of the cancer ward the morning of my operation, who just calmly lit up a cigarette.”

In fact, the book is packed with laugh-out-embarrassingly loud moments (such as when Steel is trying to get through to his doctor on the phone, and posits a canned hold message saying “Remember, your tumour is important to us”, or when he’s told his primary cancer is “occult” – medical jargon for “hidden” – and he asks if he needs to see a doctor or an exorcist).

Steel is absolutely serious, though, when he talks about how humour got him through the uncertainty, terror and physical brutality of treatment after his throat cancer was first discovered in 2023.

One comedian friend tossed him a pack of Strepsils, saying “That should sort it”. On another occasion – after the radiotherapy took Steel’s voice – the comic Seann Walsh “hoped it would come back as a comedy Chinese voice from the 1970s, so that I’d be cured of cancer but cancelled”.

Even more close to the darkly-funny bone was the reaction of Steel’s son Elliot, also a stand-up, who accompanied his dad when he initially received his diagnosis – and filled the pregnant silence afterward by observing that he might be getting on the property ladder sooner than expected. (“I was really proud of him for saying that,” recalls Steel senior.)

Even the unlikeliest comedians called to offer kind words. Steel may now be a fixture on Radio 4 (where his show Mark Steel’s In Town has chalked up 13 series) and a borderline national treasure (“maybe a Third Division one, the Crewe Alexandra of national treasures”) – but his earlier days as a firebrand left-wing “alternative comedian” meant that he never expected to get a phone call from the old-school, Thatcher-supporting “enemy” Jimmy Tarbuck to wish him luck with his treatment.

It’s one of hundreds of poignant but unmawkish moments in the book, and laced with the candour that makes it such a powerful read (as well as a funny one). “If I’d read that he [Tarbuck] was ill, would I have found his number and called him?”, Steel asks himself. “Of course not.”

Then there are his personal relationships. Steel had been in an on-off relationship with comedian Shaparak Khorsandi for years, but at the time of his diagnosis it was all very much “off”. The story of his subsequent fling with (yet) another comic makes for more awkward laughs: having to bring up vast quantities of phlegm into a salad bowl, a side effect of his treatment, is not conducive to dating.

But by the end of the book, Steel and Khorsandi are together – and this time permanently, he thinks. “It would be a bit glib to say ‘Oh, when you nearly die of cancer you realise you have to get on with life’. But it definitely makes a difference.”

Like most cancer survivors, he lives under the shadow of the disease’s possible return, and one challenge is to try to keep the positivity and perspective and joy in life’s small things that living close to death granted him.

When he was given something approaching an all-clear, he says, he felt true euphoria – that he knew would last until he got stuck in traffic on the way home. “I still get annoyed at over-complicated websites or roadworks,” he says, but on some days even the irritation can feel good: “I’m annoyed, so I must be alive. I’m pissed off, therefore I am.”

Steel insists that his experience of cancer diagnosis and treatment doesn’t mean that he has found the values we should all live by, but anyone who reads the book will get more from it than mere laughs. And for those who want only the laughs, there’s always the tour of the show of the book.

“If people read the book and go ‘Oh I was really moved and touched and it’s changed my perspective on life and the little irritants of the day’, I’d think ‘Oh, that’s nice’. If they say that at the end of the show, I’d think ‘Well, that was bloody useless then. It was supposed to be funny.’”

The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.

Visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.