From reading The Leopard in my House, Mark Steel’s uncompromising account of his punishing encounter with throat cancer, you might expect him to be a diminished force on stage. The book describes in vivid detail how the treatment savaged his epiglottis, leaving him unable to speak, eat or drink while sapping him of every last scrap of energy.

Yet 18 months after his diagnosis, his voice and his passion are undimmed. The only evidence of his ordeal is maybe that he sips his water more often than normal… oh, and all the stories he has about the extreme experiences he underwent.

The book, as you might expect, offers a more complete account of his treatment than the stand-up. Indeed, he spends much of the early part of his tour show not talking about his cancer at all. He’s back on form raging against the ‘you can’t say anything any more’ brigade, preposterous monarchists and even his miserably censorious  comrades on the liberal left, whose finger-wagging tone is losing them so many arguments.

His own stance is more of a celebration of British idiosyncrasies, inclusive by way of a shared, flawed humanity rather than any DEI diktat. It’s evidenced in his In Town Radio 4 shows – relevant bits of which he revives here in Basingstoke – and in his accounts of all those he meets on the cancer ward, patients and medics alike.

When the tumour is first found, Steel asks his consultant whether his tumour is likely to prove fatal. The doctor replies ‘Touch wood’, then does so – a superstition that leaves the comedian both incredulous and wryly amused amid all the high-tech machinery and cutting-edge science brought to bear on his illness. The absurdity clearly tickles him, appealing to his keen sense of the tragicomic, and he returns to it several times in the book.

The titular leopard is how he considers the tumour. A wild animal he’s forced to live with.  ‘I’d contacted the leopard authorities and they assured me they were used to dealing with leopards like this, and they had a plan for removing the leopard, though it would take a while,’ he notes – but he could  still hear it growling in the house.

Many who speak about surviving cancer bristle against its depiction as a ‘fight’, Steel included. Indeed he describes his experiences as a surrender right from the start, yielding himself to the mercies of the medical experts, acknowledging that he just has to submit to the process. 

In the book, especially, his flair for preposterous comparisons  to highlight absurdities kicks into overdrive with every new situation and every fresh humiliation forced on him triggering an inventive flight of metaphoric fantasy.

He’s graphic and funny at the same time, particularly in the gross yet laugh-out-loud description of the industrial quantities of mucus issuing forth as a consequence of the radiotherapy. 

Yet even when things sound horrific, Steel simply adjusts to his situation, readily accepting that this is what it takes to have a chance at staying alive, that there really is no option. He is inspired by Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy of stoicism, and this may be the only cancer memoir to mention that both the Roman Emperor’s 1st Century Meditations and the World Darts Championships aided his slow march to recovery.

Even as bookshops’ shelves groan with cancer memoirs – testament to how many people survive what was once a death sentence – Steel’s offers a unique perspective, resolutely down-to-earth and rich with humour, whether as a defence mechanism or just because that’s how observes life. 

The comedian lost two of his friends to cancer, Jeremy Hardy and Linda Smith… and they are still getting laughs beyond the grave. Hardy provides one of the funniest lines in a book which sets a  high bar, and a Smith anecdote is a high point of the tour show.  Such is the prevalence of cancer that they’re not the only comics with the disease whose stories overlap with Steel’s – he trades zingers with Matt Forde over text and follows the progress of Rhod Gilbert, who said after his punishing treatments that he wasn’t sorry he cancer, for all the newfound appreciation of life and the people in it that the extreme experience offered.

‘Am I glad that cancer happened to me?’ Steel asks. ‘Of course I’m fucking not.’ But he, too, now fully embodies the philosophy of ‘appreciate every day’, not as some bland maxim, but something he palpably experiences, all the time. Post-treatment, he also reunited with his partner, Shaparak Khorsandi, and there’s clearly also a newfound appreciation for what he had in that relationship, rocky as it sometimes was, collapsing just before his diagnosis. 

A warmth comes through all the comic’s encounters with other people, especially fellow patients, people he may never have been close to had it not been for the treatment. He even finds a connection with Jimmy Tarbuck, the Thatcher-supporting stand-up who was once a bete noire for political alternative comedians such as him.  It’s also clear Steel got invaluable support through his treatment from his son Elliot, who has also made a stand-up show about the experiences.  

The book never shies from the challenges encountered by Steel, now 64, including the difficulties in navigating the bureaucratic NHS. But even during the most brutal treatment, the comics tone is always uplifting (and never saccharine) as he entrusts  those leopard removal experts known what they are doing.

Perhaps understandably, the stage show’s less disciplined, flitting between anecdotes and introducing too many characters too fleetingly, so we don’t get to know them in the same way we do from the memoir.

But what he loses in structure, he gains in presence. He’s clearly delighted to be back on stage, at chatting to the audience like old pals – even leading an interval sing-song, just for the joy  of it. If Steel can keep his spirits up in the most extreme of circumstances, using that same trait to cheer a room, with his 40-plus years of experience… that’s a doddle. 

• Mark ​Steel: The Leopard in My House is on tour until the end of the year. Mark ​Steel tour dates. The book, subtitled One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland is published by Ebury, priced £22. It is available from Amazon priced £17.99 in hardback or £11.99 on Kindle. Or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.