Lenny Henry On Comedy, Dramatic Acting & Returning To Stand-Up

The Romesh Ranganathan Show

Romesh R/ananganathan sits down with comedy legend Sir Lenny Henry to reflect on his fifty-year career in entertainment. The conversation tr

Key takeaways

• Lenny Henry describes his early career as 'learning on the job' without the benefit of established comedy circuits like Edinburgh.
• He highlights the heavy burden of being a primary representative for Black comedians during the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Main topics

• Evolution of stand-up comedy
• Racial diversity in entertainment

Notable quotes

I'm just learning, learning, polishing, relearning, getting rid of that bit that doesn't work, slotting in a new bit.

Conclusion

A profound look at the resilience required to sustain a legendary care

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Who do you support? West Bromwich Albion, so forgive me for everybody for their really... Lisa supports Man City, my partner Lisa, so I'm literally an adjacent Man City fan now. And I'm literally, I'm in it now. I don't support them, but I'm in it. I have to sit and watch the matches. You want them Speaker 3 (0:15) to win the league. I kind of want them to win because that'll make my life Speaker 2 (0:18) easy. Speaker 3 (0:18) Oh, I see. If they Speaker 2 (0:20) win, Speaker 3 (0:20) my life is easy for us that day. Yeah. There's no bad-tempered people around. Speaker 2 (0:26) Her mum Speaker 3 (0:27) is rabid. Her mom just screams Speaker 2 (0:30) at the screen. We're rolling now, you know this, don't you? Oh, yeah. You can't have any of that other stuff I just said about Lisa and her mom. Love, Doris. Doris, we love you. Say, I love you, Doris, everybody. Yeah, I love you, Doris. We love you, Doris. Speaker 3 (0:42) And it's good that you're passionate, Doris. Yeah, man. Passion is good. Yeah, okay. Start the interview Speaker 2 (0:47) now. Okay. Hi, my name is Lenny Henry. I'm going to be on the Romesh Ranganathan show soon. Coming to a device or a computer or an iPad near you. Speaker 1 (1:08) Shut up, Romesh. Speaker 3 (1:13) This episode is brought to you by Counselling Directory. I've been very open about my mental health struggles over the years. I've tried everything from meditation to hypnotherapy. I like to keep an open mind. But something that's really helped me is therapy. I think it can be great if you struggle with anxiety, if you're going through something like a breakup or a loss. It can also be really good if you just need someone to talk to that isn't your partner or your dog. Sometimes it can, though, feel like even finding a therapist is an uphill struggle. Where do I look? Are they legit? How do I know who's going to be right for me? So that's why I think Counselling Directory is so great. It helps you find a therapist that's right for you, whether you want to see someone face-to-face or online. They have over 29,000 therapists and counsellors across the UK. So even if you're picky, you should be able to find someone. And all of the therapists on the directory are verified. You can take the time to read their personal profiles, learn a bit about them and how they work, and then contact the ones that you like in your own time. And that, I think, makes the whole thing a little bit less scary. If you've been thinking about therapy, visit Counseling Directory and find a therapist that's right for you. Speaker 3 (2:22) My guest today is an actor, comedian, writer and knight of the realm. Over the last 50 years, his comedic brilliance has lit up kids TV, sitcoms and sketch shows. In 1985, he harnessed his love of making people laugh with fundraising, co-founding Comic Relief, which to date has raised over £1.6 billion for charities around the world. He's also become an acclaimed dramatic actor on stage and on screen, as well as being a passionate advocate for diversity in the industry. He's also... an absolute legend. Speaker 2 (2:51) It's Selenie Henry everybody! Speaker 2 (2:57) What a lovely introduction. Thank you so much. Beautifully read. Thank Speaker 3 (3:00) you. Was there anything that you'd like to have given a bit more oomph to? Do you know what I mean? I Speaker 2 (3:07) don't know. Listen, you didn't mention Tiswas, and that's a blessing sometimes. Speaker 3 (3:11) Because Speaker 2 (3:11) everything, I go on the street, in the shops, Tiswas! I get that a lot. It's like, do you ever get, 50 years Speaker 3 (3:19) ago, Speaker 2 (3:20) I get that. Taxis. Uber, I still have that. Literally the first thing I ever did. Speaker 3 (3:29) Best Speaker 2 (3:29) thing you ever did. I felt like, okay, thanks. Speaker 3 (3:33) Thank Speaker 2 (3:33) you. I love my people. I love my people who come up to me in the street, but literally I just did, I won an award for doing Fences. Okay, where's Pete the dog? I get that. Speaker 3 (3:45) We've met a few times. I've met you a few times. I don't know you Speaker 2 (3:48) and we are acquaintances. Yeah. But I kind of, the last couple of times I said, well, yeah, we should have dinner and Speaker 3 (3:54) it's never happened. Speaker 2 (3:55) It's not happened. Speaker 3 (3:55) We've not had Speaker 2 (3:56) dinner. But that's not because, hmm. You don't want me to be in your house, do you? Yeah, I do. You don't want me to meet your mum properly or Lisa or anything? No, I do, I do. Because my Speaker 3 (4:05) missus is called Lisa too. They'd get on really well. They Speaker 2 (4:07) would. Speaker 3 (4:07) Well, we talked about it, but then, you know, sometimes, I mean, was that? Are you expecting Speaker 2 (4:13) me to invite you to my house? No, I'm Speaker 3 (4:14) not saying that. Because you could. Or maybe Speaker 2 (4:17) a pub nearby. Because you don't want me in your house. Exactly, yeah. I mean, I think it would be... I think if the neighbours saw us together, it would be difficult. In what way? Why would it be difficult? Two brothers walking down the street where I live. It's bad enough when it's just me. Are you nuts? Me and you walking down the street. Can you imagine? Speaker 3 (4:37) There goes the neighbourhood. What are they talking about? Well, I'd love that, though. We should do that. We should actually do it. No, Speaker 2 (4:44) I want to Speaker 3 (4:44) do it. No, Speaker 2 (4:44) we Speaker 3 (4:44) should actually do it. Well, let's commit to it now. No, but you're very Speaker 2 (4:46) busy. 14 podcasts a week, traitors and that advert. Listen, you ain't got no time to be... Maybe when you're like my age, you'll want to do it. Lenny, can we meet up? No, I'll Speaker 3 (4:56) be Speaker 2 (4:56) dead. When I'm your age, Speaker 3 (4:57) why Speaker 2 (4:57) would I say... Lenny, Speaker 1 (4:59) I'm sorry. Speaker 2 (4:59) We didn't meet up for dinner. I'm sorry you're dead. Maybe Tuesday after the other thing Speaker 3 (5:05) I've got to do. I'll come to your funeral and I'll go, I'll go to Lisa, dodge that bullet. Managed to swerve that. I told you we could wait him out. Oh, God, man. This is awful. I'm hating this. Why did I agree to do this? Right, listen, we've got your present. Speaker 2 (5:22) Oh. Speaker 3 (5:24) Have you paid my license fee? Have a look. This is the bicycle. Yeah, I think you'll be excited about this. Speaker 3 (5:35) No, they're not Speaker 2 (5:37) what they... Oh, is this branding? Is this... Ooh. This is the gin bar. Speaker 3 (5:45) So they look like chocolate bars, but they're not. Speaker 2 (5:47) Oh. Oh, it's Speaker 1 (5:50) fantastic! Speaker 2 (5:53) So you guys are going to be vexed though, don't you? Who? Lisa? Because Lisa does the gardening and she's got a shed. So she's going to be vexed that this doesn't say Lisa's shed. Hold on. Speaker 3 (6:02) Have you got two sheds or one shed? Speaker 2 (6:04) No, she's got a shed. She does all the gardening. Speaker 3 (6:06) But you don't have a shed. Speaker 2 (6:08) Why would I do that? Speaker 3 (6:09) I don't know, I thought you had a shed that you went off to, I don't know what you're doing there. The thing Speaker 2 (6:13) about gardening is it frightens me because we've got a big garden and if I go out there and start ploughing fields and digging up things, I slightly worry that I'm going to hear, Speaker 1 (6:21) Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Speaker 3 (6:25) Nobody knows my... Speaker 2 (6:27) I feel it's a bit slightly 18th century pre-Civil War America. Speaker 3 (6:32) Okay, well this slightly undermines the other presents we've got here. Oh, is it a shovel? We'll Speaker 2 (6:36) just Speaker 3 (6:36) have a Speaker 2 (6:36) look. Is it a shovel? Yeah. You've got me three chocolate bars. Speaker 3 (6:40) No, they're not chocolate bars. What they are is you plant these in the... Look, you stick them in the ground and it's different things. So these, this is lemon basil cucumber wild bergamot. Speaker 2 (6:52) Oh, this is fantastic. Speaker 3 (6:54) Yeah, and then there's a chilli one. The red hot one is chillies. Very good. Speaker 2 (6:57) I see what they did there. Speaker 3 (6:59) And Speaker 2 (6:59) it's called a grow bar. Speaker 3 (7:00) Yeah. Grow Speaker 2 (7:01) your own fiery chillies. It's Speaker 3 (7:02) apparently idiot proof. No, I didn't mean to say that with the stank that I said it with. No, you stank that Speaker 2 (7:09) all out. Speaker 3 (7:09) You've obviously Speaker 2 (7:10) seen me try to do the recycling on my own. Speaker 3 (7:12) But you just drop them in the ground. I don't know, it's got the instructions there. Don't try and remember what I've said to you. This Speaker 2 (7:17) is brilliant. Thank you so much. What a very thoughtful gift that is. Are Speaker 3 (7:20) you a chilli guy? Huh? Yeah, I like chilli. I Speaker 2 (7:22) couldn't go on hot ones, though. You know that show? Yeah, Speaker 3 (7:26) the wings. It looks really... How hot can you... How hot can you get? Well, Speaker 2 (7:30) I've had my sister Kay, if you're watching this, Kay, you'll remember this. One time, because I used to take the meat off Kay's plate when I was a kid. She's four years older than me. And I used to take the meat off her plate when she wasn't looking. And this one day, she decided to get me back and dip this big piece of meat in Scotch bonnet for quite a long time. Just did that. And then put it on the edge of her plate near me. And then I waited until she was looking at the plate. Then for an hour after. Ah! Ah! Speaker 3 (8:00) This is not... Speaker 2 (8:03) And mum, yes, that's right. And you won't do that again, will you? You won't do that again, will you, ever? Under the tap Speaker 3 (8:12) for like 45 minutes in the cold tap. And I didn't do it again. Speaker 2 (8:16) And she taught me. Kay was a superhero to me. She used to come and when I was being bullied on the way to school, Kay would show up like and beat up people on my behalf. So I shouldn't have been taking the meat off her plate. So with all due respect to my big sister who came to rescue me. I shouldn't have taken the meat off your plate. Speaker 3 (8:34) You've managed to maintain a level of longevity that is remarkable. Speaker 2 (8:40) I thought you were going to say defies belief. Yeah, that Speaker 3 (8:42) is so disproportionate to what you Speaker 2 (8:45) deliver on screen and on stage. There you are. See, that's what I expected. I mean, literally, you're rubbish. How have you managed to last this Speaker 3 (8:53) long? Speaker 2 (8:54) Like, what is the Speaker 3 (8:54) secret? How many times can you polish that turd? No, but do you... You can't have known that you were going to manage that, but is there a philosophy that you think you've had that's helped you to do that? Speaker 2 (9:06) It wasn't. Just work hard. I never... Speaker 2 (9:11) It's really odd being the only one for a really long time. Speaker 3 (9:15) I Speaker 2 (9:15) was the only one. I was doing work in men's clubs. I was having racial abuse thrown at me off and on stage. I was having to deal with that. I was having to learn how to do my job in real time in front of audiences. There was no Edinburgh for me. There was no going to the comedy store and doing a tight five or anything. It was just literally... thrown into the deep end and go, go on then. And I'd already be, I was already famous. So the weird thing was I was already famous. 16 million people had seen my debut. They liked me. And now they were showing up in clubs expecting me to have a tight hour. And I didn't have a tight hour for a really long time. It took ages. And it was just bizarre being, having to learn on the job. And so frankly, once I got used to this thing of, well, you know, that 10 minutes is now okay, you can move on to the next, you know, working on the hour for a really long time. I started to think this is going to be my life now. I'm just learning, learning, polishing, relearning, getting rid of that bit that doesn't work, slotting in a new bit. It just became my role to learn as I went along and to get as much advice from people who are respected as possible. So I talked to everybody, Bob Munkhouse, you know, Chris Tarrant, Frank Carson. I talked to all the comedians that were in. famous in my time. Sounds like, you know, the ancient Greeks now, but these were the people that I was doing gigs with in the clubs, Bobby Nutt. And they all, what's great about old people in showbiz, they all want to give, you sit there, lad, let me tell you about me. You know, you don't do politics in comedy, you know, leave that for at home. When you get on stage, your job is to make them laugh. You know, I heard that a lot of times. And I heard, you know. Wear a nice suit, look better than they do. I heard, walk around, let them have a look at you. I had, you know, don't swear. You know, I had lots of advice from all of these people, all of which was bollocks, by the way. And I just listened and I tried to learn and I tried different things out. And I stole. I took a lot. I did other people's jokes sometimes. Everybody was stealing, right? Everybody stole. Everybody stole. Because there was a period... Enlight entertainment where it was like all bets were off with all jokes. You just did the joke that worked for you in that moment Yeah, and the idea of developing your own sense of humor your own style was sort of weird because why would you there's all these jokes he can just have And so I was from school over till about 1984 I was doing all the jokes that people did Tommy Cooper jokes Frank Carson jokes. My wife was redhead. No hair just a redhead I was doing that for the longest great day and And then when I was doing Three of a Kind, which was my first big TV series, you know, between 8 and 10 million viewers on a Saturday night, whatever it was, the producer said, well, maybe you should do some stand-up. You start thinking about who you are and maybe you should start. And God bless that person, Paul Jackson, I think. He sent Kim Fuller to come and see me do my act in Luton. And it was a club gig. It was for a week. And basically Kim came and stayed for the week. And we just... The stuff I was doing on Three of a Kind, Kim just said, why don't you do Dekus here? Why don't you do Delbert here? Why don't you do the blues singer? And he just had all these ideas. And yeah, we could do some chat. He called it chat. And I said, do you mean like Richard Pryor does chat? He said, yeah. Why don't you do stuff about your childhood? Why don't you do stuff about dating? And why don't you do stuff about music? And do it like Richard Pryor would do it. He was my hero. I wouldn't dream of, I just thought, well, you can't do that, can you? And we started to have conversations like, you know about co-writing with a mate. But Speaker 3 (12:45) wasn't that week that you spent, that was when you locked in the show that you would end up doing for quite a long time, right? That was like you got the formula. After Speaker 2 (12:52) a week or two weeks, we got the formula of what the show was going to be. It was going to be, you come on, maybe you have music. And after a while, it was bad jokes. I used to do a funk hip hop. thing called Bad Jokes, where I did jokes with music and we'd orchestrated it. And so there'd be horn, then bib, coming in in the middle of jokes. It was great. And we did that that week. And we wrote a Delbert, we wrote a Dekus, and we wrote all the chat. And it was one of the most... I won't say it was the best thing that ever happened to me, but it changed my life that week. Speaker 3 (13:28) And Speaker 2 (13:28) then Kim was my soulmate in terms of comedy. We'd just sit down like this and we'd just think of funny things to say and do. And then I would go and do them and it would always work. And for 10 years, we worked together throughout the 80s and into the 90s. We just, it was amazing. And then I went away to America. When I came back, I didn't work with Kim anymore. And I love Kim. Deliberately? No, I did a terrible film called Troy Identity that Eddie Murphy was going to do and then Eddie walked away from it. And while I was making it, I found out why. And when I met Eddie, when I met Eddie, I met Eddie at this place called the China White Club in LA. He said, yo, yo, man. I said, hey, Lenny Henry. I said, yeah. He said, did you do that movie? I said, yeah, I did it. He said, can't you read? Speaker 3 (14:25) That was some dog shit, man. Speaker 2 (14:27) It was funny. Speaker 3 (14:28) Yeah, but when you did that film... You're very honest about it when you talk about it in your book. What's really sad is that, you know, it felt like a really mad moment. Just before you come back to the UK, you tell this story about going and seeing, I think it's the head of the studio. Katzenberg. Yeah. After that, you have a meeting before and then you have a meeting after. Yeah, you have a Speaker 2 (14:51) meeting when you're hot. Speaker 3 (14:52) Your Speaker 2 (14:52) name is above the title in a Disney movie. It's not a little thing. And I just thought, well, this is it. This is my life now. I literally thought, and then I got out there, and I just thought, ooh, this is 45 drafts of the script. They've gone through the colours four times. You know, you get a pink script and a blue script. They've gone through the rainbow