Lenny Henry has revealed that he made jokes about himself “that people would deem racist now” early on in his career – before his comedy contemporaries, including Dawn French, stepped in.
The stand-up comedian, who is best known for starring in The Lenny Henry Show and hosting Comic Relief, spoke about his struggle to figure out his identity after receiving his own prime time show.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Henry said that he felt like “a Dickensian child looking through the window of a very posh restaurant” around his fellow up-and-coming comedians, who had studied at university. Henry, 67, had performed stand-up in working men’s clubs after leaving school before joining a touring stage version of The Black and White Minstrel Show in 1975.
“Ben [Elton], Rik [Mayall], Richard [Curtis] – I loved them all but they had this confidence, this natural swagger that learning had given them,” he said, adding that they entered the comedy scene with “a common set of terminologies and texts and philosophical perspectives”.
He continued: “I did jokes against myself that people would deem racist now. I’d seen Charlie Williams or Josh White or Jim Davidson doing these jokes and I thought that was the humour I had to do because I was black. I was 23 and they were 40 years old. What was going on there?”
When Henry met fellow comedians Alexei Sayle and Dawn French, who he later married in 1984, they confronted him over the jokes.
“They all said, ‘What are you doing that for?’ Well, quite.”
Henry and The Vicar of Dibley star French were married from 1984 for 26 years, during which time they adopted their daughter, Billie.
Henry has been with his partner, Lisa Makin, since 2010, while French married husband Mark Bignell in 2013 – however, Henry said in the interview that the pair’s “very happy marriage” is now a “lasting friendship”.
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Later on his career, Henry studied English Literature at the Open University before undertaking a Master’s degree in Screenwriting for TV and Film from Royal Holloway in 2010. He stayed on at the university to earn a PhD, studying the role of Black people in the media. A few years later, in 2022, he was awarded an honorary degree from Oxford University.
Earlier this year, he opened up about discovering the “bombshell” revelation that the man he believed to be his family friend was actually his father.
“I had this bombshell dropped in my life, and I… played amongst the ruins, hoping it would all work out in the end – and you know what? It did,” he told The Mirror in April.
Henry recently returned to stand-up for the first time in 15 years, touring his show, Lenny Henry: Still At Large, until November.
