At 41, the comedian has achieved things his 15-year-old self wouldn’t believe
I just got home from watching The Matrix Resurrections, and lookie here, it’s my podcast guest this week, talking to the stars from that movie. Ladies and gents, here’s Russell Howard interviewing Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss.
It’s wild to think of Howard one minute talking to movie stars for his TV show in the UK, and then the next day (or a few days ago), speaking to me from his flat while I’m in my parents’ house.
Howard spoke with me about how he’d just wrapped the latest season of his Sky talk series, about how his TV career is unlike many of his comedy peers in the UK — he eschews panel shows and presenting — and how he’s looking forward to finally returning to the United States in 2022. Pandemic permitting, of course.
He’d planned to tour the U.S. and the world in 2020, but the pandemic put a kibosh on all of that. Instead, he returned home from his March 2020 tour stops in Denmark and then hunkered down at his parents for weeks while his wife worked as a doctor on the COVID-19 frontlines. But he was already in the process of filming a documentary, which continued filming, and managed to release that plus a new hour of stand-up this month on Netflix. The hour is called Lubricant, and here are the first four minutes from it:
OK, now that you’re all caught up on Howard, let’s get to my chat with him. You can listen to our podcast here:
Here is an edited and slightly condensed transcript of my conversation with Russell Howard!
Sean L. McCarthy: Has the latest Omicron variant/wave had a ripple effect on the comedy scene in the UK yet?
Russell Howard: The comedy circuit in the UK already was hit pretty hard, but that had been fading away in the past couple of years anyway. We used to have comedy clubs that would have a Thursday-Friday-Saturday, and they’d gone to a Saturday, partly because there were more comics that have been on TV and now were on tour and or come up through podcasts or whatever. So, the concept of a comedy club was struggling against, ‘Oh, I know her! I know him. I’ve seen them.’ Do you know what I mean? So people were going to sort of small venues and kind of rock venues or like theaters, but all those venues are really struggling, and lots of comics and comedy clubs, I think something like half the bookings have been canceled. People are now doing that sort of self-imposed curfew from now until Christmas, because we didn’t get to see our family last year. You know, didn’t get to go to any parties unless you were part of the British Government. We’re now kind of like almost locking down on our own, so that we can see our family in 10 days. So it’s a really weird period because we’ve just finished my TV show and we normally have a big wrap party, and then I go to my cousins and you know, it’s like the build up to Christmas and you have all the gigs that you do at a younger comic, it feels like they’re all done this year. And because January’s always bad anyway, for comedy clubs and hospitality in the UK, maybe things might be OK by February? I guess, I don’t know. That’s complete guesswork.
You haven’t already started thinking in terms of, oh, maybe I need to do another series of Russell Howard’s Home Time?
Howard filmed a pandemic talk show from home in spring 2020.
No. I have already started working up to, I wonder what the next American stuff’s going to be. I can’t wait to do comedy clubs in the UK, just drop-ins and working up new stuff to get ready for America. That’s kind of where my head is. So yeah, so selfishly, I want that. To be honest, I don’t mind doing half-full rooms, like in comedy clubs and all that kind of stuff to work up new material. It’s just when you do proper shows. Now that we’ve had a taste of full capacity again, it will be quite depressing to kind of go back to kind of a half full, in like a big theater.
Or a football stadium.
Yeah, yeah, well that stadium wasn’t even half full, mate. That was 2,000 in a 25,000 (capacity). Weirdly it was all right, though, but it is a testament to the audience’s desire to see something that that was such a great gig for a week. Yeah, outside of a pandemic, I’m not sure 2,000 in a 25000 is the best ratio for fun.
I did love how you how the documentary, Until The Wheels Fall Off, did show how much you were willing to adapt to the situation.
I doubt I was alone but I just love doing comedy so much, and comedy is created with not for an audience and you get to this magic place with a good crowd or a bad crowd. They make the stuff better. There’s an electricity and it gets deeper and you can find new angles. You just can’t do that on Zoom. You know, with that kind of I did about three Zoom gigs and it’s that aaaahh laugh or there’s the nods. And it’s just, it’s not enough to, to kind of spark so that’s why I was you know, willing to do gigs in car parks or, I did a gig in a woods. I was doing loads of shows and kind of a half-full theatres just to keep going really, because and also, it’s fun. It’s so much fun to like, irrespective of how many people are in. If you’re working on new stuff. It kind of doesn’t matter. Like actually it’s probably harder to do a half-full room when you have a show that you remember doing in front of the full audience because you’re like, well, that’s not how… that bit normally does better. But because it was kind of brand new, and I started again. It didn’t really matter. I wasn’t comparing the material’s response to anything pre pandemic.
Yeah, well, one of the things that that I noticed, you know, I’m an American viewer/critic, watching Lubricant. I just saw how much joy you have in acting out the bits. And I wonder, that style of performing. How much of that comes from having to play to much larger audiences with arenas, or how much of that comes from having younger siblings and acting out for them when you were younger?
That’s interesting. See my theory on it is: New York, all the comedy clubs in New York I’ve been to have tiny stages. Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny stages. And my image of it is, this might be wrong. The guy or the girl stood there, mic up, don’t move. Just eyeball you know and go bang bang go. And you know, that as a consequence, has clearly produced so many ridiculously good comics. The UK comedy clubs, our stages are bigger. And the rooms are a bit bigger, like even for open mics, whatever. So I think we always have a bit more room. So as a consequence, we have to learn to kind of work bigger stages early on, in a way that maybe if you’re coming up in New York City, you don’t. Because that’s one of the things I’ve noticed. Most U.S. comics are really great at being still. And I was, when I first started out, I was really frenetic. I would run around. Because I was terrified. I was only 18 when I started. The older you get, you try and sort of move with purpose. We have, like one of the greatest British comics is Billy Connolly and he’s one of the king of the kind of act out. And it’s British. I don’t know British, a lot of British comics. We really enjoyed being in the joke, but then so does Bill Burr. If you like staying in the joke. And then you’re in this kind of like sort of quite dreamy little sketch that you’ve kind of created for yourself. It’s kind of fun. But like you say, it’s a lot easier to do that if you’ve got a nice big stage when you’re coming up whereas, I remember when I first started gigging in America, in those comedy clubs in New York, you could feel the audience is going, alright, mate, fucking hell. Like, you know what I mean? And I was really like trying to play it out how I would play in arena, and it doesn’t work. So you just have to just sort of take the edges off a bit and adapt to that room. But certainly when you’re playing, like a, you know, like a 15,000 seater, the only way I found to do is is to kind of be expressive and to sort of move with purpose.
So you mentioned when you started at 18 being very frenetic. And there’s a bit in Lubricant where you gently mocked the idea of going back and talking to your 15-year old self. What would 15 year old Russell think if he saw you now?
Oh, he’d be horrified that we weren’t a footballer. Just, he’d be so upset.
All of the TV and accolades wouldn’t make up for that?
I think yeah, like 15 year old Russell was desperate to be a footballer. So 16 year old Russell would be just delighted, but 15 year old would, yeah, he’d be very upset with me. Oh, God. Just getting a text from my wife, our hospital apparently is getting ridiculous with with COVID. Oh, God, it never fucking ends, does it?
Well, 15 year old Russell would probably be thrown off a lot by that, too.
That would be quite funny. I didn’t know that’s ever happened, has it. Like a real breakdown when the 15-year-old and the 40-year-old each other. And that would be a really good sketch. They’re both desperate, desperately sad and they just kind of getting it end up getting pissed together. What’s it all about?!
What would 15-year-old Russell think of Star Wars now?
He’d like The Mandalorian. But I think he would also go, hold on, it’s just The A-Team, isn’t it? It’s the classic, get him in trouble get him out of trouble. But he would have loved Rogue One. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. And then the rest, meh.
Do you have some sort of unified theory of Star Wars because I know it shows up in your work.
Yeah, it’s such a touching point, isn’t it? It’s such a cultural touching point. If you’re my age, how old are you?
I just turned 50.
Right, so exactly. So I’m counting you as the leader of my generation as a 41-year-old. But it was such a, I guess it’s like Harry Potter is for kids now. It just blew your fucking mind when you watched it as a kid. And just the idea of a lightsaber and this kind of you know, like Han Solo and Wookies and I remember going to watch it at the cinema with my dad. Go to the cinema with your old man and it’s just the two of you and you feel so adult and just right at the end like you know, they defeat the bad guy and they’re playing the drums with, you know, the stormtroopers heads, just come out, just mind blown. And, you know, growing up in the middle of nowhere, I think we all have that kind of, maybe I’m a Jedi? You know, it’s kind of we’ve all had that moment particular when you’re hungover. Where you kind of, you see the TV remote just out of reach and you really focus on it to see if you can bring it to your hands. Everyone from my generation, we secretly hope that one day, it happens and we have the Force. I love the concept of the Force. I love that message of ‘Use the Force.’ Particularly with stand up, it’s that thing where sometimes you get. I remember doing the gig, first gig when we came out of the lockdown from the hotel for two weeks in New Zealand, and I’ve never done this. I kind of made bullet points and I put them on the speakers at the gig, just in case I kind of froze and I kind of had this moment where I was like, ‘Use the Force, Luke, fuck.’ You’re just panicking here. It’s OK. Like you haven’t gigged for a while, but you’re going to be all right, just use the Force. And whenever you do that, and you’re truly in the room as a comic, it’s so much better than trying to kind of regurgitate the script in your head or, even worse, follow a script in your head.
I quote the movies and then talk about the Force as spirituality all the time when I’m not talking about comedy. How does a frenetic 18-year-old whirling about the stage end up falling into a crew with the likes of John Oliver and Daniel Kitson?
Because, to use the Star Wars analogy again, they saw me as a young padawan. I remember just doing gigs with them and kind of just clicking and having this sort of similar sense of humor, and then getting put together with John. We have university gigs over here called the comedy network. So I was booked to support John at these gigs. And then Daniel, who’s friends with John obviously, asked me if I would support him as well. So I kind of was, yeah obviously. So I was kind of like 22 I guess, and John and Dan would be, I guess 28 at that stage. I was supporting these two geniuses and they were kind of my mates. And it was, like, one of the greatest times of my life really just because it was so counterculture. We’re on tour, and I would do 20 minutes and I was trying to turn stuff over in the same way they were, and then I would watch them do like an hour that was in a constant state of evolution. And it was just particularly with Daniel, like jawdropping some nights, where I would see something happen during the day. And then it would appear on stage that night, almost fully formed, you know, and as a kind of a young comic. You couldn’t study two greater kind of comedians from a silly political point of view or a beautiful kind of sociological point of view. We just became pals and kind of just clicked and had similar senses of humor, really.
But you’ve also made it a point to not be too political.
Well, see, I do a show about the news, but what I like doing is I don’t, I’m not a fan of clapter. I like making points with jokes. I like making a really funny show that’s kind of comedy club funny on TV, rather than, I find like a lot of satire kind of particularly in the UK, so toothless, and it just makes people applaud a point that they already know. And it’s just, I love making a joke about the point rather than, like a good case in point, is there is the story of COP 26. You know, we’re trying to phase out coal, but it was changed to phase down. And Boris Johnson said that was the same thing. And you’re like, those are entirely different words. If you asked somebody to put your dog out and they put your dog down. I mean, those are incredibly different, different positions. So what I like about that, that’s a joke about the absurdity of his position. Whereas it feels like there’s a trend at the minute to go. You could quite easily go, ‘Oh my god, it’s disgusting. What’s he playing at? Can you believe that? He is changing his mind saying that those words mean the same when they do not mean the same?!?!’ CLAP CLAP CLAP It’s like fucking yeah, you know, but I remember talking to Michelle Wolf about this. It’s so easy to make people clap. It’s really hard to make them laugh. But you can. So that’s my thing I like making, my aim is the joke. The older I get, I’m trying to find the joke or the laugh that expresses my point of view.
you mentioned that you have to present different types of jokes for the TV show. Do you feel like there’s two different Russells? There’s a Russ that people see on TV and there’s a Russ that people see at the Hammersmith?
Not really. But the only difference with my TV show is because it’s a topical news show, it has to be about the news. Sometimes you get up and you sense the audience don’t want to talk about Omicron, for example. At a comedy club, they might just want an evening of just forgetting about it, or they might want to, who knows, but you just don’t have that option. It’s like if that’s the news, that’s the news. And you have to kind of chip away at it. So I guess the difference is that when I’m onstage, is you there’s a greater range of things that you can talk about. If you want to talk about your uncle, or you want to talk about a thing you saw on Facebook a little while ago or you want to chat about COVID, you can. But you can also tell a funny story about the time you saw a squirrel. It’s a broader range of funny rather than these will be jokes about their news.
Right. Uncle Fun can’t show up on Sky or the BBC.
Oh, Uncle Fun. Yeah, totally. But also because it’s live. We shoot it live. It’s like a lot of the time, British crowds can be kind of to and fro. So it’s quite an interactive show. So if somebody laughs in a weird way, you kind of bring them into the show. So it isn’t kind of, just like this is the monologue you know, it’s still kind of me. And that’s all I do on TV. I don’t really do the kind of panel shows over here. And I’m not, you know, a TV presenter. That’s kind of doing a completely different show. It’s always been doing stand-up. The only thing I’ve ever done on TV is stand-up. I’ve never I did one presenting job years ago. I was backstage at the BRIT Awards, which is like a music event. And I interviewed Amy Winehouse, which was fairly strange, and kind of incredible. But I saw instantly, no, it wasn’t for me. I didn’t know enough about music. And I didn’t feel that that was where I wanted to be. I kind of got because I look like the kind of twat that would be in a boy band. I got offered a lot of kind of TV presenting early doors and always kind of tried to pursue stand-up really because it was kind of what I loved and then was lucky enough to be able to do stand-up on TV.
You mentioned earlier your perception of comedy in New York. And then what you saw when you actually were on stage in New York. Over here in New York, that our sense of British comedy, is that the whole idea is to become a presenter and be on panel shows. That seems to be the thing to do in the UK. Is that fair to say?
What’s interesting about it, it’s strange how I’ve seen a lot of comics in the UK cease to be comics because they’d become sort of TV personalities. Yeah, that’s definitely fair. But they can still do stand-up. The worst that you probably don’t see, because it doesn’t make it out, are the TV personalities that believe they can do stand-up, and they’re yuck. But they get an audience and I mean, fuck me generally. And but what’s great, you know, they’ll, they’ll get like a young comic to support them in the area, and that young comic will kick the shit out of the gig, and then the TV personality will struggle. But yeah, I see what you mean. We don’t have as many pure stand-up comedians as you do in America. Maybe that’s because we don’t have the rich history of the pure stand-up. We have Billy Connolly is our greatest, and we have (Eddie) Izzard, but you guys, obviously you’ve got Lenny Bruce, you’ve got Carlin, you’ve got Pryor, you’ve got Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, you know what I mean, you’ve got stand-ups and movie stars. That’s probably your parallel. We don’t really make movies in the same way that you guys do. If you’re a funny stand up in the UK, we’re like, right, let’s get him on telly. Whereas if you’re funny stand-up in America, let’s get him on the silver screen.
Sadly, we also have TV personalities who will book theater tours.
Yeah. What blows my mind about them: They never work their gear up. Anyone that’s any good. Like Chris Rock, Seinfeld, Michelle Wolf, whoever, they’re all working. You work the clubs, you make sure it works before you have the audacity to sell it. Rather than fucking, you know, that I’ll book an arena. And I just, I’ll just learn the script. It’s just like, wow.
Although I guess to be fair to them, or to even podcasters, who now also are going on theater tours….
I think that’s a different thing. Because the relationship. I think podcasts are so punk and fun and their own thing, that they’re in a band, and the audience the relationship that people have with the podcast is really tight. You know what I mean? People go to work with podcasts. It’s like, every Monday I’m there with them. They’re mates, and it’s such a togetherness. I kind of get that, and I don’t think those people present themselves in a different way. And I think the audience is getting a very different thing from it, that it’s a real kind of Wayne’s World gig.
That’s what I was starting to say is, I guess if you’re a podcaster, or a TV personality, when you’re playing in a theater, the audiences have a much different slash lower expectation. Because they’re not they’re not expecting refined jokes. They’re more there to soak up the relationship. Like oh, the person that I’m listening to on my commute or the person that I’m seeing on TV, I now get to see in real life.
If you’ve come up through stand-up, you know how extraordinary that is to have that feeling where they know you. I get it when I go to America, like in comparison to Europe and England, the gigs are a lot smaller, but it’s still mind-blowing that there’s like 500 people in Denver who are there to see me. It’s crazy. So you have to meet their expectation. You have to blow their mind, so it isn’t enough just to go, well you saw me! Do you know what I mean? You want the live version to be better than what they expect, and that’s what happens when you come up in stand-up, because you want to crush. You want to pull up trees. You don’t want to just appear, and wave for them because you want to make them laugh.
So as a proper stand up. Why, as you expressed in the documentary, why were you, at least at the beginning of the pandemic, why were you ready to quit?
Well, I was so exhausted by it. Because I’d been on this, certainly since 2006. I’ve kind of done either a TV show, where I’ve had to write proper material, or and then going into a tour. And I’ve done that kind of since 2006 without really having much of a break and it just felt a bit kind of vampirized by it. We did an arena tour in the UK where we did like 25 arenas in a month. And it was just horrific. Well, no, brilliant. But in terms of, you know, stop go bang, bang, bang, you know, and then I went straight into my TV show, and I was just frazzled, really. So I wanted to break. I wasn’t gonna quit. I just fancied a bit of time off. Be careful what you wish for.
I don’t know if people had a very similar situation like this where you suddenly realize how lucky you are that you get to, you know, write jokes for a living and perform. And you realize that actually, you’ve slightly taken that for granted, how extraordinary it was. And actually, it’s just about saying no to every gig in the world. It’s not about saying no to comedy, it’s about don’t do everything. You thick fuck. You know what I mean? That’s why you want to break it’s because you did 25 gigs in 26 days. Yeah, that probably will break most people. So it’s just about trying to, it made me realize there’s a more sustainable way of doing things. So the idea of, you know, going to a city and spending some time there. So if we’re doing gigs in Stockholm, it’s like, great, you can go there on the Thursday, and then the shows on the Friday and then we can hang out on the Saturday and that’ll be a fun thing, rather than right. But if we do Stockholm, we can go straight to Malmo. Just trying to kind of smell the roses a bit more. That’s what I realized that it wasn’t a break from comedy I needed. It was a break from, it was almost like doing comedy CrossFit. Run between all the exercises. No! Just, take your time.
I’ve tried CrossFit. I get it.
Yeah, right. It’s fun once and then twice and then you go, oh, I’m dying here. It was the fatigue of the machine rather than the beauty of comedy, really.
Have you, to borrow a term from your previous Netflix special, recalibrated?
Yeah, definitely. The last TV show we did was so much calmer, so much more relaxed. Every week we had 500 people there. It was incredible. And last series we had nobody so I was performing. I mean they still put the chairs out, which is a very fucking British way of reminding you how unpopular you are. But because of COVID you weren’t allowed to have anybody in the room. So that’s been the big thing is realizing how lucky you are to have people come to your show. And the energy comes back now because you can feel the audience is so delighted to be there. You’re so delighted to be there. Everyone who’s into stand-up or music or any kind of performative art. You’ve missed your thing. So when you get to see your your guy or your girl again, you don’t want to you don’t want to miss it. You don’t want to lose that and the comic wants to absolutely smash it because they’ve been thinking and writing all these thoughts waiting to get to you. You know what I mean? It’s kind of that’s what it’s made me think really that’s how I feel about the gigs I’ve got now in America and Europe. I’ve got lots of ideas. And I’ve got three months to kind of have a think to see what the shows can be because obviously it won’t be the show that’s on Netflix. So it’s kind of like it’ll be so exciting to start kind of turning the wheel again and seeing what was there.
Well, thank you so much for not quitting.
Thanks, man. I really enjoyed that, Sean. That was really lovely interview.
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