the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Does anyone actually find Lenny Henry funny?

On the night of his farewell presenting gig on ‘Comic Relief’ I ask this not to be provocative but as a genuine question. Does anyone find him funny? Not funny in a ‘laugh and he’ll go away’ way, or ‘laugh because the poor deluded fool thinks he’s funny’ like David Brent, and not in a ‘If there’s nothing better on the box I suppose I’ll watch.’, which leads to a begrudgingly tight lipped smile. No, an actual laugh, one that escapes your mouth unbidden by conscious thought, a spontaneous reaction, as unmistakeable as it is uncontrollable.

I’ve asked lots of people this over the years, and whilst most people think he’s a likeable enough chap, the sort of chap who if he was your neighbour you’d like to have as a friend, no-one I’ve asked actually will admit to finding him funny. Everyone agree’s he does a lot for charity, but as was the co-founder of that charity, one that has helped him in the public eye since 1985, it’s been a beneficial enterprise.

I’m not suggesting that his motives have ever been less than totally altruistic and beyond reproach, yet one has to admit that few comedians have had his longevity. Anyone remember ‘Three of a Kind’Three the comedy sketch show starring Tracey Ullman, Lenny Henry and David Copperfield? No? Three series were made of it by the BBC. Still nothing? Ullman went to the US, where she has been nominated for twenty – twenty – Emmy awards, and has won seven, but what happened to Copperfield.

I know this has nothing to do with him – well it does, but in a good way – and that is that I’ve always had a problem with the idea of charity, that in modern day Britain there are still aspects of acute public need that the state fails to provide for, and so charities are set up to meet the need. There are about 165,000 of them How is s this possible in the 6th richest country in the world?

What does it say about a society that needs so many charities and while yes, some of them are undoubtably frivolous, some, like food banks are a damning indictment of a society that needs them. The idea that in the UK there is an ever growing need for food banks is so redolent of a Britain I thought only existed in history books or the works of Dickens, of workhouses and the notion of the deserving poor.

There’s a food bank in Rochdale. Has been since 2012. A town that needs a food bank possibly has a load more pressing concerns than electing an M.P whose main focus seems to lay thousands of miles away. A town that needs a food bank, in a country that has over 1600 of them, is a country that has failed and the need for the kind of charity that a food bank provides is a glaring sign of that failure.

Anyway, Lenny Henry. The question still stands, does anyone find him funny?