Lenny Henry: I’m still a big risk – humor brings back the best music in the game of success | Section

Meand this new show – his first tour since 2010 – Lenny Henry he says he often rejects reality TV ads. He said yes Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters (no, not even me) because they wanted to pay to add it.

At first one wonders what kind of home improvement can still be profitable: it is difficult to get a handle on its purpose. In the first half of the white stop, there are new things and old places are being retread. He does little about his family finding signs of the Black Country when they arrived from Jamaica; many heard the joke in 1989’s Live and Unleashed, when he told us that his father had announced, “The Queen has already arranged a place for me.”

Bands can repeat old songs but players have to come up with new ones. Henry seems to dispute that idea. There are glimpses of the Jamaican matriarch of her large family, jokes about Prince and Tiswas – it’s very funny at times.

In the second half of his own, Henry asks the audience questions – almost every one of which allows him to play a video from the fifties – and you realize that the show is a triumph and it would be difficult to deny it. In the first half he makes a lot of 67, a setup that allows him to show himself later when he started at 16, and you realize how far he has come and how long he has been doing this.

There is an added suggestion to the audience by Henry that this first stop is “home”. He knows all the areas the listeners say they are from and can point out “down the road” where he went to school and the hospital to visit his brother. There is also a lot of his family in the group – it makes for a warm and welcoming audience.

When asked about his comedy heroes, he cites Tommy Cooper and Richard Pryor: he is in some ways a combination of both. He’s probably the only British comedian of the 1970s who could do legitimate slavery jokes, making fun of the way three Britons in their hometown talk to each other. It’s similar to Chris Rock’s performance about a slave who can read. Henry was criticized in his freelancing for having no teeth while Rock always bit, but in order to survive now he bares his teeth and proves that he is (Theophilus P) The Wildebeest that can roar.