“You think there’s nothing new, nothing funny to say about the [former] Prince Andrew story,” says Russell Howard. “Then you find out that part of his punishment could include being banned from all royal grouse hunts. I mean…” The 45-year-old comic unclamps the palms cradling his dinky Americano cup and throws them wide to express the open gag goal of such “madness”.
We’re sitting in a hotel bar a grouse’s flutter from the London Palladium, where Howard will be spending three nights of his 2026 stand-up tour Don’t Blame the Algorithm. And we’re on the topic of the disgraced royal because one of Howard’s 2019 skits about him has gone viral, again. The clip from his weekly satirical show, The Russell Howard Hour, sees the comedian unpacking Mr Mountbatten-Windsor’s “car crash” of an interview with Emily Maitlis about the extent of his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
My teenage kids were too young for the story at the time. But now they’re old enough to be curious about current headlines, they’ve turned to that Howard clip to parse the backstory in a safe, accessible and relatable style. His daft impersonations of the late Queen and Prince Phillip watching on the sofa turned the institution of royalty into a Gogglebox nan and grandad. This meant that by the time Howard dropped the jokes to acknowledge the lack of empathy shown to Epstein’s victims, those people (and their trauma) were suddenly realer too.
Watched on repeat, Howard’s pantomimed facial reaction to Andrew’s description of Epstein’s offences as “unbecoming” helped them process their way into all the morally appropriate – but deeply uncomfortable – corners of shock and disgust and bafflement at the absurdity of this privileged grown-up’s excuses. They snorted at Howard’s tidily turned pay-off: “I bet he’s sweating now.”
Although his friends tease him for “getting away with a lot of risqué material” in his sets “because people think I’m squeaky clean”, Howard says: “I hope people do feel they can trust me to talk to older kids.” He believes “topical comedy often does the same thing a good teacher can do. If you can get 30 mouth-breathing kids to laugh, then you get their attention and you’ve got a shot at getting them to make sense of the world around them… to get them to connect.”
The Somerset-twanged eldest child of an engineer and a dinner lady, Howard became a household name as one of the more puppyish panelists on Mock the Week from 2006 to 2010 before presenting Russell Howard’s Good News on BBC TV from 2009 to 2015 and The Russell Howard Hour for Sky from 2017 to 2022. Howard’s long service in the satirical trenches means that the news cycle often throws up callbacks that, gratifyingly, show him to be on the right side of history. “I mean, that [Maitlis interview] was six years ago…” And yet Mountbatten-Windsor has only just lost his royal title? “Yeah. Pfft!” He shakes the uncannily ageless head that has seen him compared to Ellen DeGeneres, various boyband members, a former prime minister of Finland and – according to one inspired heckler – “all the Minions at once”.
Cynical critics sneered at the “beige”, “uncontroversial” and “cuddly” nature of Howard’s stand-up in the early days. They disdained his “childish” tendency to rock out armpit farts and willy jokes, eye-rolling the mundanity of material about dunking biscuits. But with time even the hardest-hearted reviewers have warmed to shows through which we’ve all become intimate with the loveable eccentricities of his large family.
“My mum loves it when I ‘do’ her voice on stage,” he tells me. He admits his younger brother is often funnier than him. “There was a moment at my grandad’s funeral,” he recalls, “when my nan had a sore throat. She said ‘Anyone got anything I can suck?’ My brother said: ‘Looks like grandad picked the wrong day to die.’” He grins. “That created this really silly, dark, forbidden-yet-delicious way for everyone to escape from sadness and play in this netherworld of giggles.”
The “darker and more divided” the world feels, the more Howard feels we need comedy to blurt out the pain into public spaces and know the glassy shards will be gently packed in the bubbly wrap of laughter. I agree, having cried at two stand-up shows this year. The last was Alan Davies current tour, in which he speaks openly about the childhood sexual abuse he experienced at the hands of his gaslighting father. The moment I cried was when a beefy, bearded bloke shouted out a heartfelt “I love you, Alan” from the stalls, stopping the freewheeling comic dead in his tracks.
“Oh wow,” says Howard. “I’m welling up. That is beautiful. That is what comedy can do.” The release and relief of saying things we don’t in everyday conversation? “Totally. Stand-up can be kind of a societal orgasm. We become like bees dancing.”
This is why he’s called the new show Don’t Tell the Algorithm. Because – despite the number of younger fans who first saw him on their phones – he says live comedy shows are “one of the few experiences we enjoy away from machines. Watching TV now, you’re double screening. At music gigs you’re recording. But at stand-up shows you’re all zoned in – both as performer and as audience. When the gig is over, you almost can’t remember it but you will feel lighter for it.”
Married to a doctor (whom he first started dating in 2006), Howard’s wary of “getting too lofty” about the healing powers of his art (although he donated profits from the lockdown show he recorded in his childhood bedroom to the NHS). But he’s evangelical about the power of “finding something funny to say about sad subjects”. I have several friends who were able to discuss the rise of self-harm among teenagers with their children after Howard raised the subject in his first Netflix special. “When I first heard that statistic” – that one in four girls aged 16-25 self-harm – “I said to [fellow comic] Roisin Conaty: ‘That CAN’T be true!’ She said: ‘Ooh, it is’. I kept talking about it with all the female comics I know and I realised I was horrified and I wanted to understand. I needed to winkle the subject out.” He felt that if he could make the subject funny, he could “make it less heavy to talk about, because I was thinking there would be dads and daughters in the audience and in my smudged way maybe I could start a conversation…”
He has since been approached “by a lot of people who tell me they used to self-harm, or their son or daughter did… it’s difficult…” More so because – unlike Davies discussing his own abuse – this isn’t your own trauma? He has a think and remembers a conversation he had with the American comedian Rob Delaney after Delaney’s son Henry died from a brain tumour, aged two, in 2018. “He was desperately imploring people to address these painful subjects with the person going through them. We have this terrible British feeling of thinking: ‘Oh, I mustn’t ask about the terrible thing. I mustn’t remind them of it.’ We’re forgetting, of course, that they’re thinking about it all the time.”
Mr Good News has increasingly let some anger creep into his shows, which he workshops first at £1-a-ticket, sticky-floored Secret Comedy shows to check material is registering with younger audiences, and then at 200-seater arts centres to ensure he’s still snagging older fans. Today he tells me about “getting furious with the likes of Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate”. He also rails against tech giants Amazon and Meta, as well as the Daily Mail for sowing discord and spinning the narrative of a country in which, he argues, they avoid paying their share of taxes. He shudders. ”It’s almost like billionaires have a vested interest in keeping people divided isn’t it, when you see these far right marches?” He suggests that you don’t need to wave a flag to unite the Brits “when you can do a better job of that by starting to sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ or shouting ‘Free Bar!’ or asking somebody about Celebrity Traitors.”
“I’ve got a whole mini essay about phones in the new show,” he says. “Because they’re designed to hook us in – away from the complex mess of the world – like casinos. They hit you with this blizzard of news designed to trigger fear and stress and woe so you can forget there are incredible things happening every day too. Babies being fitted with cochlear implants, somebody trying a new food for the first time, a lollipop man helping somebody across the road, somebody laughing until they shit themselves…”
Instead of remote distraction, he wants his one-year-old son to experience real-life boredom. “Because phones make it really difficult for us to sit and think our thoughts through to the end. All great creative moments began with somebody’s brain whispering something to them and you HAVE TO listen to that whisper and go with it. Would Paul McCartney have written ‘Yesterday’ if he’d been able to watch reels of somebody flipping a water bottle instead?”
Howard rubs his eyes. “I’ve never been happier or more tired than I’ve felt since becoming a dad,” he says. “The other day, my son came up to me and just put his head on my inner arm and relaxed into me. It gave me this cosmic feeling of otherworldly happiness. So simple and obvious. I thought: isn’t it amazing what we human beings can do for each other.”
Russell Howard’s ‘Don’t Tell the Algorithm’ tour begins on 22 January (russell-howard.co.uk)
