For a social media sensation, Russell Howard isn’t much of a one for, well, sharing on social media. “I’m an old man, I kind of grew up before all that. It would just be me, sitting at home with a vacant expression, trying to think of funny things to say. Nobody wants to see what goes in the sausage and, for comedians, it is just blank faces and notepads,” says the 42-year old, who lives with his wife, NHS doctor Cerys, in north London.
“There’s a degree of punk to social media, nobody’s telling you what to do and there’s something cool about that, I’m just generationally different. But what I love about it is making stuff and throwing it out to these global channels.”
All this “making stuff and throwing it out” has seen Howard reach a massive audience. He has 10 million followers across various platforms, his newly created TikTok channel gained more than 100,000 followers on day one, and his topical news show The Russell Howard Hour has been viewed 400 million times on his YouTube channel.
The show will shortly return for its sixth run. It’s an all-consuming labour of love. “It’s pretty intense, but it’s fun because it’s collaborative, not like standup, which is obviously very solitary.”
Some weeks, it can be a bit of a slog.
“It’s like you’re given comedic homework, and you don’t really know what that’s going to be. When you’re trying to make Brexit interesting for 14 weeks, it gets more granular. It’s about digging deeper, finding nuggets within either boring or sad stories,” he says.
“So if you look at the war in Ukraine, which is obviously atrocious, we found a story about five TikTok dances that will help stop the war. How self obsessed can you be that you genuinely think your wiggling will stop a dictator?”
Such is the fast-paced nature of today’s news agenda, that sometimes things have to be thrown out or rewritten at the last minute – but nothing goes to waste. “We’ve got a writing tenacity with our material like my mum dealing with leftovers – it’s not dead yet, just put some cabbage with it.”
One element that is set in stone is Playground Politics, where Howard listens to the musings of seven-year-olds. “One kid was ranting about how Boris having parties wasn’t fair because his cousin had his birthday and all he had was a tiny cake. And I said ‘Listen, he could have got a big cake’, and a child next to him said ‘Russell’s right, that mum’s a disgrace,’” he smiles.
The show has featured stellar guests, from Jim Carrey to Jack Black. “Ed Sheeran was on The Jonathan Ross Show the same week I was and he said ‘I like your show. Can I come and do it?’ He just rocked up – didn’t want a fee – and he had to be done in half an-hour because his wife was cooking pasta. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to get Matthew McConaughey or Keanu Reeves and other times, it’s like ‘Yeah, but make it quick cos she’s doing spaghetti’.“
At the top of his game for 15 years, Howard’s success isn’t something he says he gives much thought to. “You don’t ever sit down and pat yourself on the back because you’re constantly going ‘What’s the next job?’ I just did Reading and Leeds Festival and I was thinking if I was a musician I’d have my 12 hits to bang out but, as a comedian, you have to have new stuff all the time,” he says. “And, genuinely, not to sound like too much of a dick, but when you can write jokes and pay your rent doing it – which I was doing when I was 23 – you’ve kind of made it. Everything else is just this weird bonus.”
Last month, he played the final gig of his Respite world tour in Stockholm to 1,800 people, a show he says was so beautiful, it gave him the chills. Doing such a global production inevitably makes for an ever-evolving show. “My bugbear about standup is when people do the same show everywhere.
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“What I took away from the tour is that there are many similarities between cultures, then there are bits that make no sense. It’s only when you’re in New York explaining the concept of a lollipop man to Americans, that you realise how peculiar giving an old man a giant lollipop and asking them to stop cars is.”
Cultural differences provide regular fodder for his act – like being in Norway and discovering their national animal is that well-known Norwegian beast, the lion. “Just the idea that in the 16th century they thought ‘We need an animal that sums up power and strength, we’ll go for the lion’ and there must have been a polar bear there going ‘Er hello?!’” he laughs.
“Or in Germany, as an English man, you find out – as I did – that you’re not allowed to wear a swimming costume in a sauna. I was shouted at by six naked 60-year-old women for having trunks on.”
Finding the funny in travel is well trodden territory for Howard, who blazed a trail for those that followed in filming a globe-trotting documentary with a parent. Russell Howard & Mum saw him take his fabulously spirited mother Ninette to Asia and on an American road trip.
“She would be delighted to do more but she’s looking after my sister’s kids a lot, so she doesn’t really have time. But our show did well, and then Romesh’s [Ranganathan] did well and then Jack [Whitehall] did his, and now you feel like you’ve seen it before, so I don’t know what the next iteration of it is, but we have amazing memories,” he says.
He isn’t especially interested in the permutations of being a celebrity, or of straying too far from stand-up comedy.
“There’s a difference between being a celebrity and being a famous comedian. When I’m not working, I hang out with my wife and my mates. I’m not thinking, ‘OK, is there a clothing line I can get connected to?’ I got offered a Head & Shoulders advert but I saw every gig in the future with bottles of shampoo thudding on the stage and I thought ‘I can’t do it’.”
He reckons doing reality TV is “dancing with the devil”. “You’ve built this crowd who know you and think they like you, and then you’ll get people who will come to watch you do comedy because they’ve seen you dancing. I can’t imagine the mindset of seeing somebody do a cha-cha-cha and thinking ‘I’d love to see him tell jokes’ or watching somebody chew a kangaroo’s anus and go ‘I wonder what he’s like live’. It’s just an odd thing… if I ever do Strictly, you know I’m in deep financial trouble.”
Alongside The Russell Howard Hour, he also has a new show to write. “It’s a stage of creation where you just write little notes on your phone and then you go through and try to figure out these thoughts. One just said ‘Stop Isis’ – it’s like trying to understand the scribblings of a madman.”
The Russell Howard Hour is on Sky Max, Thursdays, 10.30pm, and available on Now