‘Comedy is an escape,’ says Paul Merton, who has been making people laugh and forget their worries for more than 30 years. ‘It is very popular in bad times.’ He knows just how troubled our times are, as a team captain on the nation’s favourite topical comedy show, Have I Got News For You. And now Merton has put together a book of 80 comic short stories called Funny Ha Ha, with old masters like P G Wodehouse appearing alongside new voices from around the world. ‘Each of the authors in this book creates a world you can escape into. When we’re laughing, good chemicals flood through our brain; nothing else exists. It takes us somewhere, momentarily. That’s got to be a relief.’
The comedian and writer also appears on Radio 4’s Just A Minute, makes highly acclaimed travel documentaries and was once voted among the ten greatest British wits of all time, alongside Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward. He found personal refuge in comedy when his wife Sarah passed away in 2003, at the age of just 41. ‘She died on a Monday. Six days later I went down to The Comedy Store to watch the Sunday show, just to be in a room where 300 people were laughing.’
Paul Merton is good company and easy to warm to, a big man with an apparently gentle soul, but his role on Have I Got News For You is that of disrupter
Merton and producer Sarah Parkinson had been married for 12 weeks before her death from breast cancer. ‘It goes back to that thing about the release, the relief, it takes you somewhere else.’
A week later, Merton got up on stage again himself. ‘I would have done a gig earlier after Sarah died but I didn’t want it to be misinterpreted as somehow not caring.’ They say laughter is the best medicine, but the 62-year-old performer says making people laugh can also be a healing experience. ‘When you’re improvising and you’re in the moment, it’s as refreshing for you as it is for the audience. Plus, we have the extra joy of creating that laughter. In my more romantic moments I think there’s no higher calling.’
The Comedy Store is his spiritual home, where this son of a Tube driver and a nurse from Fulham first performed on a professional stage in April 1982, with a monologue he had written about a policeman on LSD: ‘I saw Constable Parrish approaching me, disguised as a fortnight’s holiday in Benidorm…’
Merton first did the sketch at two in the morning. ‘People laughed. I walked home from Soho to Streatham – where I lived in a bedsit – as the sun came up, on a cloud because it went so well. They asked for an encore. That got me through every bad gig for the next 18 months!’
Born Paul Martin, he changed to Merton for Equity reasons. His big break came in 1988 with the improvisational Channel 4 show Whose Line Is It Anyway? But just as things were taking off, Merton was admitted to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital for six weeks after a breakdown caused by a combination of overwork, the postponement of his Channel 4 series and anti-malaria pills. ‘I was in a room for group therapy after breakfast every morning. There was somebody who had been kicked out of their council house. Somebody else said his daughter was heavily into drugs. All these terrible things were happening to them. My thing was that somebody had cancelled a television series. I never said that in the session, because I knew: “That’s awkward.” I still had a sense of proportion and a sense of humour about it.’
His eight-year first marriage to fellow comedian Caroline Quentin began the same year, 1990. After the Maudsley, he was offered a new comedy series but turned down Have I Got News For You at first, saying he didn’t do topical jokes or politics. Twenty-seven years and over 500 episodes later, he still maintains that’s true. ‘I never do politics, no. The most topical joke I’ve ever told was written in 1984 about 1944! During the Second World War, my dad used to say the only bomb you’ve got to worry about is the one that’s got your name written on it. That scared the next-door neighbours, Mr & Mrs Doodlebug.’
Merton is good company and easy to warm to, a big man with an apparently gentle soul, but his role on Have I Got News For You is that of disrupter. Sometimes he does it with whimsy or surrealism, sometimes he pokes hard fun at panellists or the host. When original host Angus Deayton was the subject of tabloid revelations about affairs, cocaine and prostitutes in 2002, Merton was merciless. He brought every story back to Deayton and unzipped a hoodie to reveal a T-shirt bearing a newspaper splash of the story. ‘We stabbed him in the front,’ Merton said later, admitting he had not liked Deayton. ‘In the last recording I said, “Perhaps you should just resign.” ’
Merton has mellowed, but is still capable of putting his foot down. ‘There was a show when they played a clip of Kim Jong Un supervising rockets going into the air. I was quite forceful with one of the producers: “I can’t see anything funny about this. Let’s think about the comedy element. Don’t start off with this.” Whether that bit even went out, I don’t know. The following week, they gave me a story about the shortage of hummus on supermarket shelves. That was more like it.’
Paul Merton with his late wife Sarah on their wedding day in 2003. He has since remarried
Has politics gone so crazy that satire is irrelevant? ‘Well, Saturday Night Live in America is having great viewing figures because of Alec Baldwin playing Trump. It’s easy to overestimate the power of satire. As Peter Cook said once, “Berlin in the Thirties was full of cabaret clubs doing satire and that didn’t work out too well.” ’
Politicians have used Have I Got News For You to make or remake their images, the most famous example being Boris Johnson. Does Merton regret that? ‘Well, no. He was last on the programme in 2006.’ Yes, but Johnson even won a Bafta nomination for one of his regular appearances, so he’s very much identified with the show, isn’t he? ‘Yes, but the first time he was on, Ian had quite a go at him about a conversation recorded between Boris and his friend Darius Guppy, about having a journalist beaten up. Boris was very unhappy. He wrote a piece attacking the show. Then people started telling him how well he’d come across, apart from that angry moment.’
Almost all of his jokes on Have I Got News For You, Just A Minute on Radio 4 and at The Comedy Store are off the top of his head, so Merton admits he struggled to write the foreword to his new book, Funny Ha Ha. ‘I don’t know the last time I wrote a joke. The foreword took me about four or five goes. The first attempt was just awful.’ It’s charming now, with tales of his schooldays.
Merton still appears with The Comedy Store Players most Sundays, doing improvisational comedy with his third wife, comedian and actress Suki Webster. They ask the audience for subjects but sometimes have to act as censors. ‘The other day somebody said: ‘A swastika.’ We just went: ‘Nah.’
Merton comes across as a confident performer, so it’s a surprise when he admits that for a long time, he felt like an impostor. ‘I used to feel like I didn’t have permission to do this. It’s a working-class thing, which if you’re not from that background is very difficult to understand.’ After more than 500 shows, having been asked to compile some of the greatest comic writing of all time, is he finally starting to relax about that?
‘Yes,’ he says with a smile. ‘Some days I think I might actually be allowed to do this…’
‘Funny Ha Ha: 80 Of The Funniest Stories Ever Written’, selected by Paul Merton, is published by Head of Zeus on November 14, £25