“The noise of laughter is an incredible thing,” says Lee Evans. “If you heard the same volume of crying, think how terrible it would be. But the sound of ten thousand people laughing in unison is an incredible noise.”
He should know. Two thirds of the way through a tour of the arenas of Britain — the sort of supersheds more accustomed to the sound of motor shows and power chords than observational comedy, even of the outsized sort that Evans purveys — he has just broken a world record for the biggest comedy gig. At the Manchester Arena, on November 19, he played to 10,108 people — plus a clutch of Guinness World Records adjudicators with clipboards. He is, officially, the king of comedy, the laird of laughter, the guv’nor of guffaws.
“Yeah, nice of them to turn up, wasn’t it?” Evans says quickly, managing to look pleased and uncomfortable at the same time. It’s a few days after the Manchester show, and we’re in a meeting room at the Groucho Club in Soho. Any closer to the heart of showbiz insiderdom and we’d be playing tennis with Jonathan Ross.
Evans, for all the determined downplaying of his status, does somehow look like a star, with his blazer, elegantly tattered jumper, Ultrabrite teeth and glowing skin — his complexion cleansed, no doubt, by the nightly sauna that he puts himself through on stage. But if ever there were a man who wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member, this is he. “It’s all baloney, isn’t it?” he suggests, as if apologising for the fact that he hadn’t done anything more commendable — heal lepers, invent the water engine — to justify such attention. “It’s just entertainment.”
Evans gives every impression of being as surprised as anyone else that he should be mounting the most successful British comedy tour yet. The new show, which is released on DVD today, will have been seen by some 300,000 people by the time Evans plays the last of six — six — Wembley dates next month. His material is good stuff rather than great stuff, I’d suggest — but Evans would go farther. “It means nothing,” he says. “It’s nothingness, it’s of its time, it’s contemporary babble.” But you suspect that he’s comparing himself to some Platonic ideal of clowning more than he is to his rivals.
What he will admit is that he vents his spleen on the indignities of modern life — call centres, junk mail, fancy food — with an unparalleled energy, amped up to reach all the way to the back of the hall. “Physically, it does take it out of you,” he says, “but more people does make it more fun for me to perform.”
Whatever his private misgivings about his material, on stage he backs it to the hilt. However small the observation, however slight the remark, Evans the performer holds nothing back.
“Well, I don’t want to come offstage thinking I didn’t do everything that I can,” he says. “Because then I’d feel like a failure. And I know for the audience, you work through the week, and then you pay to see some big-eared fellow, you want a night out; I know how important that is. When I was a little boy, I followed my father around — he’s a comic too — and I saw entertainers doing that on stage and it really is magical, when you see someone really going for it rather than phoning it in.”
And, presumably, he saw people phoning it in too? “Yeah, I used to hate that. Working people don’t deserve that s***.” For a second, Evans has slipped out from the charmingly modest, peculiarly respectful tone he adopts for interviews. He catches himself: “But that’s just my opinion.”
Evans, 41, is almost manic about underplaying his success. He doesn’t know how much he earns, he says — and anyway, he doesn’t need more than £50 a week spending money. He lives with his wife Heather — whom he met when they were both at school — and their 11-year-old daugher Molly in Billericay, Essex. He is devoted to his family — that’s why he came home a few years ago after writing for sitcoms and then acting in Hollywood films such as Mousehunt and There’s Something About Mary. That’s why he won’t take this show abroad. But he’s also a solitary man, happiest working in the shed — well, converted garage — in his garden. He can’t be easy to live with.
There’s not a lot of personal stuff in the show — “Isn’t there? Good point. I don’t know why not” — but he does mention how hard it is for Heather to get him to take time off. It’s an ongoing dispute — Heather is trying to get him to take a holiday after the tour. “And I’m going, ‘Please don’t. I can’t sit on a beach, what’s that?’ ”
Work, he says, is how he likes to relax. “It’s the big argument in our house. When I was a kid, we were taught that life is hard and you’ve got to work, full stop. And when we moved around so much as kids, you always had to work hard to fit in wherever you ended up.”
But you don’t want to push yourself till you drop, do you? “You sound like my wife. She will say, ‘I know you’re an idiot, but you don’t have to compensate so much for that now, you can take it a bit easier.’ But I don’t feel like sitting in a chair and just twitching. And I’m scared that if you slow down your brain will stop.”
An intensely bright man behind his daffy self-deprecation, Evans is well aware of glib psychological explanations for his work rate, his perfectionism, his desire to impress. His parents were hard to impress, he never felt he fitted in, he doesn’t feel worthy of his success . . . He’ll own up to all of these things but seems comfortable with his own discomfort — it’s a cue to do work that fascinates him, after all. The worst thing to be, it seems, is complacent — and the line between confidence and complacency can seem worryingly thin. “Yeah, well played, you always feel you have to punish yourself. Yeah, I’m ill!” The one thing he won’t play down is his marriage. “We’ve come so far together,” he says. “We live in this nice house, and we can’t believe it. We are just waiting for a knock on the door and a voice to say, ‘Right, you two scallies, out!’”
His house bears no trace of his professional achievements, he says, although he knows that Heather secretly keeps track of all his successes in a cuttings book and hoards trinkets such as his Perrier Award. And when, last year, he starred alongside Nathan Lane in the London run of The Producers — a career highlight for most people — he spent any idle moments writing a screenplay, a romantic comedy that he hopes to star in himself.
After the exhilarating freedom of working on his own on this tour, he is reluctant to work on other people’s material again. But nor will he try to top the scale of this tour. “It was an experiment,” he says, “but I’ve done it now.” So does he know what he wants to be doing in five years’ time? There is a long pause. “There are so many more things to learn, aren’t there?” he says finally. “That ’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. As long as I’m creating something, and learning something at the same time, I’m happy.”
Lee Evans: XL is released on DVD today. Visit www.offthekerb.co.uk for tour details
