British actor, comedian and writer Sir Stephen Fry is one of the most seriously funny people I have ever met. His brand of humour is erudite and polished, but still, unmistakably funny. There is an entire generation who grew up on the jokes of A Bit of Fry & Laurie—a sketch comedy starring Fry and Hugh Laurie, broadcast on BBC between 1989 and 1995. Who can forget Fry’s caustic wit and Chaplin moustache as the barman sympathising with his customer’s marital troubles with unintended sexual innuendos?
“She takes no interest in my friends,” says Laurie as the customer disillusioned with his wife. “She laughs at my….”
“Peanuts?” asks Fry, holding out two bowls of peanuts.
“Hobbies,” answers Laurie. “So what if all the men have got larger…”
“Plums?” asks Fry, holding out a plate of plums.
“Salaries and better prospects,” Laurie continues. “She’s going on and on about her appearance. It is not as if she is an oil painting. She’s….”
“Plain and prawn-flavoured,” deadpans Fry, pointing to the bowls of peanuts.
Fry was at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year, discussing P.G. Wodehouse (whose character Jeeves he essayed in the television series Jeeves and Wooster, partnering once more with Laurie), Greek mythology (based on which he has written a trilogy) and the “strange affliction” that has been both his curse and blessing—his love for language.
He discovered it at boarding school, where he was sent at the age of seven. He was hopeless at everything else—art, music and sports (“I couldn’t run in a straight line without colliding into a tree”). He was resigned to the possibility of his life being one of loneliness and failure when, one day, his music teacher wrote a word on the blackboard: “Orchestra.” Fry looked at it and screamed: “Cart horse.” It was, of course, an anagram—something that had always happened with him: letters rearranging themselves into different words. He compares it with Russell Crowe’s character of a Nobel-winning mathematician in the film A Beautiful Mind. “He sees numbers going around him,” said Fry. “Presumably, mathematicians have the same relationship with numbers as I do with letters.”
His humour, too, is rooted in this play with words and phrases. “God knows I love slapstick,” says Fry. “I love the comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But I also love things that tickle the mind.”
He first realised the link between humour and language when he was 10 and living in a large British country house. His scientist father and historian mother were never into entertainment. There was a small television kept in the cupboard which would be taken out only to watch important events—like Neil Armstrong walking on the moon or the wedding of a member of the British royal family. One day, when his father was away, he took out the television from the cupboard and watched a scene playing out in a black-and-white film—a man kneeling before a beautiful woman and telling her, “I hope I shall not offend you if I state quite openly and frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.” Fry had never heard language like this, its formality enhancing the humour. He ran to his mother and told her, “I hope I shall not offend you if I state quite openly and frankly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” his mother asked him.
Fry described the scene to her, which she explained was from Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest.
“That line is so funny because you normally express love in the simplest way,” said Fry. “You say ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re great’. You don’t say ‘the visible personification of absolute perfection’. That is preposterous, and yet it is a gift because you have presented someone with a parcel of words that is so exquisite that you cannot but be charmed by it.”
Thus began his relationship with comedy. If A Bit of Fry & Laurie launched his career, then the comedy game show QI (2003-2016) sealed his place in the canon of humour greats, for which he was nominated for six BAFTA awards. He was voted among the all-time top 50 comedians by fellow comedians. For his role as Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde (1997), he got a Golden Globe nomination for best actor. His other notable films include Chariots of Fire (1981), V for Vendetta (2005), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and Love & Friendship (2016).
G.K. Chesterton once said that solemnity flows out of men naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy, hard to be light. “One ‘settles down’ into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness,” he said. “A man ‘falls’ into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky.” But everything that goes up must one day come down. Fry would know this best, having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 37. He had never heard the word before his diagnosis, but it explained the “massive highs and miserable lows” he had lived with all his life. It explained many things in his life—like the misbehaviour that nearly got him expelled from prep school, stealing credit cards as a teenager, walking out on acting projects, fleeing to Europe and attempting suicide by consuming a mix of drugs and alcohol. Fortunately, the producer of the film he was shooting for found him in an unconscious state and rushed him to the hospital. He spoke about his condition in the Emmy-winning documentary, The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive (2006).
But perhaps it is only when the lows are juxtaposed with the highs that you get to understand who Fry truly is—someone who knows that it is always darkest before dawn, who is confident enough not to be ashamed of his vulnerabilities, who believes that his failures define him as much as his triumphs. He wants to taste every fruit of every tree of every orchard in the world. “Some are addictive or dangerous,” he said at JLF. “Others are toxic or mechanical. Yet others are boring. But to end your life not having tried them all is an insult to creation.”
Fry’s experiences have not jaded him. Much like the world of the Greek gods and heroes about whom he has written three best-sellers, the latest being Odyssey published in 2024, his world, too, is filled with action, pathos, meaning and drama. His retelling of Greek mythology is witty, humorous and irreverent in a way that Homer probably did not intend it to be. In this, Fry has learned a secret that many wise men have missed: if you cannot laugh at life, then life is going to laugh at you.