Lenny looks at life of laughter

"When my agent first suggested this tour it seemed like a good idea. A hundred gigs later, I'm shattered. I want to hunt him down and kill him," jokes Lenny. "It's been a hoot though. I love stand-up, I've done it consistently over the past 30 years and I love the buzz, the connection with people."

On Sunday he rolls into Leeds, the last stop on his nationwide journey. Lenny's live show Where You From? follows a successful first leg, which took in Bradford's Alhambra. A further 40 dates were added across the UK and Ireland.

"One thing that saddens me is that most of the places I've visited look exactly the same," says Lenny. "They've all got shopping precincts full of the same high street stores and shop fronts.

"You get the odd pretty little place where they've clung onto their thatched roofs and Tudor beams but most towns are clone towns."

One thing that differentiates towns and cities is their sense of humour, as Lenny discovered filming his BBC documentary series Lenny's Britain.

He travelled the country looking at humour in the workplace, at leisure, in families and communities, asking whether it unites or divides us as a nation.

"Laughter is linked to adversity, it helps us cope with things like illness, bereavement and the working day," he says.

"I found that in big industrial cities, places where there had been working docks, mills and factories, there was a distinctive humour. You get that sharp working-class humour in places like Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham and the Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns. It's a shared sense of adversity which creates community. That's something I grew up with in Dudley.

"The workplace is changing, it's more office-based, and I'm not sure that's conducive to the collective sense of humour you'd find on the docks or in factories. There's a generation growing up who'll never have that. Have you spoken to a teenager lately? They're so humourless. Everything is handed to them on the internet. Eeh, we made our own fun in my day!"

In his live show Lenny ponders on life in noughties Britain and how humour gets us by. "This leg of the tour is more internal, I talk about my own experiences - things like my mum, the jobs I did as a kid and how I was bullied. And I've returned to some of my old characters like (stroppy Jamaican shopkeeper) Mr Lister and (ageing lothario) The Wolfman."

Lenny is fun, likeable and laid back. We think of him as the loud comic in the even louder suit who has become as synonymous with Comic Relief as red noses, but he started as an old-school stand-up who got his break on New Faces, leading to a regular slot on Tiswas, then Eighties comedy show Three Of A Kind and sketch shows of his own.

"I'm proud of coming from New Faces, there's nothing like that now for young comics," says Lenny.

"I just don't know where the next me or the next Victoria Wood will come from. New Faces offered a variety of talent you don't get on TV anymore.

"X Factor is just about singing, Britain's Got Talent was only on for a week. These shows focus on sob stories to get us weeping or the poorer contestants to make us laugh. What's wrong with just letting the talent shine and entertain us?"

Lenny's own humour gradually changed from gags and impressions to telling observational stories based on his life experiences.

"That's largely down to Dawn," he says, referring to his wife, Dawn French. "She showed me there were other ways to approach comedy. I became influenced by people like Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, whose material was based on their lives.

"Comedy is truth. The blacker' I got, the funnier I became, and gained bigger black audiences."

Is anything off limits? Joan Rivers started telling Twin Towers gags in a New York club just days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and says audiences laughed as an emotional release.

"You can make a joke about anything but you have to be a very skilled, experienced and great comic to get the balance just right," says Lenny.

Next year he's working on a couple of radio projects. Rudy's Rude Records is a comedy about three generations of a family running a record shop - "There's talk of it going on telly but they always say that," says Lenny - and a series called What's So Great About..?

"It follows a programme I did about Shakespeare. I look at why things I'm not convinced about are meant to be so great - like Bob Dylan," he adds, launching into an uncanny warbling impression of the folk legend.

Lenny is no stranger to acting, having proved his worth in such TV dramas as Chef! and Hope and Glory. In the early Nineties he starred in Hollywood movie True Identity.

"I'd love to do more straight drama," he says. "I also want to do more writing. Next year I'm doing an MA in screenwriting. I did an English degree after my mum died, I was advised to do something like that to help me cope and it did. I feel my education is unfinished business."

He's a natural class clown.

• Lenny Henry is at the Leeds Grand Theatre on Sunday. For tickets ring 0870 1214901.