Starting out in comedy aged 82

By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education reporter

Robert Benjamin graduated this year from the University of Manchester

An 82-year-old man is about to take a course in stand-up comedy at the University of Manchester.

Robert Benjamin, who graduated from university this summer, rejects the suggestion that he "left it too late" to start learning about comedy.

The course will help with tips such as how to handle hecklers.

Mr Benjamin, a former Bevin Boy miner during wartime, says his working career as a solicitor in Liverpool courts introduced him to a "hotbed of comedy".

Although he says he has no plans to become a professional comedian, Mr Benjamin says that studying comedy is a natural step for someone who has "always had a mania for telling jokes".

Bizarre comedy

If it seems funny in itself that a man in his eighties should want to study comedy, then maybe that says something about how the elderly are perceived and stereotyped.

His current favourite comedies are not part of any nostalgia-fest, instead he lists the League of Gentlemen, Men Behaving Badly and Little Britain, saying that he likes the more "bizarre" end of television comedy.

But it's not an uncritical appreciation. He doesn't approve of the character of the elderly incontinent woman in Little Britain: "It's rather tasteless and not particularly funny. And the fellow in the wheelchair - I think that's overdone and they should cut it out."

The young have a lot to learn about the elderly, he suggests. When he studied for his degree he says that other students, a quarter of his age, "didn't know what to make of me... there was no connecting at all".

As someone who has always had an interest in telling jokes, he can give some revealing first-hand observations on how comedy changes - both for individuals and in different circumstances.

"As you get older, life becomes more complicated," he says, which means things can seem less than amusing for the elderly. It literally isn't a funny old world.

Apart from the trials that come with old age, such as ill-health and bereavement, these days he says old people are often still supporting their families, rather than being looked after themselves.

Grim times

He is also old enough to know that tough times do not necessarily make for humour.

"I remember the bad times in the 1930s, children would go around barefoot and the kids whose parents were on poor relief would get school breakfasts," he says of growing up in Liverpool.

This didn't produce gritty humour, just grimness, he says. Similarly during the Blitz in wartime.

"Huddled under the stairs with the bombs raining down, no, there was no humour.

"There were a few jokes institutionalised on the radio - like Tommy Handley with It's That Man Again - but not from the people themselves, there was a grim, dour determination to get on with it."

Mr Benjamin became one of the men conscripted to work in coal mines during the war - known as the Bevin Boys after the wartime minister of labour, Ernest Bevin.

However this work was not remembered for any camaraderie or sense of humour among the underground workers, instead he recalls the anti-Semitism he faced from inward-looking communities who had never worked alongside Jewish people before.

'Terrifying'

"The older miners were alright, they literally watched my back. It was the young miners who were very anti-Semitic. I was strung up one day and left in the pitch blackness of the mine and left to dangle upside down, tied to a pit prop.

"The darkness at the bottom of a mine, you can actually feel it. It was horrible. I shouted for help until someone came. It was terrifying."

Despite this experience of prejudice, he says that he dislikes any over-sensitivity in what jokes are allowed. His own preferred taste is for a "Bernard Manning no-holds-barred" approach, he says.

Taking the longer view of comedy over the decades, he identifies the man he says was the best all-round comedian.

"The greatest was Max Miller. He bridged the gap between Victorian music hall and modern day television. He was marvellous. The trick was to make the audience the dirty ones while he played the clean one."

Mr Benjamin's comedy tutor is writer Jenny Roche. One of her favourite jokes, from the late Bob Monkhouse, stands as a warning to all would-be comics.

"They laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian, well they're not laughing now."