By Helen Musa
ENGLISH comedian Lenny Henry is a mad Steve Martin fan. In fact, not so long ago in New York he found himself sitting in the same restaurant as Martin and Paul Simon.
It took him the whole of his lunch hour to pluck up the courage to make himself known, but luckily Martin knew exactly who he was. A few years ago in a black-man-playing-white-man routine, Henry had donned a Steve Martin wig to impersonate the American comedian and Martin had seen a copy of it.
“He is the greatest. He went to the University of Cool,” Henry says.
Henry’s new-found interest in universities is for real. Last year, he graduated with a BA Hons in Literature from the Open University, where he did Shakespeare, 19th-century novels, war poetry and creative writing. Now he’s studying for a Masters in screenwriting for film and TV and is absolutely certain that it is right to be doing it at his age – nearly 50. He looks at younger students foundering and says: “If you’ve been living the life since you were 16, you bring that to bear on your studies.”
Henry still keeps up a formidable pace as a stand-up comedian, though nowadays he prefers to see himself as “sitting down and having a nice chat to the audience.”
While in Australia, though, he’ll be doing marathon on performances in non-chatty venues such as Hamer Hall in Melbourne and the Concert Hall in Brisbane before arriving at the Canberra Theatre on July 11, but he is used to it.
He had two nights off sick recently because of laryngitis and told his online fans he feared he was going rusty. 
“Yes, two nights off is slightly dangerous for a comedian,” he tells me.
He’s a bit tired of conventional stand-up comedians with routines. 
“I’d much rather be real,” he says, “and I love laughing.”
In “Where You From?” – his entirely new show for his fifth visit to Australia – he’ll be chatting about his daughter doing the GCSE, and his embarrassment when his mobile phone went off during his graduation ceremony.
Henry tells me that he’d accidentally left the phone switched to the internet, which started throwing up “all kinds of weird stuff.” In the middle of the ceremony, people started looking at him and it took Henry a while to realise he was the guilty party. “I was ashamed,” he says.
Of course, Henry will be reviving some of his popular West Indian Londoner characters, particularly Neville the shopkeeper, his wife Rachael, their son Daniel, serving in Iraq, and the modern clergyman the Reverend Carmichael.
It is character comedy, but when Daniel gets talking about Iraq, it touches on the political. And when Neville’s friend Wolfman finds himself locked into an old people’s home, that really gets Henry going. He knows he is looking towards his senior years, and remembers all too well how, when his mum went into full-time care, she just couldn’t face it.  “What am I doing with all the old people?” she asked him.
But life is good. Happily married to comedian Dawn French and quite happy to be overshadowed at times, Henry concludes:  “It’s good to be breathing, it’s good to have a beautiful, healthy child, and it’s good to have a wife who loves me.”

“Lenny Henry – Where You From?” at the Canberra Theatre, 8pm, July 11.