Comic recalls his lockdown madness

Russell Howard has told how he knew Covid lockdown was driving him a bit doolally – when he ate a dog biscuit to prove a point to his pet.

The incident occurred after the comedian noticed that whenever he gave his dog Archie a treat, the Jack Russell terrier would go and hide it in the sofa.

That baffled the comic –  and because he had nothing better to do during lockdown he decided to try to get to the bottom of it.

‘I was like, "Who do you think is going to eat your biscuits? You're the only dog that lives here",’ he recalled on the foodie podcast Dish.

‘He kind of looked at me as if to go, "Well, you are talking to a dog mate, so…"

‘So what I did, I ate his biscuit. And that was the moment I was like "I really need people again."’

Howard also recalled the day he lost his dog and called on the Twitter firepower of all his celebrity friends to help track him down – only to discover he had been in the bathroom all along.

‘I was looking around the house and I couldn't find him so I was like, right, he's gone. I legged it outside, running around and still couldn't find him,’ he told podcast hosts Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett.

‘So then thought, who are all the famous people I know? So, I rang up Jack Whitehall, I think I rang up Jimmy Carr… and just said, "Can you put on Twitter that I've lost my dog?"

‘I'd got so bad that I was genuinely running around Primrose Hill, and I'm not making this up, I genuinely got on the floor and was like, "Think like a dog. Where would you go?"’

‘Then my wife came home, went upstairs and he was in the toilet,’ he said.

My dog Archie has gone missing around the Camden/Primrose Hill area. If you see him tweet me and I'll get in contact. Please RT. pic.twitter.com/Jn9g3eny8j

— Russell Howard (@russellhoward) January 16, 2018

He also revealed a tenuous link between dogs and the fist time he met his wife, Cerys. ‘The day I met my wife, I realised I was going to marry her,’ he said. ‘Also my brother ate dog food that day for a bet but he didn't finish the tin so I didn’t give him the money.’

Nor is that the only odd link in his memory – as he also remembers his nan every time his psoriasis flares up, as she suffered from the painful skin condition too.

‘So, there's this weird relationship,’ he admitted,  ‘Every time I get a disgusting scab, I'll go, "God, I miss that lady." Every time I flare up I go, "She's with me again".’

Howard was on the Waitrose-branded podcast to plug his next tour, prompting him to recall some of the international dates he’s previously played.

‘Whenever you get to travel you notice something interesting,’ he said, citing the fact he spotted that Danes all eat porridge.

‘Young, hip couples will go for a date and they’ll eat porridge,’ he said. 'And porridge is one of the most disgusting foods to watch somebody eat. So that to me, just watching them slop this filth in. So funny.

‘I was able to go and do the gig that night and chat about it, and it's kind of funny here, but in Denmark it was like, "Oh my God, he's noticed the thing."

He said that reaction spoke to the 'sense of immediacy’ with stand-up, adding: ‘There's something really exciting about the tangibility of stand up - if you think of something and it gets a laugh, it is correct. If they don't laugh, it isn’t.

‘And then even if it's not funny, you can be funny by realising that you are not funny, you know?

‘I was in Finland once and I saw this big guy… a seagull flew down to try and eat one of his chips, and he caught the seagull in his hand. and went, ‘Nay!’, and threw it away. And the seagull looked like, petrified, like, "All right, all right, all right. I'm going back to Brighton!"

‘So, I went on stage and told this story and there was 2,000 Finnish people there who went: ‘Well if you see the seagull, you grab a seagull.’ Didn't find it funny at all.

‘And then that became funny, and so I was like: ‘You’re mental, no other nation would grab and tell off an animal,’ you know.’

• Dish, hosted by Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett, is available on all podcast providers now.

Published: 26 Oct 2022