I used jokes as my sword and shield against school bullies
The hero in Lenny Henry’s new kids’ book shrugs off the bullies to save the world – and the author reveals he suffered racist abuse as a child, but found a way to use humour as a defence. He tells more BEING funny is what’s made Sir good at sport and he can run, and Lenny Henry’s fame and fortune. But he’s got friends who back him. If you when he was a child, his wit served can, you need to be able to communicate what was, at the time, an even more and make friends, because valuable purpose – it stopped the that makes a big difference – I did bullies that plagued him. that through humour.”
The young Lenny realised that As well as shining a light on making the bullies at his school bullying in the book, Lenny laugh stopped them attacking him, strongly believed his central character so he used his wit as a crafty defence. should be black, because And now the comedian has included although he was a voracious bullying in his new children’s book, reader himself as a child, none of The Boy With Wings, in which the the characters in the books he read hero is targeted by school bullies – looked like him. but realises saving the world is a bigger “I grew up reading things like Just priority than his waste-of-space William, the Famous Five, the Secret tormentors. Seven and Jennings,” he recalls, “and
“I was bullied at school – mainly because of racism. At one point in my school career I was bullied every day and it went on for ages,” Lenny remembers. “But I discovered if you make jokes about the bully and being bullied, you might get people to be on your side.
“Jokes are like a sword and a shield, you can defend yourself with them.”
In Lenny’s book, which is aimed at children from the age of about nine years, the hero, Tunde, sprouts wings and learns he’s all that stands between earth and total destruction. “Tunde, who’s bullied because he’s black and he has a beaky nose, makes jokes,” says Lenny. “But he’s although I enjoyed those stories and I could put myself in them in my imagination, there was never anybody that looked like me in them there were never any Afro-Caribbean British kids in them, so it was always a bit of a reach for me to be in a Jennings story or a Tom’s Midnight Garden story. I would’ve loved to have seen a character like me in them. I was very aware, although I didn’t really care at the time, that there wasn’t anybody like me in those stories.
“So cut to me with my daughter, reading all these stories to her almost every bedtime, and realising that even in the Nineties there