‘Stephen! Have you been helping the old enemy?’: A report on Stephen Fry’s comedy workshop with the Oxford Revue

Together with the usual mix of excitement and trepidation that comes with meeting a famous figure you admire, in advance of meeting Stephen Fry, I was feeling another sensation, something I can only vaguely describe as a kind of unreality. In short, he didn’t feel real. It didn’t feel possible to meet him. His name and personhood are so iconographically defined and ingrained in culture that ‘Stephen Fry’ seemed almost to me to be a purely theoretical entity, like an institution, or a cipher, or perhaps even something approaching a deity (an ironic hyperbole, considering his outspoken atheism!). Happily, I am pleased to report that not only is Stephen Fry decidedly real, corporeal and human, but he is also warm, affable, and an absolutely lovely person, both possible and a pleasure to meet. Though one Revue member did mention to me afterwards that he was still pinching himself to check whether it actually happened.

The Oxford Revue, the university’s premier student comedy group, had the honour of hosting Stephen (for he insisted we refer to him informally, rather than with more grandiose titles like ‘Sir Stephen’ or ‘Mr Fry’ or ‘Lord Melchett’ – all of which he is nonetheless entitled to) for a private comedy workshop on March 4th, 2025, conducted in Stephen’s capacity as this year’s Visiting Professor for Creative Media at the English Faculty. Though now known for his work across a range of disciplines, Stephen’s roots are in comedy. He first came to prominence as part of the Perrier Award-winning Footlights revue with Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and a host of other future comedy stars; from this, he became known for his appearances on such seminal comedy series as Blackadder, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and Jeeves & Wooster, and later as the host of the panel show QI. Many of us in the Revue grew up watching Stephen’s comedy writing and performance work, and consequently have been hugely inspired and influenced by him in our own comedy, which made this workshop a massively exciting opportunity for us.

It should be mentioned that visiting the Oxford Revue was ostensibly something of a turnabout for Stephen, seeing as the Footlights are, of course, the Cambridge student comedy group. Indeed, in one episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, Stephen’s character General Melchett remarks brightly to Edmund Blackadder – played by our own Oxford Revue alumnus Rowan Atkinson, no less – that ‘Oxford’s a complete dump!’. And after the event, one Cantabrigian commenter on our Facebook page certainly seemed betrayed: ‘Stephen! Have you been helping the old enemy?!’. But to be fair, this old university rivalry is not so heated in the comedy world, and the Revue and Footlights are on good and often collaborative terms (Monty Python, after all, contained members from both groups). So hopefully the Footlights will understand we were only borrowing Stephen for the day, if that’s okay.

The workshop took place at Magdalen College in the Oscar Wilde Room, which, true to its name, was Oscar Wilde’s room while he was a student. The room was a fitting choice as an allusion not only to one of Oxford’s greatest ever comedians but also to Stephen’s own comedy hero, whose influence on his work he has spoken at length about and whom he even played in the 1997 biopic Wilde. The room features an enormous photograph of Wilde on one wall of the room, whose piercing eyes watched over the session, an appreciable decoration for our purposes (though one wonders how Oscar felt about it while he was living here!). 

We started with a Q&A session with Stephen, making sure to begin right away with the most fundamental, incisive, thought-provoking question we had: ‘If you were a sandwich, what kind of sandwich would you be?’, courtesy of Lyndsey Mugford. Stephen gave the question the necessary intellectual deliberation before finally deciding he would be a cheese and chutney sandwich, specifying precisely that it must be cut into small chunks so that it is ‘nice and spreadable’, and contained in a box with a red lid, so long as it is not a Christmas-themed box. This thoughtful and detailed response is a testament to Stephen’s ability to tackle even the most challenging of philosophical questions with a considered and profound answer, and we will no doubt be dwelling on his hypothetical sandwich identity for many years to come.

Later, we asked a range of our more frivolous, silly questions, like what Stephen thinks about the evolution of the comedy landscape across his career, the future of sketch comedy as a medium, and whether or not comedy has a duty to punch up, to which he nonetheless gave extensive and insightful answers. We were regaled with stories from Stephen’s life and comedy career, from his early forays into sketch-writing to his much-lauded (and self-written) guest role on The Young Ones, all tied together with sage wisdom on subjects ranging from mental health to learning from failure. In all these answers, Stephen’s speaking style stood out as especially enthralling, both rambly and digressive and yet always charming, witty, and sharply attuned to the room. Indeed, he was so captivating I was distracted in the moment from making proper notes on his answers, and thus cannot report exactly everything he told us – then again, it was a private Revue workshop, so at least my forgetfulness means I’m not giving away any of our exclusive perks for free! 

We then moved on to the meat of the workshop, the chutney of the sandwich, which involved us presenting to Stephen a number of selected sketches from the past couple of years of Revue shows and receiving his feedback. Some of these we performed live with all the props and trappings, while others were simply table read (although we didn’t actually have tables in the room, so really they were just ‘read’). Each member of our writing team got the chance to contribute a couple of their own hilarious sketches, which included such scenes as a logistically confusing swordfight, two sports commentators commentating on a bad date, posh yummy mummies discussing their New Year’s resolutions, parodies of Question Time and University Challenge, and a catchy comedy song about conspiracy theories, played live on piano by the Revue’s brilliant songwriter Barnaby O’Brien. Although we had picked the sketches we thought would most appeal to Fry’s sensibilities – often wordplay-heavy scenes featuring silly aristocrats and stuffy butlers, you know the sort of thing – Stephen was delightfully game for our stranger ideas too, not batting an eyelid when we brought out an enormous bespoke cardboard horse prop to perform Aman Arya’s wonderfully absurd ‘Horse Divorce’ sketch, involving a couple arguing a la Marriage Story while within a pantomime horse.  

Stephen’s feedback was excellent as well, not least because it was so often so warm and positive. Each of our sketches managed to garner his laughter and applause, meaning they were either all very good or he was being very polite, or ideally both of those. Certainly all of our writers were left with their own nugget of glowing praise to treasure and use on every poster, CV, and personal anecdote for the rest of their lives. To illustrate with a gratuitous self-aggrandisement: I wrote a farcical, Fry-and-Laurie-esque sketch about two sinister posh men repeatedly trying to pre-empt the other’s attempts to poison them, which, after seeing it performed, Stephen called ‘delicious’ and an ‘immortal masterpiece’, words which will likely forever be the most significant and special review of my work I ever get. 

All this complimenting is not to say that (once we prodded him a bit) Stephen wasn’t above giving us sharp, focused criticism on where we could improve sketches both in writing and performance. He offered excellent advice on adjusting the pace and rhythm of our sketches and on delivering them with a more naturalistic style. One sketch had a weaker ending, and Stephen, recognising what he called the ‘tyranny of the punchline’, the horrible situation where you have a funny basic concept but no hilarious ending to really stick the landing, helped us workshop ideas to bring it to a more satisfying conclusion. Altogether, his comments were hugely valuable to us as budding comedians, and the proper notes I did manage to make during this part of the workshop will be a great resource for the next generation of Oxford student comedy. 

Also, I should say that at one point during the workshop, Stephen claimed to have invented dancercise. I cannot remember the context surrounding this claim, only that I jotted it down in my notes (though I suspect it arose in the wake of a masterful comic monologue about gyms written and performed by Martha Davey, our monologuist par excellence). What I do remember is that Stephen then went on to explain that ‘dancercise’ is a portmanteau of ‘dance’ and ‘circumcise’. So there’s a scoop for you! 

This workshop was a truly amazing and rewarding opportunity that we’re very lucky and grateful to have had, and as such, on behalf of the whole Oxford Revue, I’d like to thank our wonderful presidents, Kat Jennings and Jack Bercovici, for organising the event, as well as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Simon Horobin, and everyone in the English Faculty and Stephen’s team for helping make it happen. Most of all, of course, everyone at the Revue would like to express our sincere gratitude to Stephen Fry for being able and willing to give his time for us, to participate in this workshop and share his experience and advice with us as aspiring comic artists. Between the unreal idea of Stephen Fry as an esteemed figure and the real existence of Stephen Fry as a physical being, it really felt like we got the best of both worlds.

Report by Adam Pickard, secretary of the Oxford Revue 2023-25.

In case you doubted our ability to make Stephen laugh...