Luke Connell is a regular panellist on the Stand Comedy Club Newcastle’s monthly show Nerds Just Wanna Have Fun. Luke Sunderland is professor of medieval French literature at Durham University. They are the two sides of one person. We had to find out more.
We too often see the period in terms of disease, ignorance and war – but people were witty and playful
Luke, your two main activities in life seem an unlikely combination. Let's start with how you got into academia.
I loved languages and history at school, and went on to study Classics and French at King’s College London. Towards the end of my final year at university, I was really enjoying working on my dissertation (on Roman border fortifications) and going into dusty corners of the library to find even dustier books. I began to think I’d like to do even more of that – and now I’ve been at university for over 27 years, eventually becoming a professor.
And how did your involvement in comedy come about?
In GCSE drama class, my friend Matthew and I loved doing silly sketches and trying to make everyone laugh. We are still remembered in Stockport for a daft sketch we did about baked beans. At university, I did improv and was in a sketch act, before finally trying standup.
Do you adopt a light-hearted approach in your lectures?
Yes, because medieval material is often funny and it’s important to remember that people had a sense of humour in the past. I teach the fabliaux, which are very bawdy texts about what happens in castles after dark. There are a lot of misunderstandings about who is in bed with whom. It’s good to bring out the comedy in these tales, before going on to ask what they tell us about medieval ways of thinking about bodies, sexualities and identities.
Now tell us about the Nerds show – where it came from and what makes it special.
It was the idea of a Newcastle-based comedian called Neil Harris. He approached the Stand Comedy Club to propose a comedy night about science – they loved the idea and we’ve been going for over 18 months now. We do a different theme each month, and we’ve covered things like geography, sea creatures, science fiction and crime. Neil is a genius with AI, programming and animation, and often makes his own video games especially for the show. For example, he created code to combine Jane Austen novels and Geordie Shore in a bot called Darcy-3PO. The other regular panellists all have their own forms of nerdiness: Matthew Wheelwright knows all about insects, Elaine Robertson does brilliant material on things like oxbow lakes and birds’ cloacas, and Kelly Edgar is an expert on psychology and physics.
But that’s not been your only outlet for bringing the two worlds together.
I’ve done a few different academic-comedy crossover shows, including Comedy for the Curious and Bright Club. There’s definitely an appetite out there for comedy that doesn’t come from what is relevant to our lives, but from exactly the opposite – from the outlandish and obscure and unfamiliar. Like Nerds, these shows are bringing different audiences into comedy.
You have a new piece for this year’s Fringe – Luke Connell: Bloody Marvellous.
It's a comedy show about the Middle Ages, with games, props and songs, in which we get to know creatures like sea-centipedes and manticores, dogs with names such as Havegoodday, and characters like Eilmer the flying monk.
Do you have plans for after the Fringe?
I’d like to explore the possibility of performing the show at castles and other heritage sites. It’s a different way of doing heritage and brings the period to life in its own unique way.
What would you like people to take away from your show?
A sense of medieval people’s imagination and humour. We too often see the period in terms of disease, ignorance and war. But people were witty and playful, and they took joy in inventing wonderful contraptions, in imagining distant lands with strange customs, and in stories and images of fantastic animals such as you mentioned.
