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Rik Mayall went to Manchester University where he read drama. While there, he formed a theatre company called 20th Century Coyote which he later took to the Edinburgh Festival with great critical success and subsequently to the Comic Strip in Soho. On leaving the university, he played Dromio of Syracuse in the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company Production of The Comedy of Errors, which toured America and the UK.

Television credits include Rik Mayall Presents, two trilogies commissioned by Granada Television. These were individually titled: Mickey Love, Briefest Encounter, Dancing Queen, The Big One, Dirty Old Town and Clair De Lune. They received several awards including ACE nominations in 1966 and Best Comedy Actor at the British Comedy Awards in 1993. Four series of The New Statesman followed, resulting in a 1989 Emmy Award, a BAFTA for Best Comedy Series Award in 1990 and the Special Craft Gold Medal for Best Performer in the International Film & Television Festival of New York in 1991.

At the 1992 Comedy Awards, he received the Best New Comedy Award for three series of Bottom. Other credits include Flashheart in Blackadder, two series of Grim Tales, Saturday Night Live, Filthy Rich and Catflap, Kevin Turney in A Kick Up the Eighties, two series of The Young Ones (which he originated and co-wrote), The Comedy Strip Presents, Four Men in a Car, Four Men in a Plane, Murder Rooms, The Knock, The Bill, Jonathan Creek and Believe Nothing.

In 2002, Mayall won the Gold Medal in the New York Festivals' International Radio Programming and Promotion Awards for Best Narration for George & the Dragon and Robinson Crusoe.

His animated-film narration includes The Willows in Winter, for which he won the Emmy for the role of Toad, The Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, Tom & Vicky (two series), A Monkey's Tale, The World of Peter Rabbit & Friends, Santa's Special Delivery and 78 episodes of Jellikins.

Mayall's theatre work includes twenty years of sold-out tours as a stand-up comedian in addition to A Family Affair, Cell Mates, Waiting for Godot, The Common Pursuit, Man Equals Man, and The Government Inspector at the Royal National Theatre, directed by Richard Eyre.

His film credits include Oh Marbella, A Day of Sirens, Alone in the Dark, Kevin of the North, Herod in the video-filmed Jesus Christ Superstar, Guest House Paradiso, Merlin the Return, Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (for which he won the Best Actor Award at the San Remo Film Festival 1997), An American Werewolf in London and Shock Treatment.