Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  Miff made sure that the merest sexual or lavatorial reference was blue-pencilled in any material sent by him for Tommy’s consideration. Inevitably the demarcation line differed between them, but Tommy was his own best judge. It is hard to believe that in 1965 Ferrie went out of his way to have the following, now accepted as a quintessential Cooper classic, edited out of a television show: ‘I went to my doctor and said “I keep dreaming these beautiful girls keep coming towards me. These beautiful girls keep coming towards me and I keep pushing them away. These beautiful girls keep coming towards me and I keep pushing them away.” He said, “What do you want me to do?” I said, “Break my arm.”’ It all seems so harmless now, but perhaps back then did send out a frisson not in accord with his image. If Tommy did commit the occasional indiscretion it was almost certainly mitigated by the fact that on no occasion did cynicism or malice intrude into his humour. He made fun of nobody but himself.

  There were times when his material hinted at a curiously philosophical tone, situated in a strange no-man’s land between ignorance and a higher mental power:

  Somebody once said that horsepower was a very good thing when only horses had it.

  I think inventions are marvellous, don’t you? Wherever they put a petrol pump they find petrol.

  It’s strange, isn’t it? You stand in the middle of a library and go ‘Aaaaagh!’ and everyone just stares at you. But you do the same thing on an aeroplane and everyone joins in.

  Whether Tommy and his writers or more learned people rooted in academia were the first to make such topsy-turvy observations I do not know, but the fact that he was prepared to acknowledge them is significant. Deep down they profess to a questioning of the way the world works that gets close to the higher level of conceptual or representational humour exploited so successfully by Spike Milligan in The Goon Show, going beneath the level of language to the fundamental structures of thought and life itself. Milligan could have written Cooper’s apparently simplistic comment – made to Bob Monk-house while discussing hobbies – that while other people paint apples, bananas and oranges, he paints the juice, not to mention the one about the Rembrandt and the Stradivarius.

  Perhaps it is not surprising that occasionally he hit a macabre streak. Roy Hudd describes seeing him strike up an imaginary conversation with a guy threatening to jump from the theatre balcony: ‘Why? Please don’t jump. Think of your family and your friends. Everything’s gonna be alright.’ He said all he could in an effort to avert the tragedy. There followed a pause while Cooper pretended to listen to the other point of view. He then responded, ‘Oh, I understand. Throw yourself off then!’ A radio discussion programme hosted by Robert Robinson once decided on a Tommy Cooper joke as the greatest gag of all. In its barest form it involves a man knocking on a door and asking for Charlie or Fred or whoever. ‘Charlie died a couple of hours ago,’ is the response. ‘He didn’t say anything about a tin of paint, did he?’ comes the reply. Many will not find that funny at all. If you are a comedian or a philosopher, you almost certainly will. It sums up the ridiculousness of life itself, the human condition pared to its barest bones. When Milligan elected to cast Cooper in a godlike role he was in part acknowledging this aspect of the man.

  It is unlikely Tommy would have thought through the seriousness of this himself, although serious is everything he professed to be in his approach to comedy. According to Mary Kay he was a great admirer of Woody Allen: ‘Tommy liked his dead seriousness. He always maintained that humour came out of very serious, very macabre situations. You have to be dead straight in order to make people laugh.’ When writer and film director, Michael Winner temporarily took over the Sunday Times ‘Atticus’ column from Hunter Davies in June 1977 he was determined to give Cooper some coverage. He invited himself along to Chiswick and asked Tommy to nominate a joke that he could quote the following weekend, without realising the pressure he was placing on the comedian’s shoulders: ‘It was as if I had asked him to explain atomic fusion. He sat there agonizing over what one would be right. I saw a serious man applying himself to his job.’ In the same way, the more extensive his repertoire became, so the choice that existed behind the scenes of each appearance became more daunting. He once gave voice to another aspect of the constant challenge that faced him: ‘Simplicity is the hardest thing in the world to achieve. I suppose that’s what I’m aiming for.’ He never professed to understand his own talent, nor did he want to know, recognizing that self-consciousness could cause it to implode on itself. In that sense comedy and life were one. As Woody once said, ‘When it’s all over, the news is bad.’

  But Tommy was essentially an optimist and knew how to stay that way. ‘Never mix with miseries, because they’ll bring you down to their level,’ he was fond of saying. In this vein he shared with his fellow countryfolk, Harry Secombe and Gladys Morgan a propensity for laughing at his own jokes. It is something comedians are not supposed to do, but with Cooper was excusable at two levels. Firstly he always gave the impression that the gag – ‘Here’s a quick joke. I want to hear it myself!’ – was new, even more surprising to him than to the audience. Secondly, it was an integral part of his amazing, almost totally unrecognized gift for subverting the whole art of comedy itself. Frankie Howerd had most obviously flouted the conventions of the genre, his speech a garbled string of interjections and asides that made mockery of the fluency of the monologue comedian. His wheezes, his fidgeting and his overall discomfort were a constant distraction to the task in hand. No one obviously thought of Cooper in this regard. He was adept at messing up magic, but as the years progressed he became funnier still getting the basic business of being funny wrong as well. It is a trait he leaned on increasingly as the years progressed and his delivery became more slurred and strangulated.

  The inept comedian made a powerful partner for the bumbling magician. As Levent Cimkentli, a spiritual heir to Cooper among the new generation of American comedy club performers, has pointed out, he will often use his catchphrase to fly in the face of comedy technique, delaying the punch line and affecting the compactness of the gag: ‘There’s this fellow and he’s rowing up the road like that. (Does rowing action) Not like that. Like that. So he’s rowing up the road like that, and this policeman comes up to him and says, “What are you doing?” And he says, “I’m rowing up the road.” And the policeman says, “You haven’t got a boat.” And he says, “Oh, haven’t I?” (Starts swimming for his life)’ The tag is delayed by fourteen syllables, but in spite of the irrelevant information Cooper has added, the joke gets an even bigger response, because it is even more ridiculous. With Levent’s observation in mind it is interesting to revisit a sequence already quoted in this chapter. As transcribed above it does not reflect an accurate version of what Tommy actually said. This is a more faithful account:

  I said to the waiter, I said , ‘This chicken I’ve got here’s cold.’ He said, ‘It should be. It’s been dead two weeks.’ I said, ‘Not only that,’ I said. I said – I said it twice – I said, ‘He’s got one leg shorter than the other.’ He said, ‘What do you want to do? Eat it or dance with it?’ I said ‘Forget the chicken.’ I said, ‘Forget the chicken. Give me a lobster.’ So he brought me a lobster. I looked at it. I said, ‘Just a minute.’ I said, ‘Just – a – min – ute.’ I said, ‘It’s only got one claw.’ He said, ‘It’s been in a fight.’ I said, ‘Give me the winner.’

  The repetitions, the curious cadences are italicized. With a lesser comic they would have impeded the flow considerably. With Cooper they enhanced it.

  As he wreaked havoc on the art of magic in his attempt to emulate the great illusionists of his youth, so he turned comedy on its head in his attempt to mirror the slick professionalism of the likes of Miller, Askey, Benny and Hope. Both the magicians and the mirth makers were representative of an ideal he knew, subconsciously at least, that he could not attain. The greatest paradox of his achievement is that he drew level with them. In so doing he was able to defy all the conventions, like repeating
a piece of business – catching the ball in the cone, for example – several times in his act, when the rule book made clear that, unless it was intended as a running gag, you left well alone after securing the initial laugh. He would get sidetracked by talking to people in the wings. Miller had acknowledged their presence with conspiratorial glances as part of a conversational flow with the audience. To Cooper, the distraction was more real: ‘What do you mean come off? I’ve only just come on.’ Or, thinking the audience wouldn’t notice, he would look down under his table and mutter, ‘Well, you shouldn’t have been under there in the first place.’ There were also the echoes of Bob Hope’s own insecurity; the cough that was never cured, unashamed punctuation pause to cover all inadequacies; and the jokes that maybe were old and substandard – ‘Here’s another one you may not like!’– giving an added fillip to Barry Cryer’s audience conspiracy theory. ‘Funny enough – is it funny enough?’ he would ask. He was even prepared to repeat a joke if he felt it had let him down first time around: ‘I’ve got a cigarette lighter that won’t go out. (Pause) I’ve got a cigarette lighter that won’t go out.’ Like Frankie Howerd’s whole act, it was of course perfectly calculated: this was the only line he used in this way.

  The unorthodox approach led to him taking calculated risks that none of his contemporaries would have dared. One night he walked on stage and said, ‘It’s lovely to be here.’ He paused, moved a few paces sideways and said, ‘It’s lovely to be here as well!’ On one occasion I saw him take the same device to even braver lengths. The venue was the Bournemouth Winter Gardens, the permanent home of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. For three months of high summer the classical musicians moved out to make way for the star entertainers of the day. In this profit-maximizing process many performers found themselves playing a stage not best suited to their talents, one which, New York’s Radio City Music Hall excepted, qualifies as the widest I have ever seen. I can visualize Tommy’s entrance now. Looking as if he had just been pushed on, he came from upstage to the centre of the apron, paused, looked to one side and then the other. He hardly said a word. His doubting expression told all. Fancy putting a comic on a stage like this! He then turned and taking all the time in the world – he might have been walking the dog – strolled to one end of the vast orchestral platform. He fired a salvo of one-liners at the audience on that side of the theatre. For about three minutes the laughter swelled. He then turned again and walked all the way to the far end of the stage on the other side where he embarked upon exactly the same sequence. The audience now laughed even louder. You knew it was coming, which made it all the funnier.

  In time the audience came to expect something out of the ordinary from him. It reached its zenith with the device where he found himself locked in his dressing room, which may have had its origins in the earlier one where only his feet appeared beneath the curtain. As the tabs were flown with the spotlight centred on his shoes, his bewildered cry for help told all: ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ In later years a working off-stage stand microphone became a requirement demanded of all club and theatre managements. No sooner than his name was announced, the audience could sense something was wrong. First a sigh was heard over the loudspeakers. As Lenny Henry once remarked, ‘If you can get a good laugh just by breathing out, that’s serious comedy.’ Then the words followed: ‘Oh dear! What’s going on now? I can’t get out. I’m locked in. I’m still in the dressing room. Now all the lights have gone out. Where’s the door?’ When he does get out, ‘It’s darker out there than it was in here. What’s this? It’s my suit. It’s another suit. Huh huh. You’ll laugh at this. I’m in the wardrobe!’ Eventually he does find his way to the stage – ‘Right, can we go?’ But when the tabs are drawn we see him facing away from the audience, talking to the wall. The laughter eventually provides him with his bearings and the act proper begins.

  Television producer, Royston Mayoh swears that he was once present at a Birmingham club where Tommy kept up this invisible pretence for forty-one minutes, by which time he had lost and found his trousers and probably done a circuit of the Bullring in the attempt. I think it is likely that somewhere down the line a set of tabs jammed and he improvised the entrance from there. In time the device also became magnificent cover for his late arrival at a venue, the get-out with many an exasperated stage manager: ‘You’re late, Mr Cooper.’ ‘It’s alright. Don’t worry about it.’ ‘Look, we’ve only got five minutes.’ ‘It’s alright. Start the band.’ Lee Evans recalls witnessing Tommy extemporizing into the microphone as he dressed and set up his props on one such occasion, only going on stage when he was ready.

  It is no wonder that when he died the way he did, people thought it was a joke. It is no wonder also that he was the object of awe and admiration in his fellow comics whose routines were meant to show the results of rigid discipline, careful rehearsal and accurate timing. Not that this excluded Tommy from their company. Only a performer with strong technique and immense confidence could successfully enter the forbidden territory he appeared to tread. On one occasion he was featured at the Shakespeare Club, a converted theatre in Liverpool. One night the hydraulic stage played up as Tommy was rising into view. Comedian Pete Price remembers that it stuck halfway and wouldn’t budge an inch: ‘In fact the audience could see only Tommy’s head and fez, yet he went right through his forty-five minute act and held them all the time.’ One speculates that had hydraulic stages been more commonplace, he would have been tempted to repeat the circumstances.

  It must come back to self-belief. He once discussed telling the corniest joke in the world: ‘You have to have such innocent faith in it that the audience just has to laugh.’ Perhaps this was the most important thing he acquired at the college of Milton Berle, class of 1949. Bob Monkhouse once described to me an impromptu lesson in comedy he had been given by the American. Berle asked Bob to cite any joke he had ever heard him tell, also to give him an unrelated phrase consisting of a couple of words. His claim was that he could go on that night and substitute the two new words for the established punch line. In this way, ‘This suit is made from virgin wool. It comes from the sheep that runs the fastest,’ became ‘This suit is made from virgin wool. It came from a sheep last Thursday.’ At the end of a string of progressively shorter one-liners, Uncle Miltie, as he was known to the American public, did the new version. According to Bob, the audience roared: ‘He was completely the master. He had them hypnotized.’ He could have been dangling a tap on a length of elastic. With both men the power of suggestion was helped by eyes that lit up to signal a joke; with Cooper it was aided further by an intrinsic physical funniness that not even Berle possessed. Eric Morecambe once asked Barry Cryer, ‘Why is it that he goes on stage and they start laughing immediately and when I go on stage I have to start working?’ He said it with great love. But with Cooper there was always a high level of the art that conceals art. Deep inside he was working as hard as the magnificent Morecambe ever worked.

  Tommy once spent an afternoon with Eric and Ernie during which they got around to discussing and trading ad-libs and heckler stoppers. A few nights later Eric was present at a cabaret club where many other influential show business people were in the audience. Cooper was halfway through his routine when the unforgivable happened; a waiter right in front of him dropped a tray of drinks. All the pros looked at each other expectantly, not least Morecambe. Of all the lines that had been thrown around among the three of them, which, he wondered, would Tommy consider most worthy of the occasion. After a suitable pause during which his eyes took in a grand tour of audience, culprit, tray and audience again, Cooper stared at the offender and said ‘That’s nice!’ He then continued with his act as if nothing had happened. The simplicity of the response was more powerful than anything from Orben or Glason that might have been tucked away in the innermost recesses of his mind. But about the incident I have a theory. The anecdote has been told by more high profile Cooper aficionados than any other. They all remember where they were and who they were
with at the time. And it is always a different venue. Taking into account the clause Tommy invariably had built into his contract when he was playing a club, that waiter service would be suspended for the duration of his act, I wonder whether the incident wasn’t repeated on more than one occasion to Tommy’s specific mandate. We are back to the art that conceals art and an artist as great as Eric Morecambe didn’t spot it. Moreover, Cooper’s response was the right one for a man whose humour was never judgmental or cruel. If my theory is true, one wonders whether the idea was his own. To return briefly to matters of authorship, the Broadway composer, Harold Arlen refused to draw a dividing line between composer and lyricist. ‘It’s the collaboration,’ he would stress. Perhaps that is what counts with Cooper. Scarcely any of his material was original, but the thousand secret collaborations he engendered with this original writer here, that pioneer ideas man there achieved something alchemical. He made their often pedestrian creations his own. And he always left them laughing.