Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (17 page)

If there was one comic for whom Tommy reserved the lion’s share of his adulation it was the doyen of British stand-up performers from the middle years of the twentieth century, Max Miller. More than anyone in Cooper’s youthful experience he set the standard for which to aim. No one has since surpassed the self-styled ‘Cheeky Chappie’ for the sheer brilliance of his technique, matched as it was by a personality that sparkled like the crown jewels. His mastery of stage craft was unerring. Max Bygraves, whose early impersonation provided him with his stage name, described to me how before he made his entrance Miller would have the electrician black out the stage for ten seconds. The music would cut out and quietness fell over the auditorium. People would be wondering why the show had stopped – ten seconds is a long time in such a context – but then all of a sudden the band would launch into his signature tune, ‘Mary from the Dairy’, the lights would go full up, the spotlight would hit the prompt corner and then at the precise moment for maximum applause Max would saunter on grinning from ear to ear in all his peacock splendour. The music would keep playing as he took off his coat to reveal one of his dazzling suits of floral chintz. Let’s imagine it depicted buttercups or daffodils. He directed his gaze at a woman in the front row, ‘D’you like it, lady? I’ve just had a mustard bath!’ Only on the end of the gag did the music stop, at which point the audience suddenly heard the volume of its own laughter. To use Tommy’s word, he was ‘electrifying’. As Max used to vaunt of himself, ‘There’ll never be another, lady. No, there’ll never be another!’ There was scant conceit to the remark, because it was true.

Max remains acknowledged as the master of direct communication with an audience. He possessed the most expressive pair of eyes in show business: as he leaned across the footlights they cast their beam around the theatre like a lighthouse. His skill enabled him to reduce the most cavernous auditorium to the intimate surroundings of your own front room. He used to say, ‘You need to be close enough to them so that you can nick a shilling from an old girl’s handbag without her knowing.’ Tommy certainly learned from Miller the technique of addressing the one lady in the house with an irrepressible titter, wherever she might be. Laughter is contagious and people with Miller’s skill knew how to maximize this to their best advantage, working on the single outlet until the whole house echoed in the same way. There are times when one listens to some of Cooper’s television appearances and wonders whether just such a titter had been planted or fed in on audio-tape. If this was the case, it was – as homage to the man who epitomized the variety profession – excusable. Miller had as shrewd an insight into his profession as anyone, as he showed when he described comedy to a young Bob Monkhouse: ‘Comedy, son, comedy is the one job you can do badly and people
won’t
laugh at you, but it’s the one job you can do well and they will.’

Tommy would go to watch Max time after time and admitted to learning wide swathes of his patter off by heart, even though ostensibly their styles were far apart, Miller majoring on a self-conscious innuendo that never intruded into Cooper’s more innocent routine. He was, after all, the man once described by John Osborne as ‘a saloon bar Priapus’. Only when I came to survey Cooper’s own material in transcript form did the echoes leap off the page. It is surprising that one had missed the obvious given the skill with which Miller stamped his verbal copyright on any joke he told. Jokes I had heard
both comics tell on frequent occasions had not previously connected on the same wavelength. The misdirection had been in the delivery. Max’s fluent cadencies linked to his knowing persona were in total contrast to Tommy’s more matter of fact intonation. If Miller could be perceived as the Gielgud of spoken patter, Cooper had aligned with Richardson. It was through listening to the speech patterns of Miller and Groucho Marx that T. S. Eliot drew his parallel between the worlds of the music hall comedian and the poet. Among British performers there was no one to touch Max in this area because he
was
so easy to listen to, adroitly using emphasis and repetition within a line to communicate with maximum effect. Not a word was wasted, not a phrase longer than it needed to be. His speech took wing. The subtleties of his delivery would have been lost on the young Cooper when he was learning those lines, material that usefully stayed lodged in his subconscious to the end of his days. To my knowledge he never tried openly to imitate Max, unlike so many others – both Tony Hancock
and
Sid James included – who first trod the boards as Miller impersonators. He merely told the jokes as if straight off the page, in time making them his own through the curious expedient of being unable or uninterested in replicating the distinctive rhythms of his hero.

Today audiences hearing lines like the following will automatically think of Tommy first: ‘I was talking to this girl the other day and I said to her, “Are you familiar with Shakespeare?” She said, “As a matter of fact I am. I had dinner with him last night.” I said, “What are you talking about? He’s been dead for years.” She said, “I thought he was quiet!”’ Then there were the wife jokes. It possibly excused them in Gwen’s eyes that Miller had delivered them first: ‘I’ve got the best wife in England. The other one’s in Africa!’ and ‘The other day I came home and the wife was crying her eyes out.
I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “I feel homesick.” I said, “This is your home.” She said, “I know. I’m sick of it.”’ Miller – and Cooper by default – had millions of them: ‘My wife came in the other day and she said, “What’s different about me?” And I said, “I don’t know. What is different about you? Have you had your hair done?” She said, “No.” I said, “Have you got a new dress on?” She said, “No.” “Have you got a new pair of shoes?” She said, “No.” I said, “Well, I don’t know. What is different about you?” She said “I’m wearing a gas mask.”’ Cooper was still making audiences cry at the latter almost forty years after the gas masks had been stored away.

At one point Tommy’s reverence for the two master gagsters fused. Miller used to tell the joke about coming home to discover his wife with another man – ‘not a stitch on!’ It is not a joke Tommy would ever have used, but it is perhaps fitting that tucked away under ‘Song’ in his extensive file index of gags we discover the tag line incorporated in a parody of Bob Hope’s memorable signature tune:

 Max would have understood. A few years before he died in 1963, he had befriended the younger comic and bestowed upon him his trademark white snap-brim trilby. Tommy considered it his most cherished possession and regarded Max as his guardian angel for the rest of his days. The year after Max’s death he scored a resounding personal triumph in the 1964 Royal Variety Performance. Among the botched tricks and the
‘Hats’ routine the Shakespeare gag was given a successful airing, while the aside, ‘A lady over there’s got opera glasses on me – she thinks I’m a racehorse’ had given Max stalwart service. Cooper’s friend, Val Andrews phoned the day after the television transmission to convey his congratulations. Tommy was out and Gwen took the call. Val explained how he had experienced a strange feeling while watching: ‘I could almost see Max standing there.’ For a moment there was an electric silence, before Gwen asked Val if he had been talking to Tommy. He hadn’t. ‘It’s strange,’ continued Gwen, ‘he came back from the show as white as a sheet. I asked him what was up and he said he had turned round in the theatre and seen Max standing there. It must have been Max’s ghost.’

There comes a stage when jokes, to the reluctance of their originators or those who make them famous, pass out of copyright and into oral tradition far in advance of any set period defined by the copyright laws. It was a process with which Cooper was more than familiar, extending to major set pieces in his act. When I was attempting to establish with Gwen the copyright of the ‘Autumn Leaves’ routine wherein Tommy, playing the melody at a grand piano, is smothered by a gradual avalanche of leaves fluttering down from the flies, I received the frank answer: ‘I think we saw that in Vegas. We nicked it, like we nicked everything else!’ Scriptwriter Brad Ashton has recalled the wonderfully funny takeoff on
Candid Camera
that Tommy would often perform in summer season. As a birthday present one year Brad surprised him with a video of the same routine being performed by Mickey Rooney on
The Ed
Sullivan Show
on American television in 1963. He said, ‘You bastard! Where did you get this?’ Brad replied, ‘The same place as you did!’

The lifting of comedy material was an accepted aspect of the downside of the variety and vaudeville circuit, a situation
hard to understand at a time when on the comedy circuit today the idea of a performer telling a joke that is not of his or her creation is tantamount to a request for a refund. In that sense Cooper was never a creative animal, although this is not to take away from him and his peers another form of creativity that underpins the act of any great comedian as he works the audience, editing the act on the balls of his feet, cutting this material, adding that, throwing in an ad-lib that he may never remember again. Maybe the task is so challenging that the whole matter of where the material originated pales into insignificance, if it is performed effectively and the audience does not latch on. Nevertheless, throughout his career he had to give assurances to broadcasters both here and in America that he had rights in the material that they had not commissioned themselves. There must have been many a white lie told to see him over the hurdle.

Sometimes Tommy
would
ask for permission to use items from the acts of others, even if he could be depressingly misleading in the face of generosity. When magician, Peter Newcombe presented Tommy with the gags mentioned in the last chapter it was on the understanding that he wanted them for a party. He didn’t explain that the party was the BBC Television
Christmas Party
, a festive transmission capable of reaching more than three million households as early as 1954. At other times jokes or pieces of business that today represent shorthand references to the man with the fez filtered through into his act without a ‘by your leave’ of credit. Nor Kiddie was a fairly inconsequential figure in British stand-up comedy in the Thirties and Forties, but according to Bob Monkhouse, a much missed walking encyclopedia on such matters, he may well have been the first to tell the joke about finding the violin and the painting in the attic: ‘So I took them to an expert and he said, “What you’ve got there are a Stradivarius and a
Rembrandt. Unfortunately – Stradivarius was a terrible painter and Rembrandt made rotten violins.”’ Another defining Cooper joke involved meeting a police constable after dark. It eerily echoed Tommy’s actual experience of being stopped in Regent Street with two suitcases in the early hours, something that may qualify him for some kind of distorted ownership. The officer asks Tommy what is in the bags: ‘I said, “In there, I’ve got sugar for my tea!” He said, “And what have you got in the other one?’ I said, “In that one, I’ve got sugar for my coffee.” And then he took out his truncheon and went “Boom” – “There’s a lump for your cocoa!”’ The slang use of the shortened form of ‘coconut’ for ‘head’ gives no clue to the fact that it was written by the driest of American radio comedians, Fred Allen, for a 1924 Broadway revue. It is similarly appropriate to use this paragraph to accord credit to ‘Silent’ Tait, an early novelty magic act on the halls, who was the first to make surreal use of a portable white gate through which he, like Tommy, would stroll for no apparent purpose whatsoever. However, what Cooper did not filch from anyone was the skill that enabled him in the Stradivarius gag to achieve a laugh on a pronounced pause after ‘unfortunately’, before he even reached the punch line; the panache of his pantomime as – ‘Boom’– he saw stars the moment he struck his head with the imaginary truncheon; the proficiency with which according to Mary Kay he used the gate as a device to measure the receptivity of the audience in this venue or that.

When Tommy and Gwen were not conducting their own comedy research in Las Vegas, whether in the hotel showrooms or by watching the television in their room, they were fortunate to have a friend living in Denver, Colorado who would monitor the airwaves for them. A contact from early variety days in Great Britain, Norma – there is no record of her surname – had obviously married an American and set up
home in the United States. Her copiously detailed letters, summarizing the comedy she thought would appeal to Cooper’s style and trading domestic trivia at the same time, provide a means of coming to terms with her own homesickness during the latter part of the Sixties. In this way Tommy was educated to the cod magic routine of comedy actor, Dom DeLuise, although to his credit he appropriated nothing from the account. Other letters convey a detailed breakdown of what Mac Ronay did on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, while three words that became a Cooper cliché – ‘My teeth itch!’–are attributed to Shelley Berman, a more sophisticated performer altogether. Norma questions whether Tommy would be at all interested in Jackie Gleason’s sitcom-style sketches featuring, ‘The Honeymooners’: ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, although I will gladly watch for good ones, if you like.’ She concedes that the incoming
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
does not appear to hold out much promise and by the end of the decade, when the correspondence appears to stop, a note of gloom has set in: ‘The other shows have turned to politics and the rebel youth for their humour, it seems.’ For these observations Gwen sent gifts from the old country and enough dollars to treat her kids with toys from time to time. It was a useful arrangement for both sides and kept Cooper in touch with the American scene.

One performer who came under close observation in her letters was the master clown and pantomimist, Red Skelton. As one of the top comedy stars on American television during the Fifties and Sixties he performed literally hundreds of solo pantomime sketches on his show. Today his legacy is perpetuated in a special theatrical tribute by the comedy performer, Tom Mullica, who was able to identify for me most of the mime routines that surfaced in Cooper’s act as being of Skelton’s creation. Gwen Cooper herself had hinted that Tommy appropriated much of this material while watching
Red in Las Vegas. There was the bit where he played a cowboy using an oilcan to oil an invisible door, only to discover eventually that it is his elbow that needs lubrication; the hen-pecked husband accompanying his wife to the top of the Eiffel Tower, where in manoeuvring her into position for a photograph he nudges her over the edge; the fool with the feather – he sucks air in when he should blow out and chokes in the process; the tennis player playing in slow motion who eventually gets the ball stuck in his open mouth; the old man vaunting himself in the company of young girls – only to revert to decrepitude when they have left. There were more, some in fairness not identified by Mullica, like the one where Tommy gave an impression of a man guiding the planes in on an aircraft carrier with a paddle in each hand, then realizing they are coming straight at him: anguish fills his face as first he attempts to bat them away and then ducks in horror throwing the paddles in the air. Tommy justifiably prided himself on his miming skills – the studied approach to make-believe is an important aspect of any magician’s technique – and while not in the Skelton class, he always incorporated a brief mime sequence in his act when time allowed. The items carried the advantage of requiring little in the way of props.