Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (22 page)

It has all the Cooper qualities. It is succinct. It has a rhythmic three part motif tucked away inside – just think of ‘lump for your cocoa’– that occurred time after time in his material. It has a strong visual, almost cartoon-like quality that again is so often present. And, like a great magic trick, it exploits the sheer joy of surprise. Even the most familiar gags in the Cooper canon kept this intact. The nearer he got to the punch line, so at the moment of telling the joke became reborn. When asked by David Hemingway to explain his humour, Tommy simply replied that the two funniest things were a surprise and a funny picture. His entire repertoire is a cartoon gallery of the unexpected.

Tommy was often at his most surprising when driving home a literalism, the headlights of which we didn’t see coming. Study the cross talk routines of Flanagan and Allen, Sid Field and Jerry Desmonde, Norman Wisdom and Desmonde again, and the device appears played out to the point of tedium, redeemed only by the charm of the performers. Tommy kept it on its toes, in the way Harpo had done at an earlier time when he produced an axe and split a table on overhearing a gambler say, ‘Cut the cards.’ Cooper took it to brazen extremes not encountered since Ollie forced Stan to eat his hat in
Way
Out West
: 

He could draw the obvious to your attention with such wondrous incredulity that you forgave him for it. The slightly demeaning word ‘pun’ never entered your mind as Tommy went through his roll call of crazy props: two gloves sewn together: ‘Look, second hand!’; a toy plane suspended from a coat hanger: ‘Aircraft hangar!’; a golf club that separates into two pieces: ‘I joined a golf club last week. It keeps coming apart!’ He even had a wild tendency to carry the trait into real life. Those not in the know might have wondered whether he was subject to Asperger’s syndrome. Robert Agar-Hutton has recalled his visit to a tailor’s shop in Shaftesbury Avenue where Tommy had come to buy a suit. Checking himself out in the mirror, he turned to a member of staff and asked, ‘Do you mind if I take it for a walk round the block?’ With a client so famous, how could they object? At which point Tommy took from his pocket a small block of wood, placed it on the floor, walked around it once, and then agreed, ‘Fine, I’ll take it.’ There’s also the occasion he walked into a library, asked for a pair of scissors and proceeded to cut the bottom off one of his trouser legs. He went up to the librarian and announced, ‘There’s a turn-up for the books!’ The latter incident may be apocryphal. It is warming to think it may actually have happened.

Not far removed in his personal comic spectrum was the
fascination for ‘doctor’ jokes, his habitual poor health lending an ironic quality to their status. A book could be filled with them. When a Sunday newspaper ran a competition for original Cooper jokes in 1975, they outnumbered all the others submitted. Possibly the first one he ever heard was a Max Miller original: ‘I said, “Doctor, I’ve broken my arm in several places.” He said, “Well, you shouldn’t go to those places.”’ Many others were almost certainly buried in the depths of time: ‘So I said to the doctor, “How do I stand?” He said, “That’s what puzzles me!” “Doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains.” “Then pull yourself together.” “Doctor, doctor,” I said, “There’s something wrong with my foot. What should I do?” He said, “Limp.”’ In effect they were interchangeable. To be acquainted with one today – whether he told it or not – is as vivid a reminder of the man himself as the fez or the catchphrase.

As he traded in such nonsense – in the best Carrollian sense of the word – he tapped into something that related to the child in us all. He made us laugh again at what we had chuckled at in the
Dandy
or
Beano
when we were eight years old. The innocence manifested itself in other ways. His table of props resembled nothing more than a children’s play area. And the act was totally suitable for children of all ages. In spite of his admiration for Max Miller he completely belied the old W. C. Fields adage, ‘Nothing risqué, nothing gained.’ Gwen is on record as saying that if he ever told a dirty joke she would divorce him: ‘He didn’t need to. He could still make people laugh.’ In truth such humour would have been too knowing for his own persona and when he did come close to it in his regular act it was with the naughtiness of the playground, as when he produced from his pocket a brassiere with three cups: ‘I met a funny girl last night.’ But he was not above the tendency to resort – ever so rarely – to smuttiness when
occasion demanded. Brad Ashton recalled the time he saw Tommy struggling against a tough Geordie club audience, reduced to telling uncharacteristically adult gags in an attempt to hold the crowd. The management was not best pleased. On a stray occasion in May 1966 Miff received an admonitory call from a management requesting that Tommy ‘tone his act down a bit’ for the second night of a convention of oil executives at Brighton. When the agent asked for more specific information, the reply came that the client would like Tommy to cut, ‘The Tarzan joke, and the one about when he performed in the USA in a nudist colony and a lady said, “Well, he isn’t a Jew anyway!”’ The complaint is hard to comprehend. Miff demanded that it be put in writing and doubtless the headmaster served summons on his pupil in the standard manner.

They were rare incidents, not least because Tommy knew what he was doing. Survival is one thing, habit is another. He once said, ‘Once you tell the first dirty joke you tell another and before you know where you are, you’ve got a blue show and I don’t want that. It’s very difficult to get back from blue material to clean material.’ His friends, Morecambe and Wise had once featured a routine in which it was hinted that Ernie might have been responsible for an illegitimate pregnancy. The postbag groaned with letters of protest for several days. The nearest Cooper came to a racist gag, the Brighton reference notwithstanding, was when he asked a Chinese waiter if there were any Chinese Jews: ‘He said, “I don’t know. I’ll go and find out.” So he went and came back. He said, “No. There’s only apple juice, pineapple juice and orange juice.”’ The closest he came to a sick joke was his confession that he always travelled in the tail end of an aeroplane: ‘You never heard of one backing into a mountain.’ A perennial routine called ‘Souvenirs’, in which he produced objects from a box to signify places he had visited – The Isle of Man (a dummy trousered
leg held in appropriate position); Holyhead (a sprig of holly on a headband); Leatherhead (an old boot held on top of his head); Bath (a bath cap); East Ham (a ham joint held accordingly); West Ham (switched to the other hand); Oldham – Phew! (same joint held to his nose)’ – was first written to include a gag where he blew up a pink rubber glove and inverted it to represent the lower regions of a cow: ‘Huddersfield!’ Even that was deemed by Cooper to be somewhat near the knuckle.

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: 

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: