Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (18 page)

It is perhaps surprising that at no point did Norma mention another colossus of American television comedy, although at the time she was writing his presence was certainly not as dominant on the small screen as it had once been. It is equally surprising that for all his eulogizing of Miller, Askey, Hope, Benny, Laurel and Hardy, Tommy is nowhere on record in admitting his admiration for the same performer. And yet of the comic generation that preceded Cooper he conceivably exerted the biggest influence on the crazy young conjuror. His name was Milton Berle, acknowledged as the principal pioneer of comedy on American television. In any discussion of comic
copyright his name must loom large. Known unashamedly throughout the business as ‘The Thief of Bad Gags,’ he qualified unequivocally as the prime exponent of comic appropriation. So outrageous was his approach it became part and parcel of his all-consuming geniality: ‘What has Bob Hope got that I won’t do two years later?’ It is the greatest of ironies that he of all comics should be responsible for possibly the most influential day in the career of the young comedian. Berle never played London in person, but Val Andrews and Bobby Bernard both remember the ecstasy shown by Tommy when introduced to his talents in the 1949 film,
Always Leave Them Laughing
, bouncing up and down like a kid who has discovered Santa Claus really does exist. In the movie Berle essentially plays himself, an ambitious young comic who is criticized for rising to fame on the back of other performers’ material and then gradually forges his own style. One doubts if Cooper ever gave a second thought to the fact that as he watched the movie he was caught up himself in a process similar to what was being played out on screen.

When
Always Leave Them Laughing
opened in London, the reviewer for the
Monthly Film Bulletin
reported of its star: ‘He is a comedian for whom no joke is too old, and who can only be funny when surrounded with an apparatus of stage comic paraphernalia.’ To Tommy, Berle represented an epiphany. Watch the film today and it amazes as an archaeological reference guide to so much that became solidified within Tommy’s own act: we can only be left wondering where Berle acquired the stuff in the first place. Here we find the gentle ribbing of the crowd: ‘I can always look at an audience and tell whether they’re gonna be good or bad. Good night!’ The targeting of a make-believe individual for comic effect: ‘This gentleman down here – your head is shining right in my eyes.’ The remorseless literal-mindedness: ‘A man came up to me in
the street. He said, “I haven’t had a bite in three days.” So I bit him.’ Even comedy magic. Throughout his life Berle too was a magic addict, a trait he acknowledges in the movie as he approaches a member of the audience and instructs him accordingly: ‘Take a card. Now tear the card in halves. Tear it in quarters. Tear it in eighths. Tear it in sixteenths. Now hold the little pieces in your left hand and throw them over your head. Hah hah hah. Happy New Year!’ It stood Tommy in good stead down the years. At another moment Berle tosses a ping pong ball under his hat and after a split second spits it out of his mouth. The illusion is so strong that it looks like the most skilful bit in the magician’s handbook and is funny into the bargain.

One can see the young Tommy now, scribbling away cocooned in the dark of the cinema through several screenings of the film, the light-fingered Artful Dodger to the magnificent Fagin of the comic craft. But the influence of Berle extended far beyond anything the Cooper pencil would entrust to paper. While Tommy’s personality was essentially his own, there are aspects of his presentational approach that are pure Berle. No comedian was ever more ‘in your face’, his introductory ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,’ achieving immediate contact with his audience, as it did for Tommy so many times later. Physically big like Cooper, he radiated action, as Arthur Askey did too, but on a more grandiose scale. Berle’s confidence energized the young Cooper like nothing before, providing a road to Damascus moment on a level with the day the milk cascaded out of the bottle and the one when he planted the fez on his ‘cocoa’ for the first time. It may conceivably have been the catalyst that led to his commitment to succeed as a comedian beyond the limits of the self-contained comedy magic act, where as we have seen the spoken comedy sprang out of the props and the conjuring.

His jottings from service days reveal that any early attempt to perform straight stand-up had been tentative to say the least:

 And so on. There is no indication that Tommy didn’t write – or at least compile – this himself. Equally, it may be a transcript of a Hope radio monologue. At least the punctuation shows a rudimentary evidence of the understanding of timing. On the opposite page he has flagged the remnant of another routine, ‘Comedy Script by Tommy Cooper’:

Underneath he has written, ‘Finis. The poor man’s Bob Hope.’ Did he seriously think Hope wrote his own words, or was
he merely projecting himself onto his idol’s reputation as a performer? Even Berle would have tiptoed around material like this. By the time he returned from the CSE tour of Germany that Miff booked for him in 1948 his writing style had changed to become more narrative-based. A mere fragment of a script survives, of which the following is a part. There is no indication that he ever worked it for a paying audience. It was certainly not what Miff was selling to managements when he booked the man described as ‘Almost a Magician’:

Perhaps for ‘purpose’ he meant to write ‘point’. It might have rescued a line left hanging in the air with no prospect of a laugh. He had yet to learn how performers like Berle were able to force the laugh regardless. Yet to arrive were the snappy staccato style of a hundred disconnected doctor jokes and an ability to trump Berle at his own game. It is not hard to understand why professionally he adhered to a magic-based structure for the time being.

Watching
Always Leave Them Laughing
during the research for this book was an illuminating experience. It was also an
emotional one, in a way that has nothing to do with the creaky sentimentalism of a plot with lines like ‘How many years do you think a comic has to knock around before he can learn his trade – the broken-down joints he has to start in and sometimes finish in too?’ Shadowing Berle’s character in the movie is an ageing burlesque performer played by the great Broadway comic, Bert Lahr. No more perfect casting could have been found for someone whose job it is to show Berle’s character the ropes and, more importantly, to reveal the dignity that can exist in the tradition of the clown. The film culminates in Berle beckoning a far from well Lahr up onto the stage. They go into a soft shoe shuffle. Lahr falls. The audience is expectant. It could be part of the act. It is not. Lahr’s character dies with Berle hastily bringing down the curtain. The parallel with Cooper’s own end is tear-jerking. Little did Tommy realize that at the very moment his essential comic self was crystallizing, he was also witnessing a simulacrum of his own demise. When I described the outcome of the film to his daughter, Vicky she was visibly struck with emotion. Then after some reflection, she spoke: ‘Perhaps he looked on that as a secret prayer, the way he always wanted to go.’ The stark reality is that he saw a version of his own death played out before him.

Within a short time Tommy discovered Berle’s best-selling book of humour, Out of My Trunk. It was his introduction to joke book culture, embracing a search for comic material that covered every single joke book he could lay his hands on. Most familiar at this time were the slender pamphlets of Robert Orben. Published principally as patter books directed at magicians and masters of ceremonies, they achieved a much wider audience among laughter makers, many comedians lifting whole chunks of copy to fill the need of a stray radio
broadcast when something fresher than their standard act was required. No less than Max Wall has been singled out in this regard. Normally the books were considered worth their weight in gold if they came up with one new joke for the purchaser. How much was original with Orben has long been contested. Oral tradition runs havoc again. There was nothing subtle about their titles:
Comedy Caravan, Patter Parade, Bits,
Boffs
and Banter
, and Screamline
Comedy
. In one of the most bizarre leaps of career advancement in history, by the mid Seventies Orben, an amateur magician, who had worked as scriptwriter for Jack Paar and Red Skelton, was installed as special assistant and speech writer to President Ford at the White House. Long before this connection immortalized Orben, Tommy realized that he possibly needed something a little more exclusive than what could be bought for a few coins over every magic shop counter.

He found the answer in New York, where he met Billy Glason, an ex-vaudevillian who had performed an act billed as ‘Just Songs and Sayings’ that interspersed patter with popular songs of the day. In an extensive career on the boards he had collected trunks full of jokes that he had written on file index cards and upon retirement set to and ordered the material into some kind of shape, modernizing where necessary. He claimed he could breathe new life into any gag. ‘Who was that lady I saw you with last night?’ became transformed into ‘Who was that lady I saw you with at the sidewalk café last night?’– ‘That was no sidewalk café. That was our furniture!’ Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Ed Sullivan, even Bob Hope availed themselves of his services. Tommy was one of the privileged few granted purchase of his twenty-six part
Fun-Master Giant
Encyclopedia of Classified Gags
. Only a very few sets were home-produced on the thinnest paper available, ‘to make it possible to make as many carbon copies we can!’ One source
says that it sold originally for three thousand dollars, not that Tommy paid that! An undated postcard to Chiswick shows Glason trying to clinch the transaction with Cooper: ‘It’s been five months since I first spoke of the Giant File and I’ve been trying desperately to get you to be the first and
only
proud possessor of this tremendous encyclopedia of classified gags in England. You keep saying, “in due time,” but I think now is the time. How about it, Tommy? I did give you a good concession of $900.00 for the twenty-six volumes, so won’t you please say the good word? Stay well. Best wishes, Billy. PS Write & make me happy!!’

Over the years Tommy purchased not only the Encyclopedia, but also the
Book of Blackouts in five volumes, the
Book of Parodies
in three volumes, the
Comedy and Emcee
Lecture Book
in nine lessons, the
Humor-Dor for Emcees and
Comedians
, all published under Glason’s Fun-Master imprint. They constitute thousands of pages, some mimeographed, some carbon-copied onto paper so flimsy it is surprising it survived the typing process. In addition he subscribed to a monthly sheet also issued by Billy entitled
The Comedian
. To peruse Tommy’s personal copies is tantamount to looking over his shoulder as he scrutinized this gag here, that one-liner there. Those that appealed were marked accordingly. They averaged out at about one a page, maybe a page and a half, but hardly any found their way into his act and if they did I have yet to find one that achieved classic status as a Cooperism, unless you include the line he (and Milligan too) claimed he wanted on his tombstone: ‘I told you I was sick.’ He also subscribed to regular bulletins of gag material issued by the British scriptwriter, Peter Cagney and two more New Yorkers, Art Paul’s
Punch Lines
and Eddie Gay’s Gay’s
Gags
. Tommy may have thought he was purchasing new material; he was really buying a comedian’s extended security blanket for the
day when his bankable material was taken away from him and audiences stopped laughing. The nightmare was real for every comic.

There was one extended piece of business in Glason’s pages that Tommy performed time and again. It was one of those gags that came perilously close to pre-empting itself every time it was performed, but constituted a highlight of the Cooper act as night in, night out he pushed against the obvious. Tommy had switched the basic premise from the juggling stunt detailed by Billy to the device, more appropriate to a magic act, of scaling a playing card into a hat a few feet distant. On the first attempt he fails: ‘Missed’. On the second attempt he fails: ‘Missed’. He announces that if he fails a third time he will shoot himself. He fails again. At this point he picks up a revolver and strides into the wings. A gunshot is heard. He walks back on: ‘Missed!’ Tommy used it to bring the house down during his appearance at the 1953 Royal Variety Performance. Ironically, he could not have met Glason until his first visit to America in 1954! Indeed, records place their initial transaction in March 1962. The basic premise must have been rooted in clown tradition, but had Cooper not been acquainted with it before, it would assuredly have been worth all the hundreds of dollars Glason was able to cajole out of him.