Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing (2 page)

My own volume never loses sight of its initial objective to chart the progress and impact of his immense comedy talent. Within these pages his fans will hopefully find happy reminders of their favourite one-liners and bits of business. I make no apology for chronicling the obvious. The box of hats, the bottle and the glass, the Nazi Kommandant and the British officer together in one costume may be played back in the minds of his devotees on an almost daily basis, and of course are available in various formats for viewing afresh today. However, it is still hard to come to terms with the fact that going on a generation and a half will not have seen him performing in full flow, whether live or on television. Working on the assumption that the printed page will have the last laugh over the mechanized media, I hope this volume succeeds in evoking the magic of an extraordinary entertainer whose skills and vitality might otherwise be lost to some distant future when the video tapes have all disintegrated, the DVDs become corroded. As we shall see his comedy is more timeless than that of any of his contemporaries. There is a new generation or two or three who deserve to discover his lunacy for their own sanity.

This is not to champion nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, the idealized memory of some blurred mythical past. Tommy had little truck for nostalgia anyhow. Whenever his cronies began to evoke the legend of some distant comic talent from the music halls, he would query if they remembered Fuzzy Knight.
‘He was simply wonderful, he was,’ asserted Cooper. ‘What was that bit of business he did on the trapeze, the bit with the chimpanzee applauding with the banana?’ Before long everyone would be volunteering their recollection of this absurd imaginary act. Not that Tommy didn’t have his heroes, as we shall see. But truly great comedians like Max Miller, Bob Hope, and Tommy Cooper are like colours in the spectrum. Try to imagine a new one. It is impossible to do so. The modern entertainment media appear happier to opt for shallow celebrity in lieu of genuine talent and the life force of the great performer. For these reasons Tommy Cooper must never be toppled from his pedestal in the minds of all those who – as his contemporary, Alfred Marks once remarked – were already laughing at him as they queued to buy tickets at the box office. Sadly Gwen never got to see
Jus’ Like That!
having died some six months before the play opened. Nor will she get to read this book. But I hope with genuine affection that I have not let her – or Tommy – down.

Tommy Cooper off stage and on was his own best magic trick, a bumper fun package of tantalizing twists and turns, a cornucopia of paradox and surprise. He was the most loved of entertainers, but never, like so many in his profession, asked his audience openly for affection. He was the most original of funny men, with hardly an original gambit in his repertoire. He became the most imitated man on the planet, his audience appreciating his individuality all the more. He came to epitomize the world of bumbling ineptitude in both magic and comedy, but with precision and technique to die for. He exploited the comedy of failure and nervousness, but seemingly with utter confidence. He exuded good cheer on stage and off, but was happiest when absorbed in his own private world of sleight of hand and illusion. He was a child in the body of a giant, an amateur with the sparkle of the professional, a heavyweight with the light-footedness of Fred Astaire. His catchphrase could as easily have been ‘riddle-me-ree’: you never knew who was fooling whom as he plied his trade of the tricks, his penchant for practical jokes. The one certainty was his success at so doing. Paradoxically again, no one ever felt let down by the process.

The one aspect of the man that was above question was his physical identity. No British comedian since Charlie Chaplin has displayed a surer grasp of the need for distinctive personal branding on the road to achieving personal immortality, the process that helps to keep him in the forefront of our shared comic consciousness over twenty years after his death when other funny men and women of his era have begun to recede into oblivion. Remove the fez and smooth down the tufts of jet black hair that were trained to sprout like a pair of upturned inverted commas from beneath its brim and you might as well start packaging Coca-Cola in blue cans. On one occasion the great Eric Morecambe – incidentally Tommy’s greatest fan – suggested to the author that he would be better off losing the headgear. He perceived it as a barrier between the performer and the audience. I did not have the temerity to suggest to Eric that he should replace his horn rims with contact lenses.

What he would have done in life had he not found his niche in show business is the great unanswerable question. Mary Kay concedes that he was fully aware of his physical idiosyncrasies, every detail of his gauche six feet three and a half inch, shoe-size-thirteen frame being put into the service of comedy. Of course add on the fez and the inches literally stack up. Through the years critics and fellow comics alike have been thrown into crazy competition in attempts to describe him. Clive James conjured up, ‘A mutant begot by a heavyweight boxer in a car crash in Baghdad’; Barry Cryer with one-liner panache contributed ‘like Mount Rushmore on legs’; Ron Moody added ‘he has a profile like the coast of Scandinavia; his chin is like the north face of the Eiger; Easter Island is like a Cooper family reunion.’ Alan Coren evoked fond cinematic memories of King Kong, remembering ‘the time when it roamed free, this strange, shambling creation unconfined by any human limitation, magnificent in its anarchy, going through its weird,
hilarious routines. And none of its tricks worked, and all its half-heard mumbled patter meant nothing at all, and occasionally it would erupt in bizarre, private laughter.’ Nancy Banks-Smith incorrigibly pronounced that ‘he has the huge dignity and innocence of some large London statue with a pigeon sitting impudently on its head and a workman scrubbing him in impertinent places with a stiff bristled brush.’ For me he has always epitomized in spirit as much as in form the abominable snowman as fathered by Santa Claus, or maybe vice versa, with a touch of Desperate Dan – without the stubble on his chin – thrown in for good measure. Whichever you opt for, they all say he was born funny, he looked funny, and he had funny bones. Moreover, perhaps he was the Wagner of comedy. Here is Dylan Thomas on the composer: ‘Whatever I can say about him, he is a big man, an overpowering man, a man with a vast personality, a dominant, arrogant, gestureful man forever in passion and turmoil over the turbulent, passionate universe.’ The only word that confirms he was not writing about his fellow Welsh wizard is ‘arrogant’. Tommy was never that.

Once seen he would never be forgotten, but what you remember, of course, is the broad image of an ungainly hulk in a red hat. Analyse his performance and he is seen to represent a far more complex range of expression and body language than the immediate impact of his branding suggests. Facially he is as interesting as Keaton, the stone face comic of the silent screen who supposedly never smiled but in whose countenance one can read all of human emotion. The legendary guru of British comedy, Spike Milligan once described the Cooper visage to me as ‘a call for help, wasn’t it? “Please help me out of this. Please. Please.”’ His deep-set, almost mournful wide blue eyes were perfect for registering a resigned astonishment at life’s ups and downs. In time the perplexed Cooper look,
characterized by a glance upwards and through forty-five degrees and as such betraying his theatrical roots, would become as much a part of his comic persona as Jack Benny’s stare. No one had a more beseeching glance of puzzlement as he scrutinized a prop that was new to him, observed a more manic look of desperation when a trick failed, a guiltier look of complicity – like that of a child with his hand stuck in the cookie jar – as he discovered you had caught him out while fumbling some secret manoeuvre, or a more radiant searchlight grin born out of a relentless optimism that the next task can’t possibly prove as calamitous as the last. Eric Sykes, who directed Tommy on several occasions, once defined comedy as a way of looking at the world askew. He knew instinctively that no performer physically played cockeyed more effectively than Cooper: all great clowns, Eric included, might be said to have been born at forty-five degrees out of kilter to the world and that is the way they see it.

One would have expected his long gangling limbs to provide a three-ring-circus of incoordination, but the mad, flapping hands – ‘See that hand there, look. Well this one’s just the same!’ – clasping his heart one moment, nervously flittering back to his props the next, and the outsize feet that when still seemed set in a permanent ten to two position were the lie to the general pattern. Interwoven throughout his whole performance was a surprising grace and delicacy of movement that might have been choreographed with sensitivity and skill. His movement at times was reminiscent of a matador swerving from one table of magical nonsense to the other as he eluded the advance of some invisible bull. At other times his lurching body seemed to defy gravity, like some inflatable figure being kept aloft as air rippled with amazing fluidity through his shoulders, arms, and fingers. He’d subscribe to this process as a regular device to follow the punch line of a joke. The theatre
critic, Gordon Craig once said of the actor, Henry Irving, ‘Irving did not walk on the stage, he danced on it,’ and the same might be said of Cooper as he lifted his feet and replaced them, as if threading his way through some imaginary maze with
haute école
finesse. As the American poet, E. E. Cummings commented, ‘The expression of a clown is mostly in his knees.’ Cooper was certainly as capable of doing double takes with his legs and feet as with those soulful eyes. A favourite pose as he went from one piece of nonsense to another involved standing in profile beside one of his tables, hand touching, head tilted back, his right leg kicked up at right angles at the knee, his face turned to the audience in a gleeful grin, as if to say it’s all a game. Even tentative burlesque ballet movements were not beyond him. With arms outstretched, he would pirouette accordingly amid the magical chaos: ‘I taught myself, I did. I was in Swan Lake. I was. I fell in.’

His maniacal, throaty laugh was the perfect counterpoint to the whole catalogue of gestures and the reckless abandon with which his props were cast aside, leaving the stage at the end of his performance a stagehand’s nightmare. Shoulder-heaving in its intensity, the Cooper guffaw has come to be recognized as the grand sonic emblem of British comedy. Capable of warding off disapproval, excusing failure, registering delight, born – so he claimed – of nerves, it epitomized the Cooper stage persona, co-existing with that self-deprecating cough that presumably in this outrageous game of make-believe we weren’t supposed to hear as he faced the reality of the gag misfired, the trick gone wrong. Laugh and cough were the interjections that saved a thousand words. Those that remained were thrown to the mercy of the most distinctive voice in comedy since that of W. C. Fields. Once described as an impressionistic blur that made Eddie Waring sound like Julie Andrews – for today, say, read Ray Winstone and Emma
Thompson – it was characterized by a slightly hoarse West Country burr bordering on a slur that at times could pass for insobriety, but only seldom was. It invested his jokes, his monologues, his shaggy dog stories with a kind of rough poetry. And then there was the matter of his catchphrase. ‘Just like that!’

He always claimed this came about by accident. ‘I may have done it and not thought anything of it at the time,’ he once mused. Anyhow, it gathered momentum through repetition and became fodder for the generation of impressionists who hitched their imitative wagon to his star. It is a fairly innocuous expression, but today cannot be said among the British public without triggering instant amusement. Once he had given in to the concept, he was only too happy to embroider upon it with those expressive hands gesturing down in counterpoint at waist level: ‘Not like that! Like that!’ followed by some incomprehensible incantation of dubious foreign extraction that might have been spelled ‘Zhhzhhzhhzhh’, but probably wasn’t. In retrospect it was the perfect verbal trademark for a comedy exponent of a demonstrative art like magic. Twenty years after his death it was voted, in one of those polls upon which unimaginative television executives seem to thrive, the second most popular catchphrase in British comedy history. Since the one that preceded it and those in close proximity soon after were all phrases of the moment, the likelihood is that his will endure, while the others will shrivel away. Reference to being the only gay in the village is hardly the stuff of everyday conversation.

The unavoidable cliché is that Cooper remains the most impersonated figure in recent British show business, the beckoning fez an instant token of fun and frivolity. The catchphrase and the hat became inseparable, as Tommy found with his wife Gwen when he returned on holiday to Egypt, where he
had served in the war: ‘We were in Cairo and we came across a guy selling fezzes in the market. I went up to try one on and the guy turned to me and said, “Just like that!” I said, “How do you know that? That’s my catchphrase!” He said, “What’s a catchphrase? I know nothing about any catchphrase. But I do know that every time an English person comes up here and tries on one of these fezzes, they turn to their friends and say ‘Just like that!’ And you’re the first one not to say it.” Marvellous, isn’t it!’

The fez acted as a beacon of merriment the moment he stepped on stage. That first entrance was irresistible as he strode to the centre like a barrel of bonhomie come crashing towards the footlights. He was possessed of a crazy comic spirit from the end of the tassel to the tips of his toes. In this regard I have always considered that he was to magic and comedy what Louis Armstrong was to music, their performance modes extensions of their natural being, underpinned by an essential playfulness and a keenness to share this quality with their audience. In his early days his attack was irrepressible. Never had such a surge of idiocy been unleashed into an auditorium with such vigour. So contagious was the atmosphere he created that from that moment everything he did would be funny, however seemingly unfunny any one constituent part of his routine might have appeared in the cold light of a lesser performer’s act. By the time his fame was established, it was only necessary for those expectant for his entry to hear the opening strains of his signature tune, the ever present ‘Sheik of Araby’, for the laughter bottled up inside them to gush forth in waves. For the next twenty, thirty, forty minutes he would grant us entry into his weird world, a crazy magical paradise where reality was turned on its head as he panicked his way to a closing ovation.

His stage tables always resembled some surreal Argos
catalogue made real. There were props for playing with, like the rose in the bottle with the secret thread attached: ‘Rose, Rose, Arisen!’; props for dropping for the sole purpose of picking them up: ‘See that. I’m not afraid of work!’; props for questioning: ‘I don’t know what that’s for!’; props for his own comfort, as when he would blow up a balloon for no other purpose than to deflate it into his face: ‘It’s the heat that does it!’; props with which to impress, as when he threw an egg into the air only for it to shatter the plate upon which it was supposed to land intact; props he had presumably brought from home to sneak in some vestige of domestic routine, like the flower in the pot which wilts the moment he turns away from watering it, not once, not twice, but ad infinitum; and occasionally props for genuinely succeeding with, moments when the magic came right and his look of triumph was a wonder to behold. Ostensibly no object on stage served a more useful purpose than the rubbish bin slightly to the right of centre, but when he went to activate it an absurd jack-in-the box head from some distant Hammer horror movie emerged to send him into instant shock and the stage became more littered still. Working in tandem with the chaos was a stream of anarchy that was nothing if not liberating, ahead of its time in reflecting the message of modern stress therapists to rid us of the clutter of our own lives, the Christmas presents never used, the gadgets that never worked, even the jokes we wish we had never started to tell.

In mocking the conventions of magic and comedy he made fun of the performer that we might like to think exists in us all. James Thurber had a special insight into the formula. It is unlikely that the great American humorist ever saw Tommy Cooper. Even if his failing eyesight allowed him the privilege on a visit to London in the Fifties, he showed amazing prescience in the Thirties when he entitled a
New Yorker
article
‘The Funniest Man You Ever Saw’. To read it today is to play an instant game in which Cooper has to be cast into the main part, not merely because he possibly
was
the funniest man you ever saw, but because here was a type, that of the compulsive gagster, that Thurber and Cooper clearly intuitively understood. ‘He’s funnier’n hell,’ explains one character. ‘He’d go out into the kitchen and come in with a biscuit and he’d say: “Look, I’ve either lost a biscuit box or found a cracker,”’ says another. As for card tricks, there was no stopping him: