Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing Read Online Free PDF Page A

the diminutive clown Little Tich danced in his elongated boots, absurdist sketch comedian Harry Tate sported a moustache that he could twirl like an aeroplane propeller, and pioneer patter comedian Dan Leno claimed to have tramped the streetsso often that he had to resort to turning his legs up at the ends where the feet had been worn away. But Cooper would have been perfectly at home in the company of these early superstars. Indeed, I am convinced that had fate not destined Tommy for a role in twentieth-century show business, Lewis Carroll would have had to invent him, this manic Mad Hatter with a Cheshire cat grin and a profile as forbidding as the Queen of Hearts. That the guillotine trick was one of his favourite illusions is telling, his love of outrageous wordplay even more so. And if he had not been one of the royal family’s favourite entertainers, one can imagine judgement being passed at the Palace: “‘It’s a pun” the King added in an angry tone, and everybody laughed. “Let the jury consider their verdict.”’ When donning one of those absurd half and half costumes, he might have been Tweedledum and Tweedledee in one body. His whole world was one of playing cards rising up in a rebellious swirl around him. The perpetual lateness of the White Rabbit provides its own sly grace note for those who knew him off stage.
    Others have seen him in different contexts. With a meaningful twinkle in his eye, Spike Milligan once suggested to me that Cooper would have been his ideal choice for casting as Jesus Christ: ‘You can almost see him now. Fishes, loaves. Loaves, fishes. Huh huh huh! And here’s a little trick I’d like to show you now. As you can see there is nothing on my feet. I will now walk on this water over here. Not over there. Over here!’ Barry Cryer has taken up the theme: ‘I threw the money changers out of the temple the other day. Silly really, cos I wanted two fivers for a tenner. Huh huh!’ Milligan also said that when God made Cooper he got it wrong and that if he were a self-made man he made a terrible job of it. They point to the same thing. Given that the world is not a perfect place, the idea that one day one might meet one’s maker and discoverhe is wearing a red fez is a consoling one. Kenneth Tynan, while not subscribing to the Christian hypothesis or approving of the current state of the world, once nominated Ralph Richardson for the part of God, qualifying his choice, ‘if we imagine him as a whimsical, enigmatic magician, capable of fearful blunders, sometimes inexplicably ferocious, at other times dazzling in his innocence and benignity.’ In addition, the actor and the comedian shared that abstruse air that hints of knowledge deprived to lesser mortals, linked to an ability to make the trivial sound as if it were the secret of the Universe, as for instance in this typical Cooper pronouncement: ‘They say that 20 per cent of driving accidents are caused by drunken drivers. That must mean that the other 80 per cent are caused by drivers that are stone cold sober. In other words, if all drivers got drunk, there would be far less accidents.’
    Magic of course provided him with the perfect metaphor with which to comment upon the human condition. Whereas Chaplin and Keaton needed vast expanses of Hollywood real estate, not to mention in those early movie-making days lashings of sunshine to pursue their craft, Cooper’s happiest arena was on a stage. Where else would a magician have plied his wares? His act was not a matter of merely standing at a microphone. Here was as well-defined a milieu for his personal comic vision as Galton and Simpson ever constructed for Tony Hancock or for Steptoe and Son. Of his British contemporaries only Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd, and Max Wall succeeded in creating anything resembling a three-dimensional world out of their solo spoken monologues. Unintentionally, Tommy’s dysfunctional approach to magic – neither totally burlesque nor obviously