by John Fisher
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:
Thanks for the Memory
Of the night when I came home
And found you not alone
You said he was a nudist
Who dropped in to use the phone
Oh thank you, so much …
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 perfo
rmer, 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.
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:
Ladies and gentlemen – and members of the audience … I’m very happy to announce that just before I came out on this stage, I signed a two-year contract with Paramount. (Wait for applause) Now I’m waiting for Paramount to sign … But I could have been in The Yearling. The only trouble was they didn’t ask me … I’m really happy tonight though. I just received a little bundle from heaven (wait for applause) my laundry. But now at this time I’d like to … Hmmm, I’d like to! I have to. It’s in my contract …
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’:
For a number of years we were deliriously happy – but then we met each other … She was an odd-looking girl. She had a big heart and hips to match … But I didn’t care … I just worshipped the ground her father struck oil on. Whenever I looked at her, time stood still. In other words she had a face that would stop a clock. But it was a face men go for. ‘Gopher-face Sally’ they used to call her, the pride of the London stockyard. But I never was that cruel. I just used to call her ‘Melancholy Baby’, because she had a head like a melon and a face like a lolly.
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’:
I’ve just returned from a tour of Germany. As you know you have to be inoculated before going abroad… The doctor studied me for a few minutes and finally shook his head. I exclaimed, ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it?’ The doctor picked up my arm and took my pulse. You can’t trust these doctors. They’ll take anything. I told him so. He raised his eyebrows. Have you ever tried raising eyebrows? It’s more
fun than raising chickens. The doctor brought out a needle about three feet long. ‘What are you going to do?’ I screamed. ‘Spear fish?’ He said, ‘Now this won’t hurt a bit.’ And he was right. He didn’t feel a thing. The last thing I recall saying was, ‘What’s the purpose of all this?’
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.