by John Fisher
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.
Perennial Cooper props like the flower that wilts every time it is watered and the sword that recoils on itself when he pretends to swallow it, as well as many of his cod juggling bits – like timing the third (soft) cannon ball to reach his forehead at the precise moment he brings together with a resounding crack the two other hard balls in his hands – were all part of the same clown legacy. A more short-lived bit of business with a similar pedigree from the late Fifties was what Tommy called his ‘Goofus’ routine, one of the few musical sequences in his repertoire, again almost certainly spotted on a trip to America. A thousand clowns before Cooper had donned a long overcoat stuffed with motor horns. Only Tommy could announce ‘Please notice I have absolutely nothing concealed about my person’ before revealing the horns for all to see: ‘This is note F, this is note G. This next one – I don’t know what that one is… Huh huh huh!’ The title of the routine relates to an early hillbilly number by Gus Kahn. The item might have been more effective with a tune better known to English audiences, not least Kahn’s more memorable and more appropriate, ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie!’
When it came to acquiring strong original material Tommy never realized how lucky he was on his own doorstep. Aside from the massed ranks of the television writers, many of them familiar names, commissioned by the television companies to provide him principally with sketch material – names that we shall encounter again in the chapters on hi
s television career – there were three writers who should forever be guaranteed their place in the roll call of honour attached to classic Cooper comedy gems. Their names are Val Andrews, Freddie Sadler, and Eddie Bayliss. According to Vicky Cooper, Eddie was probably her father’s favourite writer. He had no links with show business or the literary world, was a lorry driver by trade and came to Tommy’s attention when out of the blue in the late Sixties he submitted some material to Miff Ferrie. His reluctance to give up his day job kept him outside the cabal of the top television comedy writers of the day, in whose company he could well have held his own. To his credit Ferrie spotted that he had a sure grasp of the conciseness that hallmarked a great Cooper gag and Tommy’s fondness for a literalism that could go to surreal extremes, as in these:
My feet are killing me – every night when I’m lying in bed they get me right round the throat like that.
I had a ploughman’s lunch the other day – he wasn’t half mad.
‘When you walk in a storm, hold your head up high’ (singing) – I did and fell in a puddle.
Eddie was also responsible for the memorable visit Cooper made to the doctor the time he lost his voice:
He said, ‘Open your mouth,’ and then he said, ‘A little raw.’ So I went, ‘Grrr…’ He said, ‘I’m gonna test your ears, cos sometimes when you lose your voice it affects your hearing.’ I said, ‘Right.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna go down there and I’m gonna whisper something to you. And if you hear me I want you to repeat it.’ I said, ‘Right.’ So he went down there and I went down there and he said, ‘How now, brown cow?’ And I said (softly) ‘How now, brown cow?’ And he said ‘Pardon!’
Bayliss gave Tommy the basics of his fly routine, the miniature newspaper – ‘a fly paper’– upon which the fly would alight for Cooper to sneak up behind and annihilate it with an almighty mallet and – once he had convinced us he was only kidding – the best method of getting flies out of the room: ‘I use this. Instant starch. It doesn’t kill them, but they glide out the window like that.’ At this point Tommy, arms outstretched, would perform an effortless glide around the stage himself. Eddie had as sure a grasp of the visual as of the verbal, as also shown on the occasion of the 1977 Royal Variety Performance, upgraded by Lew Grade to Royal Variety Gala in recognition of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, when Tommy with one eye on the royal box took a sword from his table, carefully laid it on the ground and knelt expectantly in the direction of Her Majesty. After a few seconds he stood, replaced the weapon and shrugged, ‘Well, you never know!’ By then, however, the Palladium was in uproar. According to one reviewer, ‘the Queen, who doesn’t always laugh too easily, literally shouted’ at the joke.
If Eddie was his favourite writer, Cooper still owed Val and Freddie a considerable debt of gratitude for devising his most memorable routine, for which neither of them has ever been given proper credit. I refer to the ‘Hats’ sequence. Both Sadler and Andrews had been around Tommy from virtually the start of his career. Freddie was by night, as his letterhead proclaimed, a ‘Comedy Impressionist and Compère’ on the concert party circuit, trying to eke out an existence by doubling as a scriptwriter by day. Val, the only survivor of the trio, was and remains in his eightieth year respected throughout the magic community for his achievements as an author, dealer and light comedy performer in his own right. In those early days both were paid what might be deemed less than modest amounts to pen material for their friend. Freddie had some success with a burlesque of the ‘catching a bullet in the teeth’ routine that would crop up in the Cooper repertoire until the end of his days. Perhaps more memorably, he gave him the gag with the skipping rope: ‘Here we have a skipping rope – so we’ll skip that!’ Anything that gave Tommy an excuse to sling something to one side without fear of breakages had an additional cachet.
In the early Fifties Val advertised himself as ‘The Magicians’ Scriptwriter – at your service for a complete act, routine, or patter for a single effect, written to your own style.’ One night he had been performing himself and was aware of his friend grabbing him as he came off stage: ‘Who writes your patter, boy?’ Val replied that he did. ‘Well, I want you to write something for me.’ In time Tommy professed his interest in a standby of the magician’s repertoire from an earlier time. Chapeaugraphy was virtually an act in itself, in which a large circle of felt with a hole in the centre was twisted into a variety of different hats. The French magician and entertainer, Félicien Trewey had scored heavily with the device during the latter part of the nineteenth century, his presentation being one of the very first performances captured – by the Lumière Brothers – on film. At its fullest extent his routine presented a parade of as many as thirty-two characters ‘under one hat’, including toreador, miser, drunkard, costermonger, priest, schoolmaster, a whole sequence of nationals, including a Turk in a fez, and a Salvation Army ‘lassie’. The idea can be traced back to the early part of the seventeenth century when in more limited form it featured in the act of Tabarin, a popular charlatan and farceur who performed on the streets of Paris. Since Trewey’s heyday it had become relegated to a large extent to the amateur stage and lecture platform. Tommy had recently seen a performance in which the different hat shapes were linked to an accompanying story line for the characters represented.
For a man who never wore hats in real life, the comic potential of the actual article had long intrigued him. In 1970 Tommy confided to the journalist, John Dodd that he first discovered he was funny when he was wearing a hat. He was seventeen and standing at a bus stop with a hat on his head when people began to laugh and snigger. At first the circumstances must have been daunting for the developing teenager, but with a pith helmet and a fez behind him he would in adulthood turn the discovery and embarrassment of his teenage years into comic gold, as first shown by the early routine in which he went back and forth between the theatre tabs in a series of daft impressions – each signified by the hat he was wearing – of ‘famous people of the past, the present, and the future’. He featured this as a second spot in the show, Paris by Night at the Prince of Wales theatre in 1955. In the original sequence he paraded, in quick succession, Uncle Sam; John Bull; Napoleon; English sailor; American sailor; ‘Two sailors at once’; Napoleon again; ‘We should not have lost the war! (Nazi helmet); ‘Why?’ (British Tommy); the King of Norway; ‘the other way’ (turns hat through ninety degrees); Nelson (with a hand over his right eye); Half Nelson (same as before, but down on bended knee); and so on. Sometimes he would become hopelessly entangled with the tabs, sometimes completely out of sync with the invisible assistant backstage readying each hat for him. With this in the back of his mind Val devised the concept of using a box of different hats instead of the disc of felt to tell a continuous story. Tommy brought in Freddie to add some ideas of his own and the routine that stopped the show for Cooper on more occasions than any other was born during the run of Paris by Night.
His effortless ability to switch with lightning speed from one to another of a whole procession of characters that included tramp, sailor, banker, cowboy, soldier, little old lady, fireman, pilot, policeman, and a few more along the way – while keeping order for himself in the box that belied the confusion experienced by the audience – would alone qualify many a lesser performer for a place in comedy’s hall of fame. The words of the doggerel that began
’Twas New Year’s Eve in Joe’s bar, a happy mob was there. The bar and tables were crowded, lots of noise filled the air. In the midst of all this gaiety the door banged open wide. A torn and tattered tramp walked in. ‘Happy New Year,
folks,’ he cried.
were largely inconsequential – and sometime incomprehensible – but provided a springboard for his gift for comic looks like no other routine in his repertoire. It is hard for Val to be specific about who was responsible for what detail other than, ‘I can safely say 50 per cent of it was Sadler, 50 per cent Andrews.’ He is also gracious enough to concede that what enabled the routine to grow in stature and re
main fresh over so many years were the occasional faux pas on Cooper’s part that proved so funny he kept them in. It is great testimony to his acting skills that night after night they continued to come over as entirely spontaneous. Tommy would be hardly a dozen lines into the script when in a moment of excitement – ‘Them’s shooting words,’ a cowboy said. ‘Are you aimin’ to be shot?’ – he forgot the words and had to backtrack to the beginning, muttering the whole sequence again sotto voce and switching hats around at a great pace while he caught up, all the while insinuating to the audience that it will be business as usual soon, as if nothing had happened. Val recalls that when this first happened – during a dressing room rehearsal – he had to spend half an hour convincing him how funny it could be on a regular basis: ‘His reaction was, “Yes, but they’ll think I really have forgotten!” There were times when Tommy was not exactly a mental giant!’
Such lapses proved the making of the routine. Inevitably at one stage he can’t find the hat he needs: ‘I’ve got to get a bigger box! Where was I up to?’ Then it is time for the fireman to have his say, but Tommy brings the helmet up so sharply, he hits himself accidentally with considerable force on the forehead. Registering pain as only he can, he appeals to the wings: ‘Now that’s dangerous, that is. You should have padded that a bit. I could have cut my head open on that.’ The poem concludes with the bar-room brawl getting so out of hand – ‘in rushed an Indian; a little schoolboy; I don’t know who that is!’– that the law has to intervene:
In the middle of all this fighting you could hear the knuckles crunch,
When all of a sudden they heard a policeman’s whistle …
It doesn’t come.
They heard a policeman’s whistle…