Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing

by John Fisher

  No luck this time either.

  They heard a policeman’s whistle…

  At last we hear the sound effect from the wings. Tommy peers out at the disgraced stagehand with disdain and utters the line that sums up amateur theatrics everywhere:

  Isn’t it marvellous, eh?

  That’s all he has to do.

  And he’s wearing make-up as well!

  Then a policeman came in and pinched the whole damn bunch.

  In a more expansive moment Val confided to me a more detailed account of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the sequence, acknowledging in addition the burlesque monologue style of the comedian Billy Bennett, the low comedy laureate of the music halls, as a further source of inspiration. The verbal structure of ‘New Year’s Eve in Joe’s Bar’ started out as a conscious Bennett-style parody of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ by the Edwardian balladeer, Robert William Service. In addition, working away in Val’s mind was the memory of an extinct double act, Tom Payne and Vera Hilliard, in which the comedian played a door to door salesman with a number of hats in a suitcase. The many strands became plaited together to produce a classic. Over the years other writers with Cooper’s consent took the basic premise to rewrite other words and characters around it. It was always a futile exercise. Audiences would never tire of the original. Why should they, let alone the performer, settle for second best?

  Tommy never relinquished his interest in the piece of felt itself. In later years the writers John Muir and Eric Geen came up with the approach that suited him best and, more importantly, did not clash with the now established pattern of ‘Hats’. For all his skill in switching hats back and forth at breakneck speed in and out of a cardboard box, he had proved less adroit at twisting the ring of felt into a series of specific complex patterns while following a set patter line. The new angle was an incidental one, taking away any such worries as he reminisced about the lady who had approached him before the show to enquire how serious a person he was in his private life. Tommy is anxious to stress that at home he is nothing like the buffoon she sees larking about on the stage, that he reads a lot of serious books, attends a lot of serious plays. All the while he is twiddling the cloth into an inconsequential series of bizarre headpieces that hilariously disprove the assertions of the moment.

  It is doubtful if Sadler received the remuneration that was his due for his part in the ‘Hats’ routine. Val, who wrote for Tommy on a fairly regular basis from 1947 until the mid Sixties, certainly never received what his contribution was truly worth. Only economic necessity kept him in the loop for so long. There were times when he might have been forgiven for walking away. Around the time when ‘Hats’ came into being he submitted to Tommy a sketch based on the idea of Cooper as a penniless restaurant owner forced by circumstances to play all the staff himself, doubling as commissionaire

  ABOVE: Tommy’s parents, Thomas and Gertrude Cooper, circa 1920s.

  ABOVE RIGHT: Three years old and ready for play.

  Eighteen years old and ready for the world.

  Enjoying a bottle and a glass off duty in Egypt in 1947.

  Gwen (far left), star of her wartime concert party.

  Tommy and Gwen, just prior to their wedding in Cyprus, 1947.

  The early publicity pose that defined an image.

  Miff Ferrie: agent, manager, Svengali.

  Later publicity pose when success was assured.

  Baby Vicky seems unimpressed (above) and with baby Thomas (below) in the garden at Chiswick.

  ‘Frankie and Bruce and Tommy’s Christmas Show’, 1966.

  ‘Do you like football?’

  ‘Bucket, sand! Sand, bucket!’

  Time to relax with the famous feet up at home.

  A sensation on the Ed Sullivan Show, New York, 1967.

  ‘When autumn leaves start to fall …’

  ‘And ven zey are caught everyone vill be shot …’

  Funny bones: with Anita Harris, promoting Tommy’s Palladium show, 1971.

  A rare private moment backstage.

  aire, head waiter, chef, even the performers in the cabaret that included a Russian violinist and an adagio dancer. When Val asked Tommy whether he had had a chance to study the sketch, the reply was non-committal: ‘I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet.’ He thought no more of the matter until a few months later he was watching an episode of The Tony Hancock Show, the early 1956 series for commercial television that featured the star before Hancock’s Half Hour cemented his television reputation on the other channel. A carbon copy of the original sketch was played out before him. At one point he turned to his mother and said, ‘If the next character to come through the door is a Russian violinist, this has gone beyond coincidence.’ It was! As he says today, ‘I rest my case. I worried considerably about it. Thought I was going out of my mind. When I mentioned it to Tommy – I wasn’t aggressive – it was his defensive attitude that worried me. He was like Billy Bunter: “No, Skinner took the cakes.” It was nothing to do with him.’ Val, a modest and unassuming man, refused to have anything to do with Cooper for several months, but the need for a few shillings, the camaraderie of the magic profession and the fact that Tommy could be such good company brought them together again. But he remains quite clear about what happened: ‘He would have sold it. Thinking it was not suitable for himself in the first place, he didn’t want to give me any money for it and thought I would just dismiss it. If it was no good for him, it was no good for anybody. Did he seriously think he was brighter than me in that regard?’

  John Muir also testifies to Tommy’s less than straightforward manner in dealing with scriptwriters when money was concerned. For one Blackpool summer season Muir provided him with a routine that burlesqued the skills of Percy Edwards, the well known animal impersonator. When he asked how it was working out, Tommy replied, ‘It died. Not a laugh. I tried it out and had to drop it.’ That put paid to any suggestion of payment. However, when he mentioned the matter to another act on the bill it transpires it was getting huge laughs each night. A short while later John caught Cooper doing the routine on one of his television shows for Thames. When he approached the company they told him that Tommy had claimed the material as his own. The broadcaster smelled the proverbial rat and wasted no time in paying him. Andrews, Muir and Brad Ashton all testify to his cheeseparing habit of delaying the use of material submitted by them until he could perform it on television, thus shifting any financial obligation from himself to the production company. That he might continue to use such material in his stage performances in perpetuity was something that was always pushed to one side.

  From a myriad of sources the Cooper comic repertoire slowly came together. In the early days his energy was indefatigable as he went out of his way to try out material that was new to him. David Berglas, Pat Page, and Bobby Bernard all share fond recall of him popping into meetings of the smaller London magic clubs, like the Thursday sessions of the Institute of Magicians in Clerkenwell and the Friday ones of the London Society of Magicians in Red Lion Square, to test new stuff en route to a late night cabaret booking. At other times he would test gags by springing them on friends or family in anxious anticipation of the reaction. ‘Usually he bursts into the kitchen with a funny hat just as I’m putting the joint in the oven – and is hurt if I don’t laugh,’ Gwen once said. Jokes were like tricks, things to try out with renewed excitement whenever he found one to his liking. Backstage or at rehearsals he never lost an opportunity to try out a new gag, as Bob Monkhouse reminisced: ‘I once saw him in a dressing room dangling a bath tap on a piece of elastic. I asked him what he was doing. “It’sa gag,” he said. He was going to come on, dangle it up and down a few times and then say to the audience, “Tap dance!” I thought the idea was terrible, the worst joke I’d ever heard. “Don’t do it,” I said. “They’ll attack you.” Of course he went ahead with it and brought the place down.’

  The final arbiter always had to be Cooper. Once he had convinced himself that somet
hing was funny, there was no stopping him. One tires of the times ones sees his jokes dismissed as ‘old’. Billy Glason hit the nail on the head in his sales pitch: ‘There are no old gags! The only thing old about old gags are the ones who’ve heard them before and the answer to those who want to admit their age when they remark that a gag is old, is “Say, you don’t look that old!”’ Tommy once confided his feelings on the issue to magical friend, David Hemingway: ‘It doesn’t matter how old the gag is. It doesn’t matter how many times the audience has heard it before. If it’s funny, it’s funny.’ Anyhow, public memory is so short that what an audience is capable of forgetting is remarkable, until the point when familiarity does set in and a joke assumes the status of an old friend. Who would not have attended a Cooper show and come away disappointed at not hearing lines like these?

  I said to the waiter, ‘This chicken I’ve got here’s cold.’ He said, ‘It should be. It’s been dead two weeks.’ I said, ‘Not only that, he’s got one leg shorter than the other.’ He said, ‘What do you want to do? Eat it or dance with it?’ I said ‘Forget the chicken. Give me a lobster.’ So he brought me a lobster. I looked at it. I said, ‘Just a minute. It’s only got one claw.’ He said, ‘It’s been in a fight.’ I said, ‘Give me the winner.’

  When Davenport’s magic shop had its premises opposite the British Museum, the joke used to be that Tommy went to one for his tricks and the other for his gags. Barry Cryer has a theory that Cooper was fully aware of the awful quality of much of his material and was entering into a conspiracy with his audience: ‘He knows it’s a terrible joke and he knows they know it’s terrible. They were laughing less at the joke itself than at how bad it was, not to mention his effrontery in sharing it with them.’ My contention is that there is no such thing as a bad gag, if it is well told and the personality of the teller can surpass its inherent triteness. That may amount to the same thing. Certainly, one of Cooper’s skills was his ability to spot what would work for him in this regard, to recognize the innate structure that would connect effortlessly with his delivery.

  Someone once commented that the best Cooper one-liners had an almost haiku-like quality. I doubt if the theory would hold water if subjected to the many rules of this most compact, most complex literary form, but one senses what they were trying to say. No one understands the mechanics of the process better than current comedian, Tim Vine. Had he been around in Tommy’s time, providing the master with material, he would have been the one writer Cooper made sure he paid properly. Without impersonating or making any overt reference to his hero, Vine keeps alive the logical illogicality that underpinned so much in the Cooper joke compendium. Likewise had Tommy been alive today he may well have had a harder time on the circuits that Tim plays, since he could not claim to have been the comic auteur that modern audiences expect in such situations. In a curious twist of time warp, jokes by Vine published indiscriminately on the internet have been wrongly attributed to Cooper’s repertoire. When through a horrendous series of misunderstandings one of them found its way into my stage tribute, Jus’ Like That! it achieved as loud a laugh as any of the gags Cooper had told in his lifetime:

  Apparently, one in five people in the world is Chinese. And there are five people in my family, so it must be one of them. It’s either my mum or dad. Or my older brother, Colin. Or my younger brother, Ho-Cha-Chu. But I think it’s Colin.

  It has all the Cooper qualities. It is succinct. It has a rhythmic three part motif tucked away inside – just think of ‘lump for your cocoa’– that occurred time after time in his material. It has a strong visual, almost cartoon-like quality that again is so often present. And, like a great magic trick, it exploits the sheer joy of surprise. Even the most familiar gags in the Cooper canon kept this intact. The nearer he got to the punch line, so at the moment of telling the joke became reborn. When asked by David Hemingway to explain his humour, Tommy simply replied that the two funniest things were a surprise and a funny picture. His entire repertoire is a cartoon gallery of the unexpected.

  Tommy was often at his most surprising when driving home a literalism, the headlights of which we didn’t see coming. Study the cross talk routines of Flanagan and Allen, Sid Field and Jerry Desmonde, Norman Wisdom and Desmonde again, and the device appears played out to the point of tedium, redeemed only by the charm of the performers. Tommy kept it on its toes, in the way Harpo had done at an earlier time when he produced an axe and split a table on overhearing a gambler say, ‘Cut the cards.’ Cooper took it to brazen extremes not encountered since Ollie forced Stan to eat his hat in Way Out West:

  I slept like a log last night. I woke up in the fireplace.

  Sometimes I drink my whisky neat. Other times I take my tie off and leave my shirt hanging out.

  Someone actually complimented me on my driving the other day. They put a note on my windscreen that said, ‘Parking fine’. So that was nice.

  My dog’s a one-man dog – he only bites me. I say to him ‘Attack’ and he has one. He took a big lump out of my knee the other day and a friend of mine said, ‘Did you put anything on it?’ I said, ‘No. He liked it as it was.’

  He could draw the obvious to your attention with such wondrous incredulity that you forgave him for it. The slightly demeaning word ‘pun’ never entered your mind as Tommy went through his roll call of crazy props: two gloves sewn together: ‘Look, second hand!’; a toy plane suspended from a coat hanger: ‘Aircraft hangar!’; a golf club that separates into two pieces: ‘I joined a golf club last week. It keeps coming apart!’ He even had a wild tendency to carry the trait into real life. Those not in the know might have wondered whether he was subject to Asperger’s syndrome. Robert Agar-Hutton has recalled his visit to a tailor’s shop in Shaftesbury Avenue where Tommy had come to buy a suit. Checking himself out in the mirror, he turned to a member of staff and asked, ‘Do you mind if I take it for a walk round the block?’ With a client so famous, how could they object? At which point Tommy took from his pocket a small block of wood, placed it on the floor, walked around it once, and then agreed, ‘Fine, I’ll take it.’ There’s also the occasion he walked into a library, asked for a pair of scissors and proceeded to cut the bottom off one of his trouser legs. He went up to the librarian and announced, ‘There’s a turn-up for the books!’ The latter incident may be apocryphal. It is warming to think it may actually have happened.

  Not far removed in his personal comic spectrum was the fascination for ‘doctor’ jokes, his habitual poor health lending an ironic quality to their status. A book could be filled with them. When a Sunday newspaper ran a competition for original Cooper jokes in 1975, they outnumbered all the others submitted. Possibly the first one he ever heard was a Max Miller original: ‘I said, “Doctor, I’ve broken my arm in several places.” He said, “Well, you shouldn’t go to those places.”’ Many others were almost certainly buried in the depths of time: ‘So I said to the doctor, “How do I stand?” He said, “That’s what puzzles me!” “Doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains.” “Then pull yourself together.” “Doctor, doctor,” I said, “There’s something wrong with my foot. What should I do?” He said, “Limp.”’ In effect they were interchangeable. To be acquainted with one today – whether he told it or not – is as vivid a reminder of the man himself as the fez or the catchphrase.

  As he traded in such nonsense – in the best Carrollian sense of the word – he tapped into something that related to the child in us all. He made us laugh again at what we had chuckled at in the Dandy or Beano when we were eight years old. The innocence manifested itself in other ways. His table of props resembled nothing more than a children’s play area. And the act was totally suitable for children of all ages. In spite of his admiration for Max Miller he completely belied the old W. C. Fields adage, ‘Nothing risqué, nothing gained.’ Gwen is on record as saying that if he ever told a dirty joke she would divorce him: ‘He didn’t need to. He could still make people laugh.’ In truth such humour would have been too knowing for his own
persona and when he did come close to it in his regular act it was with the naughtiness of the playground, as when he produced from his pocket a brassiere with three cups: ‘I met a funny girl last night.’ But he was not above the tendency to resort – ever so rarely – to smuttiness when occasion demanded. Brad Ashton recalled the time he saw Tommy struggling against a tough Geordie club audience, reduced to telling uncharacteristically adult gags in an attempt to hold the crowd. The management was not best pleased. On a stray occasion in May 1966 Miff received an admonitory call from a management requesting that Tommy ‘tone his act down a bit’ for the second night of a convention of oil executives at Brighton. When the agent asked for more specific information, the reply came that the client would like Tommy to cut, ‘The Tarzan joke, and the one about when he performed in the USA in a nudist colony and a lady said, “Well, he isn’t a Jew anyway!”’ The complaint is hard to comprehend. Miff demanded that it be put in writing and doubtless the headmaster served summons on his pupil in the standard manner.

  They were rare incidents, not least because Tommy knew what he was doing. Survival is one thing, habit is another. He once said, ‘Once you tell the first dirty joke you tell another and before you know where you are, you’ve got a blue show and I don’t want that. It’s very difficult to get back from blue material to clean material.’ His friends, Morecambe and Wise had once featured a routine in which it was hinted that Ernie might have been responsible for an illegitimate pregnancy. The postbag groaned with letters of protest for several days. The nearest Cooper came to a racist gag, the Brighton reference notwithstanding, was when he asked a Chinese waiter if there were any Chinese Jews: ‘He said, “I don’t know. I’ll go and find out.” So he went and came back. He said, “No. There’s only apple juice, pineapple juice and orange juice.”’ The closest he came to a sick joke was his confession that he always travelled in the tail end of an aeroplane: ‘You never heard of one backing into a mountain.’ A perennial routine called ‘Souvenirs’, in which he produced objects from a box to signify places he had visited – The Isle of Man (a dummy trousered leg held in appropriate position); Holyhead (a sprig of holly on a headband); Leatherhead (an old boot held on top of his head); Bath (a bath cap); East Ham (a ham joint held accordingly); West Ham (switched to the other hand); Oldham – Phew! (same joint held to his nose)’ – was first written to include a gag where he blew up a pink rubber glove and inverted it to represent the lower regions of a cow: ‘Huddersfield!’ Even that was deemed by Cooper to be somewhat near the knuckle.