by John Fisher
For all this attention to detail, he had no wish to analyse his appeal: ‘I honestly don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to know, because if I became self-conscious, I would lose the gift.’ But neither, unlike Dodd or Morecambe, did he analyse his humour. Barry Cryer claims he never heard him utter a single analytical remark. His response to a gag would always be a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’: ‘It was as if something went “Ping! I can do that.” He would never explain a rejection, although he would always be very nice in turning something down.’ Peter Reeves recalls the lunchtime spent in conversation with an intense lady journalist from the Swedish equivalent of Radio Times. She went on and on about her theories of his humour, relating it to the bigger issues affecting society at the time and at last concluding, ‘Is this the way you approach your work?’ ‘Well, I put something in and if it works, I keep it in. If it doesn’t, I leave it out.’ ‘Very interesting,’ was her reply. One longs to have seen the expression on his face.
His natural speech rhythms were such that he often repeated key phrases. The writers at LWT picked up on this. Dick Vosburgh recalled the read-through where one of the team launched into the material he was submitting for the opening stand-up, written as Cooper would say it: ‘Good evening. Good evening.’ Tommy looked at the words and was aghast: ‘What’s this? I can’t say that. I don’t say everything twice.’ Everyone fell about laughing. The story manifests itself in another form with the young Alan Ayckbourn, no less, as the writer faithfully reproducing Cooper’s speech patterns on the page. When Tommy read the four words aloud, he found himself delivering the greeting four times: ‘Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. Good evening.’ ‘There are too many good evenings here,’ he complained. On another occasion at Thames, Dick Hills included in his script the lines, ‘And he came in like that –it could have been like that –but no, it was like that.’ Royston Mayoh explains that Tommy genuinely didn’t understand: ‘Dick just didn’t think. He had done the unforgivable. By holding a mirror up to his foibles, he ran the risk of exposing the myth.’ All magicians are inquisitive by nature, but the ultimate secret Cooper did not wish to have explained was his own.
Unless he was taking his straight-faced penchant for teasing people to unheard of lengths, there are some remarkable instances of how dim he could sometimes appear. Val Andrews remembers the early time when the last five words of the line that went ‘this trick was given to me by a very famous Chinese magician, Hung One – his brother was Hung Too,’ emerged one night as ‘and his brother was executed as well.’ Tommy couldn’t see what was wrong. Val said, ‘He would argue, “But he still died.” He could never grasp it.’ Cryer cites the wrong emphasis he would place on the word in a line. Another joke went something like, ‘A man walked into a bar and went “Ouch!” It was an iron bar.’ Barry explained how important it was to put the emphasis on the adjective, not the noun. An argument ensued: ‘Isn’t the joke, ‘It’s an iron bar?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Did they laugh?’ ‘Yes.’ As Barry says, ‘He wasn’t interested. But then he laughed.’ Maybe it was funnier Cooper’s way as long as Cooper was doing it, but as Andrews says, ‘It was a pity his intellect didn’t match his talent.’
But it could never be that simple. Inevitably, much of his success has been accounted to timing, that cliché of comedy appreciation. Spike Milligan once compared Cooper’s verbal dexterity to a finely honed razor or a piece by Chopin: ‘It was so magically correct. There’s only one split second in a moment of time when the joke is right. Go left or right of that and it doesn’t happen and he hit a bull’s-eye every time.’ On the other hand his magical colleague, Patrick Page dismisses forcibly the whole idea that he was born with some special gift: ‘Bollocks. Tommy didn’t understand the meaning of the word “timing”.’ He may not have had the intellectual grasp the term implies, but at an instinctive level there was something locked into his very being that with experience achieved the sharpness and exactitude Milligan held in such high esteem. Tucked away in a single sketch – the one set in the fish restaurant – is an exchange between Cooper and the difficult diner that encapsulates this verbal skill. Tommy continues to show remorse for ‘his little fishy friend’, the trout that the character played by actor, Anthony Sharp insists he must have:
Tommy: You’re not having it.
Customer: I want the manager.
Tommy: Oh well – that’s different.
On the page the joke is as flat as a flounder, but somehow Cooper’s delivery lifts it out of the mire of limp Seventies sitcom. There is no pause to telegraph what he is going to say. Once the line is uttered – with the merest flicker of a smile – he moves speedily on. It is not a major laugh, but within the Milligan terminology the proportionate reaction it triggered in the studio unquestionably qualified it as ‘a bull’s-eye’.
If he skilfully downplayed this line, what arguably remained the most obvious tag in his repertoire was pushed fearlessly to the limit as he returned on stage in defiance of the audience pre-empting him. I refer once more to that moment when having attempted to shoot himself for failing to land the third card in the hat he declares for a third time, ‘Missed!’ The joke is obvious, but however many times one saw it performed, however transparent it appears in retrospect, one never heard the word without feeling a twitch of surprise. Like the master magician he was at heart, Cooper never let go the gift of surprise, even if, as his daughter says, he hated being surprised himself. Whatever the definition of timing in the comic’s handbook, it is difficult to imagine him as anything but a blue riband exponent of it at times like these.
Comedy has its own unfathomable secret workings, professing rules that are incapable of rational explanation. As Walter Matthau’s character, Willy Clark explained in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, ‘Words with a k are funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. Kleenex is funny. Tomato is not funny.’ A great deal of what made Cooper so enduringly funny is inexplicable too. If it is true that the brains of a Beckham are in his boots, it may be equally true that Cooper’s were locked away somewhere within the innermost, imponderable reaches of his physiology. It would help to explain the most astonishing aspect of his technique whereby physical business cultivated in the earliest years of his career remained constant until the end. His pace slowed down through the years, as did that of Pelé and of Best, but something stayed amazingly constant in his combined physical and mental makeup that many a soccer player would have killed for.
Study the earliest and latest recordings of a set piece from his act and very little discrepancy will be found between them. A film or video editor could cut back and forth haphazardly from one to the other and still arrive at a continuous whole. Whatever Tommy’s physical condition, albeit compromised by age, health or merely the weather, the performance remained sharp and precise. As Bob Monkhouse said, ‘Once he’d got the piece of business correct, it remained perfectly that way always. He never altered it. The precision gave the lie to the apparent clumsiness that he produced. The only time I ever saw him in any way being clumsy with his clumsiness was when he was doing something for the first time in rehearsal. And he wouldn’t do it on stage until he got it right.’ In this approach he was as painstaking as the greatest practitioners of serious stage conjuring. There is no better example than his cabinet routine.
In its pacing and dramatic structure the sequence is a short one-act play of its own. At Tommy’s silent beckoning two stagehands wheel on the wardrobe-size piece of furniture with red curtain in lieu of door. It comes on faster than expected. At the split second it reaches centre-stage, Cooper, clearing the decks for its arrival, just so happens to be standing in its path. The abrupt force of the collision leaves him dazed and disoriented until, pulling himself together for the miracle ahead, he draws our attention to the pitch black interior. As he adjusts the prop first to right and then to left before returning it to central position, no one in the audience can have a single doubt about its innocence: ‘Empty! Empty! Empty!’ Reaching ove
r the threshold he knocks against the three interior walls with his clenched right fist to prove the point further. Genuine hurt steals over the Cooper countenance as he hits too hard, but the show must go on. With all the bravura of Dante or Jasper Maskelyne he steps inside, draws the curtain across and almost instantly whips it back again. There has been no time for anything to have happened, but he looks as if he has seen the ghost of Rasputin, or maybe – in this retro sentry box – that of his old commanding officer: ‘Ooh! It’s dark in there!’ Back on terra firma he pulls the curtain across once more and almost fussily proceeds to make a series of mystical passes towards it, each pointedly from a different direction and loudly accompanied by a tymp roll. Then with anticipation and precision he jerks the curtain back sharply. There is no one there. Nothing has happened.
Nothing will happen. For a nanosecond expectancy hangs in the air, before Cooper succumbs to disdain and dismissal. For one incredible moment the audience ceases to exist. He shrugs, almost subliminally, to the stagehands to take the cabinet back whence it came, slapping the side nearest him as he does so: ‘Right!’ The bathos of his delivery tells us all we need to know. In that one word is wrapped up more than the secret admission of his own failure, but the guilt and frustration of every one of us who sets out high-handedly to achieve a personal goal we know we can never attain. The underplaying of the end says a thousand words, while the routine is studded with detail that could take up many more. The sound of the metallic swish of the curtain on its rail is as correct as a musical note needs to be. The danger that he will be carried away with those mystical passes shows a mind spiralling out of control. The basic emotions of pain, fear and, come the end, guilt are enacted with his whole body at a level with which the audience for all its laughter truly empathizes.
His interaction with long established props testified to the same exactness throughout his career. The supposed muddle with the box of hats, the catalogue of errors with top hat and cane in the Frankie Vaughan send-up, the confusion with the bottle and the glass, the demonstration of the ‘very famous’ vanishing wand, all provide evidence of the process. If one wanted proof that it is more difficult to burlesque straight magic well than to accomplish what one purportedly sets out to do, the latter serves as a prime example. Picking up the wand he went into traditional screech mode: ‘Look. A solid wand …’ The words are timed to coincide with the moment he brings the wand down against the plate in his other hand. The plate shatters. He is not deterred: ‘… will vanish in front of your very eyes.’ He grabs a sheet of newspaper from a small table to his left, wraps the wand inside and as if he were tussling with some unknown force attempts to make the rod disintegrate within. He fails and tries again. On the third and final attempt the wand makes contact with the table, which collapses into a heap. The fancy footwork he shows as he attempts to sweep away the evidence under a magic carpet of his own imagining takes us back to football pitch and ballet stage. His legs are their own expression of embarrassment as, above the waist, he attempts to retain dignity and composure. Tommy said it himself: ‘Straight magic and funny magic are almost equally difficult. If it’s straight, it’s hard and takes a lot of practice, you see. But to send it up is still hard, so it’s more or less on the same level, although the magic has to go wrong at precisely the right time, so I suppose it’s harder.’ The paradox was that within his own twisted parameters he set himself higher standards of personal perfection than anybody. In my opinion, he could have added that his own choreography was more impressive than that ever accorded the occasional dancers on his television shows.
Tommy once surprised Bob Monkhouse by claiming that when it came to physical comedy and magic he had learned not to practise in front of a mirror. He maintained that by so doing you became so engrossed in yourself that you lost sight of the audience, whereas by working to an imaginary crowd, albeit a blank wall, you were constantly aware of the fact that ultimately you had to deliver across the footlights. Bob said, ‘I believe that was one of his secrets. I never saw him perform or do any kind of business where he wasn’t totally involved with reaching out to people. It was never a case of “Look at me. Look at me.” It was always “Here, this is for you.”’ His skill in handling an audience was never seen to greater effect than in his presentation of the evergreen juggling stunt with the eggs and the glasses. This had long been a standard item in conventional juggling acts, the cue for well deserved applause before the performer moved onto his next feat. Cooper enlarged the whole concept. It was no longer about a mere display of skill, everything about the interplay he could establish through that fourth wall that exists between performer and spectators. The climax to the routine when he knocks the tray from between four tumblers of water and four eggs precariously balanced on tubes set on the tray in such a way that the eggs fall into the glasses was always impressive, but in Cooper’s hands the destination was never as important as the teasing detours he took en route with those seated in the auditorium.
First the four eggs were ‘selected’ from a box of six: ‘Now, I’d like someone here at random – oh, Mr Random, would you point to any egg you like, sir. This one? Why this one? Why not that one? Alright.’ This is the one he breaks to show that they are all genuine –‘so fresh that the hens haven’t missed them yet’– before setting up the intricate structure that he will soon capsize with one blow of his hand. Gradually he leads the audience into a state of comic apprehension, to which at this stage, trapped in their seats as they are, laughter can provide the only antidote: ‘What I do is go like that see and the idea of the trick is this – the tray goes over there (he points decisively) – and the eggs – huh, huh – they’re supposed to go into the glasses. I want to know why it hasn’t worked – just like that – boom – like that! And I’d like to point out that you are in direct line of fire!’ The way he plays on his own nervousness brilliantly increases the laughter as he approaches the resolution. However, he does have one word of advice: ‘I’ll give you a little tip. If they fly out, just catch them like that (he cups his hands together carefully), not like that (he claps his hands together), else it will go all over you like that (he uses his hands to mime the mess dribbling down his shirt front).’ The audience is encouraged to join in the count, not least so that he can catch them out at the last moment: ‘One – two – two and a half …’ When the climax arrived, he seldom failed, but when an egg did miss he always claimed, ‘That’s three more than normal!’ However many eggs ended up in the glasses, the routine always scored as a piece of audience involvement on a grand scale.
Whatever was going on within Cooper’s physiological make-up when it came to the playing of physical comedy, the fact that he could replicate complex physical business over a chasm of many years was only half of the achievement. It is equally extraordinary that as he did so he never left you in any doubt that what you were seeing performed was taking place for the very first time. One soon realizes that one is talking of something more than comedy, namely comic acting of a very high order. He might be older, droopier, even sadder – possibly as a result of having done it a thousand times – but the immediacy somehow remained, in a way that Frankie Howerd never achieved in his struggle with the lady pianist who was hard of hearing –‘Poor soul. Don’t mock!’– or Tony Hancock with his intentionally hackneyed display of Hollywood idols of yesteryear: ‘And now here’s one for the teenagers. George Arliss!’
Hancock was too young to attempt an impersonation of William Gillette, the celebrated American actor–playwright of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Gillette helped to define the image of Sherlock Holmes with his portrayal of Conan Doyle’s character in the play he based on the stories, but arguably his greatest contribution to the theatre was the concept that he articulated concerning performance: ‘The Illusion of the First Time in Acting’. He wrote that each successive audience before which a scene is played ‘must feel – not think or reason about, but feel – that it is witnessing, not one of a thousand weary repetit
ions, but a life episode that is being lived just across the magic barrier of the footlights. That is to say, the whole must have that indescribable life-spirit or effect which produces the Illusion of the First Time.’ Directors struggle and strain to achieve this mystical quality from their casts. If it may be accepted as a criterion for success as an actor, then Cooper in his restricted way must be considered an accomplished actor indeed.
Many British variety comedians matured into successful straight actors, not least Max Wall, Jimmy Jewel and Nat Jackley. All had reached the Indian summer of their careers by the time they did so and were less compromised by the spontaneous connection that an earlier audience would have made with their comic achievements. Leaving aside for the moment whether Cooper might at a later age have been able to submerge himself into a straight part, the superficial idea of our comic hero in a serious role is quite impracticable. However hard Cooper might have tried to tame his comic gestures and keep a straight face, distraction would have won the day. A routine that occasionally found its way into his act was a card trick that required him to play the part of a cockney spiv to justify the aces changing into pictures of ice-creams: in the cockney patter ‘Aces’ became ‘Ices’. For this he donned cap, scarf, clip-on walrus moustache, and an attempt at an accent: ‘All right, me old cock sparrer!’ The funniest line in the whole piece was his admission ‘You’d never know it was me.’ With Cooper the combined resources of every theatrical costumier in London could not have prevented such knowledge. He was beyond disguise.