The Times - UK (2020-09-05)

the times | Saturday September 5 2020 1GM 35

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the Royal Court. You could almost sense things

changing before your eyes.”

The Oxbridge connection was crucial. Until Peter

Cook and Jonathan Miller (light blue) joined forces

with Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore (dark), English

comedy was a music hall tradition, stretching from

Marie Lloyd and Max Miller through Gracie Fields

and George Formby to the young Ken Dodd. They

were troupers who found things out the hard way,

pulling on their boots and learning how to woo

audiences in different towns, four nights a week.

“With Beyond The Fringe,” says Billington, “a long

playing record soon came out of the West End show,

and young people began to walk around quoting from

it, word perfect. It was a phenomenon.” Four

graduates, not from the school of hard knocks, but

from our two most ancient seats of learning, had

redefined the scope of English comedy. The

established church, the idea of military valour, and

politicians of all stripes, but particularly members of

Harold Macmillan’s cabinet, were now subjects of

mockery.

The public schoolboys of Private Eye joined in the

fun in 1961, and when That Was the Week That Was

was screened a year later the satirists had secured the

commanding heights. When Monty Python’s Flying

Circus, another assembly of Oxbridge graduates, hit

our screens in the summer of 1969, just as the Beatles

were breaking up, the new boys had conquered

Everest. Half a century later the Pythons are unofficial

ambassadors for our nation, wherever they go.

Many of these comedians were brilliant performers,

and what’s more, they knew it. For the first time, the

funny men began to think they were brighter than the

people who paid to watch them, a process that

the victim of his own bigotry. Rigsby, the seedy

landlord in Rising Damp, was forever hoist with his

own petard. More recently we have the Pub

Landlord. Say no more! Arthur Lowe, Warren

Mitchell and Leonard Rossiter achieved comic

immortality, and Al Murray was often

very funny.

Television comedy was not

always the rose garden of

common memory. For every

classic like Porridge there was a

shocker like Love Thy

Neighbour. While Morecambe

and Wise dazzled, Bernie

Winters was often upstaged by

his St Bernard dog, Schnorbitz. As

for Cannon and Ball, they should

have stayed at the end of the pier. The

Comedians, other than Manning, was

third-division stuff.

Only the auctioneer, it is said, is equally

interested in all schools of art. So it is with

comedy. A personal list of favourites would

include Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper

and Les Dawson from the world of clowns;

the Alan Ayckbourn of Absurd

Person Singular and The Norman

Conquests; Auberon Waugh’s

stinging denunciations of frauds

and impostors; the Ealing

comedies, Kind Hearts and

Coronets to the fore; Noël Coward

singing Nina (From Argentina), and

Ray Davies’s Autumn Almanac;

Humph Lyttelton’s extraordinary

licence on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A

Clue; Victoria Wood’s “Beat me on

the bottom with a Woman’s

We e k l y”, Peter Kay’s conspiratorial

winks, the V-sign, and almost

everything Barry Cryer has

ever said.

A

bove everybody stands

Kenneth Arthur Dodd,

the last and the

greatest of the front-

cloth comics. Doddy

was the true voice of English

comedy. He played every hall in

the land, many times over, and

nobody ever asked for their

money back. In 1965 he filled the

London Palladium for 42 weeks,

persuading John Osborne to

take his actors from the Royal Court Theatre to see a

master at work. And not once did he utter an

obscenity, “deconstruct” a joke, or indicate which way

the responsible citizen should vote.

“We know there is misery in the world,” he told me

shortly before he died in March 2018. “We can see it

every day. But why do so many modern comedians

want to tell us how awful things are? It’s our job as

jesters to bring joy into people’s lives. We all get the

blues, but comedians have the chance to banish them,

if only for an evening. That’s why they pay to see us.

It’s our duty, and our pleasure. The world is a

wonderful place.”

Comedians make poor arbiters of taste, lazy

interpreters of political events, and unreliable mentors

of youth. They are the successors to Feste in Twelfth

Night, to Till Eulenspiegel of legend, and to King

Cole’s “fiddlers three”. Like Rigoletto, their duty is to

put on the motley and bring us laughter, not present

themselves to the world in the robes of virtue.

Joy, Dodd called it, and no man knew more about

how to help audiences share it. You never know. If

Kumar and the apostles of confected rage ever put

their prejudices to one side, they might share it too.

Michael Henderson is the author of That Will Be England

Gone (Constable)

reached its height with the arrival of alternative

comedy in the 1980s. Originally a reaction against the

sexual and racial stereotyping of television shows like

The Comedians, alt-com eventually swallowed its own

tail because too many practitioners were not very

funny; certainly not as funny as Bernard Manning, the

old-style northern comic they loved to hate. From

there it was a slippery slope to the valleys of modern

routines like those of Stewart Lee, who aims to

“deconstruct” comedy. It is the comic equivalent of

Heston Blumenthal’s egg and bacon ice cream:

showing off for its own sake.

So what is English humour at its best? In the first

place it is that blend of mockery and affection, from

Gilbert and Sullivan to the Python gang, which finds

humour in matters high and low but falls short of

cruelty. Then it is the great gift of laughing at

ourselves. Not everybody is capable of doing that. The

English do it all the time.

There is also a democratic spirit at play. We are a

bolshy people, and don’t care for those who have

designs upon us. In Dad’s Army the joke is always on

Captain Mainwaring when he ascends the moral

pulpit. Alf Garnett, star of Till Death Us Do Part, was

The funny men

began to think

they were

brighter than

the people who

paid to watch

them, a process

that peaked

with alternative

comedy in

the 1980s

“

er 5 2 020 1GM

s a c C s R H

li

C t W w e e w c t n m L p

takehisactorsfromth

Clockwise from top left, Peter Kay

and Sian Gibson in the BBC sitcom

Car Share, Ken Dodd, Nish Kumar,

Carry On’s Sid James and Barbara

Windsor, Dad’s Army, Tommy

Cooper and Victoria Wood

English humour at its best is in

the first place that blend of

mockery and affection, which

finds humour in matters high

and low but falls short of cruelty.

“