Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing: The Definitive Biography of a Comedy Legend

Once seen he would never be forgotten, but what you remember, of course, is the broad image of an ungainly hulk in a red hat. Analyse his performance and he is seen to represent a far more complex range of expression and body language than the immediate impact of his branding suggests. Facially he is as interesting as Keaton, the stone face comic of the silent screen who supposedly never smiled but in whose countenance one can read all of human emotion. The legendary guru of British comedy, Spike Milligan once described the Cooper visage to me as ‘a call for help, wasn’t it? “Please help me out of this. Please. Please.”’ His deep-set, almost mournful wide blue eyes were perfect for registering a resigned astonishment at life’s ups and downs. In time the perplexed Cooper look, characterized by a glance upwards and through forty-five degrees and as such betraying his theatrical roots, would become as much a part of his comic persona as Jack Benny’s stare. No one had a more beseeching glance of puzzlement as he scrutinized a prop that was new to him, observed a more manic look of desperation when a trick failed, a guiltier look of complicity – like that of a child with his hand stuck in the cookie jar – as he discovered you had caught him out while fumbling some secret manoeuvre, or a more radiant searchlight grin born out of a relentless optimism that the next task can’t possibly prove as calamitous as the last. Eric Sykes, who directed Tommy on several occasions, once defined comedy as a way of looking at the world askew. He knew instinctively that no performer physically played cockeyed more effectively than Cooper: all great clowns, Eric included, might be said to have been born at forty-five degrees out of kilter to the world and that is the way they see it.

One would have expected his long gangling limbs to provide a three-ring-circus of incoordination, but the mad, flapping hands – ‘See that hand there, look. Well this one’s just the same!’ – clasping his heart one moment, nervously flittering back to his props the next, and the outsize feet that when still seemed set in a permanent ten to two position were the lie to the general pattern. Interwoven throughout his whole performance was a surprising grace and delicacy of movement that might have been choreographed with sensitivity and skill. His movement at times was reminiscent of a matador swerving from one table of magical nonsense to the other as he eluded the advance of some invisible bull. At other times his lurching body seemed to defy gravity, like some inflatable figure being kept aloft as air rippled with amazing fluidity through his shoulders, arms, and fingers. He’d subscribe to this process as a regular device to follow the punch line of a joke. The theatre critic, Gordon Craig once said of the actor, Henry Irving, ‘Irving did not walk on the stage, he danced on it,’ and the same might be said of Cooper as he lifted his feet and replaced them, as if threading his way through some imaginary maze with haute école finesse. As the American poet, E. E. Cummings commented, ‘The expression of a clown is mostly in his knees.’ Cooper was certainly as capable of doing double takes with his legs and feet as with those soulful eyes. A favourite pose as he went from one piece of nonsense to another involved standing in profile beside one of his tables, hand touching, head tilted back, his right leg kicked up at right angles at the knee, his face turned to the audience in a gleeful grin, as if to say it’s all a game. Even tentative burlesque ballet movements were not beyond him. With arms outstretched, he would pirouette accordingly amid the magical chaos: ‘I taught myself, I did. I was in Swan Lake. I was. I fell in.’

His maniacal, throaty laugh was the perfect counterpoint to the whole catalogue of gestures and the reckless abandon with which his props were cast aside, leaving the stage at the end of his performance a stagehand’s nightmare. Shoulder-heaving in its intensity, the Cooper guffaw has come to be recognized as the grand sonic emblem of British comedy. Capable of warding off disapproval, excusing failure, registering delight, born – so he claimed – of nerves, it epitomized the Cooper stage persona, co-existing with that self-deprecating cough that presumably in this outrageous game of make-believe we weren’t supposed to hear as he faced the reality of the gag misfired, the trick gone wrong. Laugh and cough were the interjections that saved a thousand words. Those that remained were thrown to the mercy of the most distinctive voice in comedy since that of W. C. Fields. Once described as an impressionistic blur that made Eddie Waring sound like Julie Andrews – for today, say, read Ray Winstone and Emma Thompson – it was characterized by a slightly hoarse West Country burr bordering on a slur that at times could pass for insobriety, but only seldom was. It invested his jokes, his monologues, his shaggy dog stories with a kind of rough poetry. And then there was the matter of his catchphrase. ‘Just like that!’

He always claimed this came about by accident. ‘I may have done it and not thought anything of it at the time,’ he once mused. Anyhow, it gathered momentum through repetition and became fodder for the generation of impressionists who hitched their imitative wagon to his star. It is a fairly innocuous expression, but today cannot be said among the British public without triggering instant amusement. Once he had given in to the concept, he was only too happy to embroider upon it with those expressive hands gesturing down in counterpoint at waist level: ‘Not like that! Like that!’ followed by some incomprehensible incantation of dubious foreign extraction that might have been spelled ‘Zhhzhhzhhzhh’, but probably wasn’t. In retrospect it was the perfect verbal trademark for a comedy exponent of a demonstrative art like magic. Twenty years after his death it was voted, in one of those polls upon which unimaginative television executives seem to thrive, the second most popular catchphrase in British comedy history. Since the one that preceded it and those in close proximity soon after were all phrases of the moment, the likelihood is that his will endure, while the others will shrivel away. Reference to being the only gay in the village is hardly the stuff of everyday conversation.

The unavoidable cliché is that Cooper remains the most impersonated figure in recent British show business, the beckoning fez an instant token of fun and frivolity. The catchphrase and the hat became inseparable, as Tommy found with his wife Gwen when he returned on holiday to Egypt, where he had served in the war: ‘We were in Cairo and we came across a guy selling fezzes in the market. I went up to try one on and the guy turned to me and said, “Just like that!” I said, “How do you know that? That’s my catchphrase!” He said, “What’s a catchphrase? I know nothing about any catchphrase. But I do know that every time an English person comes up here and tries on one of these fezzes, they turn to their friends and say ‘Just like that!’ And you’re the first one not to say it.” Marvellous, isn’t it!’

The fez acted as a beacon of merriment the moment he stepped on stage. That first entrance was irresistible as he strode to the centre like a barrel of bonhomie come crashing towards the footlights. He was possessed of a crazy comic spirit from the end of the tassel to the tips of his toes. In this regard I have always considered that he was to magic and comedy what Louis Armstrong was to music, their performance modes extensions of their natural being, underpinned by an essential playfulness and a keenness to share this quality with their audience. In his early days his attack was irrepressible. Never had such a surge of idiocy been unleashed into an auditorium with such vigour. So contagious was the atmosphere he created that from that moment everything he did would be funny, however seemingly unfunny any one constituent part of his routine might have appeared in the cold light of a lesser performer’s act. By the time his fame was established, it was only necessary for those expectant for his entry to hear the opening strains of his signature tune, the ever present ‘Sheik of Araby’, for the laughter bottled up inside them to gush forth in waves. For the next twenty, thirty, forty minutes he would grant us entry into his weird world, a crazy magical paradise where reality was turned on its head as he panicked his way to a closing ovation.

His stage tables always resembled some surreal Argos catalogue made real. There were props for playing with, like the rose in the bottle with the secret thread attached: ‘Rose, Rose, Arisen!’; props for dropping for the sole purpose of picking them up: ‘See that. I’m not afraid of work!’; props for questioning: ‘I don’t know what that’s for!’; props for his own comfort, as when he would blow up a balloon for no other purpose than to deflate it into his face: ‘It’s the heat that does it!’; props with which to impress, as when he threw an egg into the air only for it to shatter the plate upon which it was supposed to land intact; props he had presumably brought from home to sneak in some vestige of domestic routine, like the flower in the pot which wilts the moment he turns away from watering it, not once, not twice, but ad infinitum; and occasionally props for genuinely succeeding with, moments when the magic came right and his look of triumph was a wonder to behold. Ostensibly no object on stage served a more useful purpose than the rubbish bin slightly to the right of centre, but when he went to activate it an absurd jack-in-the box head from some distant Hammer horror movie emerged to send him into instant shock and the stage became more littered still. Working in tandem with the chaos was a stream of anarchy that was nothing if not liberating, ahead of its time in reflecting the message of modern stress therapists to rid us of the clutter of our own lives, the Christmas presents never used, the gadgets that never worked, even the jokes we wish we had never started to tell.

In mocking the conventions of magic and comedy he made fun of the performer that we might like to think exists in us all. James Thurber had a special insight into the formula. It is unlikely that the great American humorist ever saw Tommy Cooper. Even if his failing eyesight allowed him the privilege on a visit to London in the Fifties, he showed amazing prescience in the Thirties when he entitled a New Yorker article ‘The Funniest Man You Ever Saw’. To read it today is to play an instant game in which Cooper has to be cast into the main part, not merely because he possibly was the funniest man you ever saw, but because here was a type, that of the compulsive gagster, that Thurber and Cooper clearly intuitively understood. ‘He’s funnier’n hell,’ explains one character. ‘He’d go out into the kitchen and come in with a biscuit and he’d say: “Look, I’ve either lost a biscuit box or found a cracker,”’ says another. As for card tricks, there was no stopping him:

‘And then he draws out the wrong card, or maybe he looks at your card first and then goes through the whole deck till he finds it and shows it to you or –’

‘Sometimes he just lays the pack down and acts as if he’d never started any trick,’ said Griswold.

‘Does he do imitations?’ I asked.

‘Does he do imitations?’ bellowed Potter. ‘Wait’ll I tell you –’

As the title character passes off the use of a pencil eraser as some magnificent vanishing trick, claims the invention of the hole in the peppermint wondering whether it will prove a commercial proposition, or emerges from the bathroom with a tap in his hand, ‘I’ve either lost a bathtub or found a faucet!’, one can imagine Cooper bringing the whole piece to life. But the telling line is yet to come:

‘Laugh? I thought I’d pass away. Of course, you really ought to see him do it; the way he does it is a big part of it – solemn and all; he’s always solemn, always acts solemn about it.’

For all the outward mayhem, Tommy never performed without solemnity. Seriousness and sincerity never failed to hallmark anything he did in the cause of laughter. And as for imitations? Well, wait till I tell you! There was the one of the swallow (‘Gulp!’), the one of his milkman that no one seemed to get, not to mention Robert Mitchum’s father and Frank Sinatra, where he donned a trilby for effect. After the laugh, he’d drop the hat and the ground shook. It happened to be made of cast iron. Even Louis Armstrong was conjured up with a scrunched up handkerchief and a single toot on a child’s plastic trumpet. ‘Right!’ he would sheepishly admit to himself as he faced up to the fact that it was not quite what the audience expected.

He corresponded to the Lord of Misrule in ancient times, licensed to make play of our expectations of life, right down to the bare bones of language itself: ‘Now before I begin my act proper, I’d like to say this. This. Funny word that, isn’t it? That. Now that’s funnier than this!’ That he had far greater effect than any distant forebear may be attributed to the fact that the world in which he operated has become more complicated, more ambitious, more self-satisfied than it ever was when the original Tom Fool would have been expected to wear cap and bells in lieu of red felt and tassel. The mass media of our own time have also helped to raise Cooper to the status of an enduring national figure. Since his death his caricature by Gerald Scarfe has been the subject of a postage stamp in 1998; he has featured as the lead figure in the poster campaign for the celebrations staged nationwide by the National Film Theatre to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Independent Television in 2005; even the 2001 discovery in a garden shed of the earliest known television footage of our hero dating back to 1950 occasioned headlines that might have been fitting, had the technology allowed, for a Christmas Day broadcast by Queen Victoria. In the Nineties, National Power went as far as using the image of a pylon with fez, bow tie and outstretched metallic arms to tell the world that it was now generating more power from less fuel – ‘Just like that!’

The catchphrase was quoted by Margaret Thatcher in one of her last party conference speeches, although it is said in such circles that her speech writer, the dramatist Ronald Millar was required to give her lessons in the correct intonation ahead of the delivery, the PM being possibly the one person in the land ignorant of the most famous three words in popular culture. Politicians of all parties still find themselves caricatured fez on head when disaster crosses their path, an error of judgement is made. It only seems yesterday that The Times, courtesy of cartoonist John Kent, ran an image of a be-fezzed Home Secretary waving a magic wand with the caption, ‘It’s Magic! “Tommy” Blunkett turns an asylum-seeker into a taxpayer.’ It was almost unnecessary to add the catchphrase. It was a change in the summer of 2005 to discover by chance an article on of all things glass collecting in the investment pages of The Business headlined, ‘Glass, bottle – Bottle, glass.’ It is one thing to have one’s catchphrase remembered way beyond the time it was meant to serve, quite another to have one’s very speech patterns enter the subconsciousness of the nation.

The most bizarre manifestation of his fame came in 2000 when he was featured in the Body Zone at the ill-fated Millennium Dome built on the Meridian Line in Greenwich. Visitors were literally able to get inside the mind of Tommy Cooper, which found itself vying for attention with a giant model of an eyeball and an enormous, throbbing heart which beat faster whenever anyone let out a blood-curdling scream. Footsore tourists and day-trippers queued to stand behind massive teeth in sight of fez, microphone and glass of water as the distinctive voice was heard once again telling not only its familiar one-liners, but responding to the heckling of other so-called comic brains. The public complained that nothing was explained properly, which seems in keeping with the Cooper way of doing things. Tommy had become the most effective byword for incompetence and confusion since his own heroes, Laurel and Hardy. It was appropriate that he should prove to be the most popular aspect of an exhibition and building that in their own way quickly came to symbolize those qualities. All that is left is for Cooper to be granted the posthumous knighthood he deserves and for his iconic image to be discovered by some enterprising animation film company ready to transmute his sense of the ridiculous into further comic gold.

To the British public he has acquired a mythic status on a par with John Bull, Robin Hood, Mr Pickwick, even Mr Punch. It was with a degree of seriousness that in 1998 the Daily Mirror recommended foregoing the celebration of St George’s Day, in favour of a Tommy Cooper day. The saint had been revealed as the patron saint of syphilis sufferers and as someone who never set foot in England. It proclaimed the idea of a national day in which we all wear fezzes in tribute to ‘someone who sums up our unique attitude to ourselves and the world and someone who is eternally cool. Look no further than Tommy Cooper.’ Classless, timeless, ludicrous, his qualifications speak for themselves. Maybe Lenny Henry should think about converting Red Nose Day into Red Fez Day.

He also tapped into that rich vein of surrealism that links the comedy of the British music hall tradition back to the century of Lear and Carroll. It was another era when the diminutive clown Little Tich danced in his elongated boots, absurdist sketch comedian Harry Tate sported a moustache that he could twirl like an aeroplane propeller, and pioneer patter comedian Dan Leno claimed to have tramped the streets so often that he had to resort to turning his legs up at the ends where the feet had been worn away. But Cooper would have been perfectly at home in the company of these early superstars. Indeed, I am convinced that had fate not destined Tommy for a role in twentieth-century show business, Lewis Carroll would have had to invent him, this manic Mad Hatter with a Cheshire cat grin and a profile as forbidding as the Queen of Hearts. That the guillotine trick was one of his favourite illusions is telling, his love of outrageous wordplay even more so. And if he had not been one of the royal family’s favourite entertainers, one can imagine judgement being passed at the Palace: “‘It’s a pun” the King added in an angry tone, and everybody laughed. “Let the jury consider their verdict.”’ When donning one of those absurd half and half costumes, he might have been Tweedledum and Tweedledee in one body. His whole world was one of playing cards rising up in a rebellious swirl around him. The perpetual lateness of the White Rabbit provides its own sly grace note for those who knew him off stage.

Others have seen him in different contexts. With a meaningful twinkle in his eye, Spike Milligan once suggested to me that Cooper would have been his ideal choice for casting as Jesus Christ: ‘You can almost see him now. Fishes, loaves. Loaves, fishes. Huh huh huh! And here’s a little trick I’d like to show you now. As you can see there is nothing on my feet. I will now walk on this water over here. Not over there. Over here!’ Barry Cryer has taken up the theme: ‘I threw the money changers out of the temple the other day. Silly really, cos I wanted two fivers for a tenner. Huh huh!’ Milligan also said that when God made Cooper he got it wrong and that if he were a self-made man he made a terrible job of it. They point to the same thing. Given that the world is not a perfect place, the idea that one day one might meet one’s maker and discover he is wearing a red fez is a consoling one. Kenneth Tynan, while not subscribing to the Christian hypothesis or approving of the current state of the world, once nominated Ralph Richardson for the part of God, qualifying his choice, ‘if we imagine him as a whimsical, enigmatic magician, capable of fearful blunders, sometimes inexplicably ferocious, at other times dazzling in his innocence and benignity.’ In addition, the actor and the comedian shared that abstruse air that hints of knowledge deprived to lesser mortals, linked to an ability to make the trivial sound as if it were the secret of the Universe, as for instance in this typical Cooper pronouncement: ‘They say that 20 per cent of driving accidents are caused by drunken drivers. That must mean that the other 80 per cent are caused by drivers that are stone cold sober. In other words, if all drivers got drunk, there would be far less accidents.’

Magic of course provided him with the perfect metaphor with which to comment upon the human condition. Whereas Chaplin and Keaton needed vast expanses of Hollywood real estate, not to mention in those early movie-making days lashings of sunshine to pursue their craft, Cooper’s happiest arena was on a stage. Where else would a magician have plied his wares? His act was not a matter of merely standing at a microphone. Here was as well-defined a milieu for his personal comic vision as Galton and Simpson ever constructed for Tony Hancock or for Steptoe and Son. Of his British contemporaries only Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd, and Max Wall succeeded in creating anything resembling a three-dimensional world out of their solo spoken monologues. Unintentionally, Tommy’s dysfunctional approach to magic – neither totally burlesque nor obviously straight – became the most consistently successful public relations device conjuring has enjoyed in its deep and distant history. He is every one of us who has ever fumbled his or her way through a conjuring trick in a social situation. His success becomes our success. He was clever enough to ensure that triumph occasionally sneaked up on him regardless.

Significantly for all his relevance to real life, he hardly ever made reference to topical issues, whether sport, celebrity, politics, or opinion of any kind. As a private individual cocooned in his private world of jokes and magic, he was not interested. Ken Dodd once said that to be a great comedian you need to know the price of cabbage. So sure is that vibrant performer’s grasp of the lives of his public, one cannot disagree. But in Cooper’s case it just didn’t matter. He succeeded in attaining the widest possible audience appeal by keeping up the barricades around his own lunatic world. Only occasionally would a product reference intrude, as when he yo-yoed a can of hair cream on a length of elastic: ‘Brylcreem bounce!’ Or picked up a loaf of ‘Nimble’ sliced bread with a balloon attached: ‘She flies like a bird through the sky – high – high!’ As he let go, it plummeted to the floor. Funny at the time, they did not last in the act for long. Many stand-up comedians of his era would have found it difficult to work without a copy of that day’s newspaper within reach. Cooper nevertheless stayed thoroughly genuine, an ordinary bloke to the last, never less than the people’s comedian. And how we need him now – a funny man who knows that success in his role is not about getting awards, playing cold, cavernous, overlarge arenas, cropping up on pretentious panel shows, or signing off from the job in hand to write novels we possibly do not need.

Some might have dismissed his comedy as mad, but as Eric Sykes put it, ‘He was about as big an idiot as Einstein and he got more laughs.’ He was a one-off. He was not necessarily the funniest comedian, the greatest clown, the most entertaining magician of all time. He may have been all three; he may have been none of these. But he was without question Tommy Cooper. Like Sinatra, Satchmo, Astaire, his very name will endure as a superlative all of its own. Let us now trace his beginnings.

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