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ENGLISH HUMOR |
 Peter Cook, left, and Dudley Moore in their early routine "Greta-Bloody-Garbo." |
Nursing my sore ribs
after too much Brit humor
of TheColumnists.com
Is this sceptered isle about to sink giggling into the sea? It wouldn’t surprise me. Yearend holiday television has aired three tributes to the men who rolled back the frontiers of English comedy in the 1960s and 1970s--Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. I watched them all, agog, ribs aching.
Just a couple of weeks earlier I had caught a delightful documentary on “Beyond the Fringe,” that four-man cast of comic glitter that included those two offenders plus Dr. Jonathan Miller and playwright Alan Bennett. And Sir David Frost’s “That Was the Week That Was” (TW3) was featured in the same vein a couple of weeks before that.
The English are having a hilarious time recalling their bright stars of anti-establishment commentary in that unrivalled period of quality output. They’re still doing it, by the way, both in print and broadcast.
Must we split hairs and distinguish between comedy and satire? It’s a fine line sometimes. Cook and Moore didn’t set out to be satirists. (Isn’t that Jonathan Swift territory?) But when critics praised them for their biting satire, they wore the mantle comfortably.
At 30 years remove, it’s true that some of the Cook-Moore material may seem in the schoolboy league, but that was the point. It was delivered with such a straight face by two Oxbridge-educated adults that it triggered gales of subversive laughter. How else to explain the excitement of listening to Peter Cook’s “worst job,” as described in their first unpublished cassette tape of “Derek and Clive.” His worst job, he said, was the daily routine of cleaning up the hindquarters of the late Jayne Mansfield, who had this odd problem of lobsters crawling into her bum. “She seemed to like it, and yet she was quite a nice girl,” Cook deadpanned, as Moore sagely agreed. Moore then described his worst job: emptying Winston Churchill’s spit-bucket every evening. Cook gravely commiserated.
I played this scratchy pirated tape to friends in my 37th-floor McGraw-Hill office in New York in 1977, as excited as if I were inhaling the magic white powder. A friend who specialized in covering news of nuclear reactors had obtained the tape by devious means, and helped assemble a half dozen trusted colleagues with a taste for the surreal. We were exhilarated by the inventiveness of these cultured but naughty Englishmen. We wasted the best part of the morning soaking up the stuff.
England was and still is a truly remarkable little country. Only ranking 47th in square kilometrage among the world’s nations, it somehow manages to produce talent in the arts well beyond its domestic requirements. The United States, with five times the population, still looks to England for leadership in many cultural matters.
Don’t all Americans wish they could speak like John Gielgud or Judi Dench or John Cleese? Don’t we all see Monty Python as a cultural milestone? Doesn’t every rerun of ‘Fawlty Towers,’ every airing of ‘Life of Brian’ continue to impress us? The classics and the detective series flowing from the BBC and ITV television machines outclass nearly everything that is done on U.S. television.
Most of it exports well in all directions. German television bought the entire Fawlty Towers series and broadcast all except the one entitled “Don’t Mention the War.” They have a problem with irony.
The English do this on a budget, too. While 40 writers sweated over the “Cheers” machine for several years, Peter Cook could produce a perfect sketch in an hour, ready for prime time. Cleese, no slouch at the keyboard, says he and Graham Chapman needed about a day to reach the same quantity and quality as “Cookie” could manage in a fraction of that time. Nowadays, Ben Elton displays that same facility for a long string of successes, including the early “Black Adder” episodes.
Only twice have I personally come close to this scene.
I once appeared on a BBC radio panel with the late great satirist Willie Rushton, co-founder of Private Eye magazine and a regular on TW3. The theme was American barbarisms vs. proper English. Willie gave me a hard time for being a native of the country where one says to the barkeep: “Gimme a beer.” My defense (‘Pity us. We’re a young country. We don’t have the wealth of flavours and brands that you do.’) was drowned out with a stream of spontaneous one-liners from Willie, the verbal equivalent of a package of firecrackers going off, with a couple of roman candles and a cherry bomb tossed in. I knew enough to shut up and let him soar.
My second encounter was longer-lasting. A good friend and former McGraw-Hill colleague, Roy Eales, began as a writer and performer in the satirical review ‘Mad(e) in England,’ which played in the 1960s at the Showboat Lounge jazz club in D.C., on the same bill as such jazz names as Mose Allison and Jimmy Witherspoon.
After Roy’s group disbanded, he became a business reporter, and he and I shared a hotel room for a week in New York (McGraw-Hill’s largesse) while being indoctrinated in the prim world of specialized business writing. At the end of that, I needed a week to readjust to grim reality, mainly because of Roy’s non-stop comic fireworks.
Roy had risen on the wave of English satire that included David Frost’s ‘TW3’ as it swept through the United States. Cook and Moore were angling for attention in a small New York theatre when Frost came into the country and addressed millions on television, creating tensions that participants recall to this day. Indeed, jealousies developed between Moore and Cook when Dudley went to Hollywood. Sadly, they ended up at each other’s throats.
Roy, by the way, is living on the Brittany coast of France, wearing a beret and publishing poetry about nature. At least that’s what his website says. Could be another Eales joke.
Even today, the British amuse themselves at the expense of Americans. We are too rich, too fat, too ignorant and too loud. Worst of all, like the Germans, we do not appreciate irony as integral to the definition of ”funny.”
A couple of months ago, one of the tabloids, the Daily Mirror, made exquisite use of this superiority. As part of a libel settlement, the paper published a cringing apology to Los Angeles resident and property heir Steve Bing for having encouraged the public to call him up and harass him for making poor Liz Hurley pregnant. Not only is Bing a perfectly good man, he is a “philanthropist and humanitarian,” the apology stated.
A clever commentary appeared on the opposite page, however. Written by Mirror show business editor Kevin O'Sullivan, it was headlined: ‘Why Americans can't understand irony or sarcasm.’ The great mystery dividing two nations, O'Sullivan wrote, is that ‘the use of irony, satire, double entendre--and almost anything short of a custard pie in the face--is liable to rebound on you in spectacularly embarrassing fashion."
A bit harsh on us, I thought, but I see his point. Our middle classes certainly prefer the straightforward joke with a clean punch line.
Satirical writing is part of the mix of features in even the most uptight British business publications. The daily Financial Times and the monthly Management Today both delight in their satirical pieces. John Weak (a pseudonym) does a satirical diary for Management Today entitled ‘Weak at the Top,’ the page that many readers turn to first. The January diary starts as follows:
‘There are two dead giveaways that a company is in big trouble: one is a corporate redesign and the other is an office move. As Smokehouse Ltd. shares are currently lower than a lizard’s scrotum, I’m expecting one of the two at any moment. Sir Marcus wandered into my office. I was immediately on alert as he only does this when he’s pretending to be friendly and it’s usually a prelude to being shat on from a great height.’ He goes on to try to move his company to Norfolk (the English Siberia) where he keeps a mistress.
When the gloom closes in
from the sky in October, England beds down for several months
of near-darkness. I have often thought that this environment
creates a ready market for off-the-wall satire of the Peter Cook
variety, unlike sunny climes, where people get lots of ultraviolet
light and can be naturally fat and happy. Maybe I won’t
retire to Tahiti after all. Certainly not to Los Angeles.
©2003 by Michael Johnson. The photo is from the official
Peter Cook website.
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