The Death of Tommy Cooper

Yesterday, I came across a video on YouTube of the death of the British magician and comedian Tommy Cooper.  (I’m neither going to link directly to the video or embed it due to the subject matter.  If anyone wants to view it, it is easy enough to find.  There are several versions of it, all essentially the same, it appears, on YouTube. )  Cooper died while performing on a live TV show called “Live from Her Majesty’s,” and perhaps it was a fitting end and perhaps not.  Morbid curiosity was only a small part of why I watched it.  The more compelling reason is that I am 50 now, and he died at 63, a point that is not that far away for me in time.

The odd thing about Tommy Cooper’s death was that people kept laughing at him while he was dying.  Cooper’s act was to effect being an incompetent magician (which he wasn’t).  He would tell jokes while putting off the inevitable failure of the trick he was performing and there would be mistakes and interruptions.  So, when he faltered a bit and fell to a sitting position on the floor, the members of the audience thought it was just part of the act.  And they laughed.  And as he sat slumped and breathing laboriously, they laughed.  And when he fell back dead on the floor, they laughed again.  Because each discreet action was believable as part of his act and each happened, quite amazingly, with the same timing that he used in pacing his gags.

I wonder how it felt for him to die with laughter in his ears.  I would like to think that it was pleasant.  He had spent his career making people laugh, and what more fitting way to go?  But as he sat slumped dying, did he not most likely think, “I’m dying, you bastards!  Don’t fucking laugh!  Call me a doctor.  Help me!”?

It is a mysterious thing, this passage from life that we call death.  I think that what is compelling about that video is that while most of us are familiar with the before and the after, it is rare for us to see the transition.

Still the important thing about Tommy Cooper, from our perspective, is not that he died, but that he lived.  He was, I think, a wonderful comedian who makes me laugh quite a bit.  So that’s why I decided to embed a clip of him quite alive and quite funny.  Enjoy.

The Departed

Famous people keep dropping like flies.  This seems to be the worst year for celebrity death in quite some time, perhaps since the year that John Denver and Sonny Bono died young and needlessly.  Of course, not all of the celebs who shuffle off this mortal coil are on the level of a Michael Jackson or a Patrick Swayze.  Some are known for other things than performing and are really only celebrities in the loosest definition of the word.  Two of those who have recently died are Larry Gelbart and Jody Powell.

Gelbart was a writer and more specifically a comedy writer and more specifically than that an immensely skilled comedy writer.  In death as in life, he is best remembered for creating, or, rather, adapting from the movie of the same name, the sitcom M*A*S*H.  there was more to him than that, though, and he wrote movies and plays and other TV shows.  Some of those are pretty damn good, too, such as the play Sly Fox and the TV movie Barbarians at the Gate.  He started out in radio at the age of 16 when his father, who was a Hollywood barber,  got him a job writing for Danny Thomas.  that led to a stint working on Duffy’s Tavern which led to writing for Bob Hope for a while.

In the ’50s, he worked for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour and some specials.  He is represented by the character called Kenny in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and I want to go further off to the side on that and say that the character of Lucas is not Neil Simon’s presentation of himself, but is, in fact, his take on the young Woody Allen.  It’s not about Your Show of Shows, which is what Neil worked on.  It is about Caesar’s Hour, which was where Woody came on board.  In fact, there is a legendary story about Woody being brought to the writer’s room by Milt Kamen, who you probably don’t remember, but should.  Kamen had found Allen when Woody was writing sketches at a resort in the Catskills and convinced Caesar to hire him.  On the appointed day, Kamen collected Allen and ushered him into the writer’s room with the introduction, “I have with me the young Larry Gelbart.”  To which Gelbart, who had been a top comedy writer for about ten years, responded, “The young Larry Gelbart is sitting right here.”

But that’s how young he was when he started.  He was maybe 26 or 27 at the time and seemed like an old pro.

Gelbart was best known as a writer of clever dialogue in the spare, unsentimental tradition of George S. Kaufman.  As the guy who wrote most of the best episodes of the first four seasons of M*A*S*H and who also had a hand in all the others from that period, his influence on me was enormous.  His characterization of Hawkeye showed that he could have been a good writer for Groucho, had Groucho still needed top-notch film writers in the later decades of his career.  for many years, my true ambition was to be the young Larry Gelbart.  For a while, it was to be the middle-aged Larry Gelbart.  A person could do worse.

The second person I wanted to bring up was Jody Powell.

Now, I can’t say that he was any particular influence on me, although I’m sure he would have been had I actually known him. ( At least that’s what I got from the tribute that Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about him on The New Yorker website.)  I just wanted to note that I saw him once when I lived in Washington.  He crossed K Street in the opposite direction that I was, and I recognized him.  He gave no indication of knowing me, as shocking as that might seem.  I didn’t stop him, didn’t follow him, didn’t pester him, just took note of him.  “That’s Jody Powell,” I thought.  “Cool.”  He certainly didn’t look like a guy who would die, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at age 65.

You just never know.

What Closes on Saturday Night

People like to throw the word “satire” around a lot these days, but the term is rarely understood or applied properly.  I say this after reading a review of what sounds like a dog of a movie, Hamlet 2, in The New York Times.  At several points, the reviewer, Stephen Holden, refers to the satire in this film, only I don’t see anything satiric about it.  It’s merely a spoof, and Mr. Holden seems to think that sending up Dead Poets Society–however abysmal and worthy of derision that film may be–qualifies as satire.  However, it doesn’t, at least not to my mind.

Satire is a political and social weapon, and it has one target:  Those who have too much, control too much, and think that they have a right to dictate what sort of lives the great mass of humans get to live.  It is a cudgel that should be used in defense of the defenseless and against those in power.  You can make fun of a cripple, but a cripple can’t be satirized.  Neither can someone who is poor.

However, it seems to me to have been a trend in this country over recent years to attack those without power while giving those with power a relatively free ride, the main exception being partisan caricatures.  The Daily Show is capable of rising to the level of satire, but not much else that I see.  In the main, we spoof the rich and powerful–the “how stupid is Bush” trope is more spoof than anything else– while attacking the poor and downtrodden.

Let me use a couple of examples to show what I mean.

The first is an example of how popular it is these days to kick the poor. It’s a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look concerning two homeless men, Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and his cohort, Ginger.  Now, I like Mitchell and Webb.  I’m not here to run them down.  I just found this sketch disappointing because it does nothing except reinforce stereotypes and take potshots at people who are already down.  This takes no courage, no wit, no incisiveness, nothing.  At best, it takes a bit of a mean streak.

Contrast this with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer as Tom fun and Derek:

There is an element of understanding and sympathy here that makes it poignant in a completely unsentimental way.  The small stain of satire in the piece is inherent in its sympathy with the characters and addresses the narrowness of a society  that pushes some of its weakest members to homelessness for their eccentricity (in losing their lodgings for Derek’s “unconventional way of eating an arctic roll“–a kind of dessert) and to theft in search of a bit of fun.

Satire denies the supremacy of the powerful by invoking laughter, but it is a laughter tinged with outrage.  Satirists are injured idealists, disappointed lovers.  They are people who use wit in order to defend those who cannot defend themselves and to deflate pretension.  And of all the things that one might claim about the homeless, calling them pretentious isn’t one of them.

When Illiterates Try to Read Between the Lines

I tried twice yesterday to get comments on a New York Times blog called “Moral of the Story” by a fellow named Randy Cohen.  The blog purports to be dedicated to looking at stories from the news through the lens of ethics. (Never mind that ethics and morals are two distinct things and that people who are ethical aren’t always perceived as moral while folks who are moral are oftentimes not ethical.) As of this writing, neither comment has made it through the censors, which, for the purposes of this post, is neither here nor there. The blog post in question concerns the recent public relations tug-of-war between David Letterman and Sarah Palin.

First, let me say that the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. I can’t really imagine a less important news story. The situation is essentially this: Letterman told a joke–in some eyes a rotten joke–poorly, and Palin reacted in an absurd manner. There is no winner in this tiff, especially not the great American public.

Sprinkled amongst the comments generated by this post were a number that berated Letterman for joking about Willow Palin being raped, a thing which he did not do. Being a lover of the English language and of reasoning as an avocation, I wrote the following as my second comment (the first comment is lost to history):

There is not only a semantic but a legal difference between rape and statutory rape. In the one case, one participant in an allegedly sexual act is unwilling. The act is forced upon that person without their consent, whether they have the legal authority to give consent or not. In the other case, a person is engaged in a sexual act at an age that the legislature has determined is below the age at which informed consent can be given. The person’s willingness to engage in the act is irrelevant. They are deemed too young to be trusted to knowingly consent to such an act.

Conflating the two does no one any good. In fact, it cheapens the harm done and the injury felt by the victims of rape, those who were unwillingly violated by another.  However, in this matter and for the sake of making a few third-rate political points, it is convenient for Governor Palin and her acolytes to muddy the two very distinct terms into one so as to misstate the intent and effect of the joke. And if anyone actually thought that Letterman was referring to Willow Palin when he made that joke, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’ve got a dirty mind.

Finally, it is hypocritical to worry about protecting the children when both Willow and Bristol Palin have been repeatedly used as props and weapons by their parents. If the folks who are so worried about them are true to their word, they would find these kids a foster home.

(I have slightly revised this comment to remove spelling and other such errors and to amplify the argument in a couple of places.)

As I’ve trudged through life, I’ve been subjected to a long stream of numbskulls and dimwits who disparaged “book learning” in favor of “street smarts” and who decried the need for a large vocabulary (originally called the use of “twenty-five cent words,” inflation has them valued at somewhere around five dollars these days) and the subtle use of language. And yet the entire line of thinking that goes into jumping to the conclusion that Letterman was joking about anyone being raped shows exactly why book learning and a varied vocabulary and a subtle sense of language are virtues, not vices. For without understanding how words work, without understanding the difference between reasoning and believing, a demagogue can mislead and citizens are reduced to the status of cattle. (I made a similar point in an earlier post.)

Despite what is believed in some quarters, this nation was not founded by men who had faith in religious belief.  They had faith in the ability of humans to reason their way through problems.  They understood that reason elevated the member of a mob to be a functioning citizen.  Reason allowed them to be governed rather than ruled.

QI or Not QI, that Is the Question

A few months ago, I participated in a minor kerfluffle on Facebook concerning the British quiz show QI and its potential with an American audience.  (The Facebook page dedicated to getting QI to America can be found here.  There is an online petition here.)  The question raised was whether Americans would understand QI.  And in fairness, I will say up front that the person who raised this question did not do so under the assumption that Americans are too stupid to understand it.  Her point was that the differences in culture would make the enjoying of it impossible.

I disagree.

I’ve been watching loads of British shows over the course of the last couple of years,starting with QI, and I can say without hesitation that my never having gotten closer to Great Britain than Horseneck Beach in Massachusetts has had very little effect on my ability to enjoy these shows.  Do I sometimes not get a reference?  Sure.  And that’s why God made Wikipedia.  In fact, I’ve started watching a wonderful British panel show, one that should be far too obtuse for me to get, called Have I Got News for You.  This is a comedy panel game show that makes fun of whatever has been in the news over the course of the previous week.  (I also listen to the podcast of the show that inspired HIGNFY way back when, The News Quiz.)

As a result, I now have a working knowledge of the major figures in British politics and find that I can keep up pretty easily, only occasionally pausing in order to look something up.  I already know that every week is another low point in the premiership of Gordon Brown.  I know that Hazel Blears is short and John Prescott is fat and incomprehensible.  I know that Lord Mandelsohn has been sacked four times and that Alistair Darling is, well, Alistair Darling.  I know about David Cameron and Ann Widdecombe and Boris Johnson from the Tories and Nick Clegg and Charles Kennedy and Lembit Opik from the Lib-Dems.  It’s not that hard.

If you had to ask me which British shows I’ve seen that stand the least chance of finding an audience in America, I would guess that it would just about anything created by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, although I’d like to think that I’m completely wrong about that.  From Vic Reeves Big Night Out to Catterick and beyond, they have created a body of work that is surreal, unique, funny, awful, wonderful, contemptuous, compassionate, and strange.  I’m not completely certain of this (and I’m never certain about much of anything when it comes to Vic and Bob), but they might just be great artists.

One of the great misapprehensions of modern times is encapsulted in Bernard Shaw’s well known joke that the United States and Great Britain are  “two countries separated by a common language.”  Like so many of Shaw’s aphorisms, it is more facile than it is true.  In fact we are actually two inflections of the same Anglophone culture, siblings in the family of Anglophone nations.  And, like many siblings, we tend to emphasize the few differences rather than the many similarities.

It’s unfortunate.  I would love to see QI here.  I’d love to see Have I Got News for You and The Fast Show and Bang! Bang! It’s Reeves and Mortimer! here.

Homage

It’s been a long time since I’ve really watched Morecambe and Wise.  After the unexpected success of The Benny Hill Show here in the States around 1980, other British sketch shows started popping up on PBS and some of the independent stations.    Dave Allen at Large popped up on Channel 38 in Boston, and Morecambe and Wise was shown on some station that I no longer, unfortunately, remember.  I don’t think Morecambe and Wise ran very long, though, despite it being an extremely funny show.  It more or less fell off the radar screen for me until the rise of YouTube.

And then, this past weekend, my wife informed that PG Tips had a new commercial that I should watch, which turned out to be a tribute to a famous Morecambe and Wise sketch.  Here’s the original:

And here’s the commercial for PG Tips, in which Johnny Vegas shows himself to be something of a nifty dancer:

And now I must put myself to the task of finding more Morecambe and Wise.  Here’s to Eric and Ern.  You left it a better place than what you found.

He’s Italian, His Name’s Frank, and He’s Not Sinatra

I write a lot, like many expatriate writers, about my original home.  I was born in Warwick, Rhode Island, and I spent about 20 out of my 49 years in the state.  I’ve lived in Warwick (very briefly as a baby), East Greenwich, Pawtucket, North Kingstown, Providence, East Providence, and Bristol.  Since I do write things set in Rhode Island so often, I have a need to burrow through my past for usable material and bits and pieces I can use.  In some recent work, I have reason to refer to the venerable Rhode Island broadcaster Frank Coletta.  It’s hard to not like Frank.  He has a sly smile that that just gets to a person.  Here’s the tribute that was done for Frank’s 30th anniversary with the station.  And, Frank, salud!

Brian Blessed on Have I Got News for You

I can’t seem to get my brain together enough to write a cogent post today, so instead I’ve posted, below, a compilation of clips of the appearance Brian Blessed made last year on the BBC comedy quiz show, Have I Got News for You.  My favorite part is the story he tells concerning John Gielgud, but it all makes me laugh.  Enjoy.

HIGNFY

It’s getting to the point where I should just rename this blog “I’m an American Who Has Been Watching a Lot of British Panel shows” because I’m about to unleash another on my imaginary public. This one is called Have I Got News for You, and, in it, two teams of panelists are prodded into identifying and mocking news stories by a guest presenter. The team captains are Ian Hislop and Paul Merton. Hislop is the editor of the satirical publication Private Eye, which was once partially owned by Peter Cook, and Paul Merton is a comedian and writer known in the US to viewers of the British, or original, version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?

I make this post, though, not just to introduce HIGNFY (as it’s known to friends and family) to those who have not sampled it, but to point out something I think I’ve figured out about British politics. Ever since the Iraq War started falling to pieces, I’ve wondered how Tony Blair (and now Gordon Brown) and the Labour Party have managed to retain power. As time has passed, they have seemed increasingly comical and inept. And then I started watching these British celebrity game shows.

In the following clip, the guest presenter on HIGNFY is one Boris Johnson, a rumpled man from a well-to-do family who is the current mayor of London, and the former editor of The Spectator, as well as  Tory MP for Henley.  And after seeing people like Boris Johnson and Ann Widdecombe in action, it’s no wonder Labour’s been able to hold on.

But don’t take my word for it.  Just listen to Boris (Ian and Paul are teamed with Stephen K. Amos and Clive Anderson, respectively):

And here’s another. Ian and Paul joined by Sue Perkins in destroying Boris.

We Interrupt This Series of Posts

Okay, I was checking out Baby Got Books this morning, and the current post, which concerned a book of photographs of country music stars at a variety of open concerts during the ’60s.  It’s called Pure Country, and it looks to be very interesting.  As part of the post, Tim, who runs BGB and very well at that, added some streaming audio of Hank williams, the Carter Family, Dolly Parton, and George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today” on Austin City Limits.

Well, it just so happens that I saw that Austin City Limits, or at least most of it.  And old George was sensational.  I hadn’t really paid him the mind that he deserved before that night, but I’ve done my best to not continue that mistake in its wake.  You can’t understand what country music is and ought to be without understanding George Jones and others of his generation, especially Johnny Cash (whose version of Soundgarden’s Rusty Cage I just heard last weekend and am still recovering from).

My favorite bit of George Jones on Austin City Limits was him singing a song called “The King Is Gone.”  Here it is for your enjoyment:

And what the hell, here’s Johnny’s video for “Rusty Cage”:

Enjoy.