Tommy Cooper: Always Leave Them Laughing Read Online Free

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 hehad 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 Argoscatalogue 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.