More than 50 years after his debut, the Squire of Knotty Ash plays 120 shows a year, each lasting five hours. He tells Michael Henderson what comedy is — and quotes Aristotle
There are certain goals in life that one might accomplish, given the time and the will: climbing the Matterhorn, say, or sitting through the Ring cycle in a week (both need a head for heights). There are other things one might do in dreams, like scoring a century at Lord’s. But one thing every person sound of mind and body can and should do before they die is catch Ken Dodd, the once-and-forever king of comedy, working his magic on stage.
This month, as always in October, he’s in Blackpool. Just as the ravens always return to the Tower, Doddy can always be found by the Fylde coast at this time of year, bringing happiness to a town that needs it more than most. For the next four Sundays he will fill the Grand Theatre with laughter until they fetch the shepherd’s crook and turn on the house lights. Even then, audiences are not safe. ‘I know where you all live,’ he tells them. ‘I’ll follow you home, and shout jokes through your letterbox!’
The ‘Happiness Tour’, he calls it, and it will only end when they put him in a box. ‘Happiness,’ he says, getting philosophical, ‘and pleasure are very different things. Pleasure is fleeting, whereas true happiness comes from contentment. In life, in all our lives, there must be comedy, but inevitably there must also be tragedy. For me happiness is hearing the sound of laughter, the most beautiful sound in the world.’
In that case, he must be the happiest man who ever lived. Since he made his debut at the Empire Theatre, Nottingham, in 1954, Dodd has been convincing people that so long as he is on stage, life is a boon. Even now, at 78, he plays 120 shows a year, and every one lasts at least five hours. Invited to deliver an address on the history of comedy last year at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, he was affronted when they took away the mic after a mere hour. In Doddy’s book, that amounts to a gargle.
‘By the time I let you lot out,’ he tells audiences, ‘Tony Blair will have visited another five countries.’ At a recent show in Eastbourne he said ‘tattybye’ at 12.47 a.m., and while a few dozen people had left to catch buses, more than a thousand stayed to cheer. There were some flat moments mid-way through the show, but the third ‘shift’, a little matter of an hour and 42 minutes, was such a tour de force of sustained barminess that, as they shuffled out, young and old alike looked bewildered.
The night before, in Worthing, Peter O’Toole had motored down from London to catch the show. ‘He looked me up on the internet, apparently, to find out where I was playing. Last year Barry Humphries arrived one night in his private plane.’ That tickled old Doddy, an unabashed admirer of the only solo comic (‘not stand-up, please — that term was invented about 20 years ago’) who can stand alongside him without fear of embarrassment.
Some great performers attract the envy of their fellows. Not this chap. According to Eric Sykes, ‘he should be available on the NHS’. John Osborne, directing at the Royal Court in 1965 when Dodd was breaking the house record at the London Palladium, where he played twice nightly for 42 weeks, took the entire company to watch the master at work. ‘We all went away exhilarated,’ wrote Osborne, ‘by this incredible phenomenon of human invention and overwhelming energy.’
It is silly to pretend that his act is the elemental force it was three decades ago, when Michael Billington, the Guardian’s theatre critic, described it as ‘a timed fiesta’, but it is still a wonder to behold. ‘I would now say it was a choreographed fiesta,’ says Billington, ‘organised down to the last detail, with minor adjustments. He can still take a conventional audience, and by the end of the evening make them feel as though they’ve been on a holiday. Liberated is the word.’
In Billington’s experience, the only comparable performer was Laurence Olivier. ‘Like Olivier, Dodd works in another dimension which takes you beyond the explicable, and that is a sign of genius. They create their own aura, and their own atmosphere. Dodd may play four nights a week but each show is an event, just as an Olivier night was different to all others.
‘An actor who appeared with him at Chichester in Uncle Vanya told me that every performance was called Holy Night. Olivier’s reputation was so high that people went into the theatre with expectations they didn’t have of other actors, no matter how good. I presume that Garland had it, and Maria Callas. Of those I have seen, Olivier and Dodd are the two. Olivier took you into realms of human experience unknown to others, and Dodd takes you to the very limits of comedy.’
Forty years after those famous Palladium shows, and three decades since he was a regular presence on television, a medium that cannot possibly contain him (‘It leads people by the nose to believe that everything must be crash, bang, wallop’), the Dodd experience has to be tasted live. The great comedians of the recent past — Eric Morecambe, Frankie Howerd, Les Dawson and Tommy Cooper — have gone, alas, which leaves Doddy batting for them all: the last remaining link with the music-hall.
And bat he does. He knows every comic that ever drew breath, every gag, and everything that has been said or written about his craft. ‘Aristotle thought that comedy was like a buckled mill wheel, something that wasn’t quite right. I think that comedy is a perception of incongruities, something slightly off-centre, but you wouldn’t believe how many comedians, some of the very best, have no sense of humour. It’s like having a nice car. You don’t necessarily need to know how to change the prop-shaft so long as you are driving the thing.’
Which is not to say that he is a theorist. Once, attending a conference in Cardiff, he was astounded to hear what the dry-as-dust academics were saying. ‘They spoke all afternoon about humour, and not one of them was funny. I told them I had 30 seconds, no more, to establish the trust of the audience. Gracie Fields called it a silver thread. Posh actors call it rrr-apport. I call it building a bridge. Laughter is the effect, humour the content, comedy the technique.’
If he doesn’t understand many of the modern so-called technicians, he cannot be alone. ‘Some of these people feel they have to use obscenities, but it doesn’t make the gag any funnier. It’s like a child running home from school and shouting ‘knickers’ to his mother. We all know swear words, but on stage they tend to introduce another emotion, which gets between the performer and the audience. It’s gratuitous. At the back of their minds people think, “Why did he have to say that?” I can’t understand some of these sour-faced malcontents who sneer all the time, because that is not true comedy. Many of them have not lived long enough to realise that while you have to have a degree of disbelief in life, you can’t go around decrying everybody and everything all the time: the Queen, the police, the law, what is called the Establishment, because life is better than that. It’s a form of mistaken drollery, I suppose. They think they’re being hip. But I like to celebrate life. People may come into the theatre with the blues but I’ve got to send them away feeling happy.’
Get him on his favourite performers and he will talk all night. Al Read: ‘Perhaps the greatest radio comedian. He was one of the first observational comics, the one who says “Have you noticed how ...?” Peter Kay is in that line.’ Robb Wilton: ‘One of the great drolls, a comic actor rather than a comedian, a pop philosopher, and the joke always rebounded on him.’ Max Miller: ‘The grand-daddy of all front-cloth comics, and he didn’t tell filthy gags, no matter what you may have heard. It was bawdy, yes, it could be spicy stuff, but you must remember there was a Watch Committee in every town. They used to sit in on a Monday, and if they didn’t like what they heard, there was no show.’
He is especially proud of the Liverpool comics. Ted Ray, Arthur Askey and Tommy Handley were his guiding stars, and further back there was Billy Bennett, ‘Almost a Gentleman’, whose monologues inspired the youthful Dodd’s flights of fancy. ‘He used to recite lines that began, “The sea was as smooth as a baby’s top lip, not even a policeman in sight.” Poetry, that.’
Neville Cardus said that Vladimir Horowitz was ‘the greatest pianist, living or dead’. Anybody who has witnessed the Squire of Knotty Ash in full flood is likely to feel the same way about this incomparable pleasure-giver. If you have neglected to catch the greatest performer in the long, glorious history of British comedy, then get a move on, because when the curtain falls for the last time our lives will be poorer. Best to take a thermos, though, and a few jam butties. ‘I wonder what they’ll say about me in a hundred years. When the bloody hell is he going to finish?’