• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 298 0

at random. Like Russian roulette, they poisoned one piece of sushi and watched it go round and round the carousel waiting for one unlucky luncher to select it. It could have been some advertising exec but ended up being a Russian spy. I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s a bloody cheek having 12.5 per cent service included in the bill. I picked the dishes off the carousel and brought them to my table. The waiter only takes them away. I figure this is worth a maximum of 6 per cent.

It’s incredible to think that as I sit in Itsu arguing over the service charge in front of a tower of empty plates resembling the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai, fifty years earlier my dad was performing just a few yards away, clutching these very notes I have in my hand today.

It’s fascinating for me to see my dad’s notes. A comedian’s notes tend to make little sense. They will consist of subject headings and key words. My dad’s notes say things like ‘Westminster Abbey’, ‘School teacher’, ‘The house bit’ and ‘Your horse has diabetes …’ Comedians carry around these scribbles of key words that they hope contain the DNA of a good gag. Looking at some of the notes from my last tour, it’s the same kind of thing: ‘Wrinkle cream’, ‘Morning’, ‘Last day sunbathing’. I once thought it would be fun to swap notes with other comics on the bill and try to make jokes about each other’s subjects onstage. This suggestion wasn’t met with much enthusiasm in Jongleurs, Leeds, circa 2005.

In among the notes there is a script, and it’s hilarious. So here’s my dad in a Soho nightclub in 1962:

I’d like to tell you a bit about myself … I’m one of the better lower priced performers … I’m from Canada. I realize that it may be a little difficult because you’ve never heard of me here but don’t let it worry you ’cause I have the same problem in Canada …

But it’s real nice to be here … I brought my wife over with me … You know how it is … You always pack a few things you don’t need …

We had a very interesting flight over here, we came on a non-scheduled airline … You know what that is? … That’s the type of airline who aren’t sure when the crash is going to be … You see, they use old planes … In fact this one was so old that the ‘No Smoking’ sign came on in Latin …

But don’t get me wrong it wasn’t all bad … There were only a few things that I didn’t like … For instance when I fly I like to have … Two wings …

It’s such a treat to have so many attractive ladies in the audience … Especially for me … Because I come from a very small town … And I don’t want to say the girls in my home town were ugly, but we had a beauty contest there once … And nobody won …

They finally picked one girl and called her the winner, actually she wasn’t that bad … She had a beautiful bone structure in her face … Those eyes … Those lips … That tooth … She had this one tooth right in the front and it was three inches long … The first time I saw her I thought it was a cigarette and tried to light it … To see her eating spaghetti was really something … She used to put her tooth right in it and spin the plate … But I married her anyway …

I got married because I wanted to have a family and it wasn’t long before we had the pitter-patter of tiny feet around the house … My mother-in-law’s a midget … I told her to treat the house as if it were her own … And she did. She sold it …

I hope you found that as funny as I did. I particularly like the ‘I thought it was a cigarette and tried to light it’ bit. This is proper old-school stuff, wives and mother-in-laws being the butt of the joke. I don’t know if he wrote all of it, some of it or none of it. I know that comedians back in those days used to share jokes around a lot, but nevertheless it’s still funny. I have gags, I couldn’t really survive without punchlines, but a lot of my material is observational or mimicry. It’s a different approach to making people laugh – it makes me laugh, which is why I say it. But you can understand how ‘old-school’ comedians can be baffled by ‘alternative’ comedy, because there are so few proper ‘gags’. ‘Where are the