Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [28]
After the show, Milligan, Sellers, and Michael Bentine came around to Secombe’s dressing room. For whatever reason, Secombe responded by removing the lone light bulb from its socket and plunging the room into darkness. Milligan re-created the dialogue, notably leaving out his own contributions:
SECOMBE: Why are you all persecuting me like this? Are you from the Church?
SELLERS: No, we are poor traveling Jews of no fixed income.
SECOMBE: Oh, just a minute. (He replaces the bulb.)
BENTINE: See! See the light! It is a sign!
SECOMBE: You must help me escape from here. I’m being kept prisoner against my dick!
BENTINE: You mean will.
SECOMBE: No, Dick. Will died last week.
They clicked.
• • •
Joking, drinking, deriding other comedians, and carving schemes for professional advancement, Peter could now amuse himself in the company of kindred discontents at the Grafton Arms. The core group—Spike, Harry, Michael, Jimmy, Graham Stark, and the writer Denis Norden—were joined over the next year or so by other rising comedians like Terry-Thomas, Dick Emery, Alfred Marks, Tony Hancock, and even a stray woman, the comedienne Beryl Reid. They’d play pub games of their own invention. “We used to go through this insane mime routine, which kept customers out of the pub for months,” Spike recounted. Another game they called “Tapesequences.” It was a pseudo-narrative version of “Pass It On” in which one person would start to tell a story into a microphone in a voice so low nobody else could hear it, after which he or she would pass the mike around for the others to continue the would-be tale, which was necessarily nonsense.
At the heart of the group were four men suffering varying degrees of mental distress, a tendency Sellers, Milligan, Secombe, and Bentine codified by nicknaming themselves after the one-eyed mutant lugs in the Popeye cartoons.
Goons.
It wasn’t a flattering label. Most people who have seen a few Popeye cartoons are familiar only with the relatively benign Alice the Goon, who in the later years of the series became so upstanding a citizen that she up and joined the Marines. But as the cartoonist E. C. Segar originally drew them, the primordial Goons were hulking, hostile creatures, verbally incoherent, prone to violence. Their charm was their charmlessness. They were butt ugly with brains to match, and Peter and his friends related to them. (The word goons also referred to the henchmen, usually dumb as planks, in American gangster movies; more peculiar by far is the fact that goons are what RAF prisoners of war called their Nazi guards.)
According to Michael Bentine, it was he who came up with the term. “I was the first of the Goons to make a hit in London’s West End,” Bentine declared in his memoir, The Reluctant Jester. “I have a two-page centre-spread from Picture Post dated 5 November 1948, illustrated with pictures of myself and my chairback in action and headed ‘What is a Goon?’ ” (“Chairback” is a reference to one of Bentine’s standard comedy acts: appearing on stage armed only with the broken back of a wooden chair, he would proceed to turn himself into a jack of all props, with the chairback becoming in rapid-fire succession a rifle, a saw, a flag, a door, a jackhammer, a pillory, a cow’s udder . . .)
According to Milligan, it was he who came up with the term. “It was my idea for us to call ourselves the Goons. It was the name of the huge creatures in the Popeye cartoons who spoke in balloons with rubbish written in them. The name certainly predates the beginning of the war. I started using the [word] ‘Goons’ in the army.