Peter Cook

What is it about the English public school, that makes for such intelligent, but sad, comic geniuses. Is it being dragged away from the maternal apron strings at too tender an age that forces the more sensitive souls to hide behind the invisible cloak of wit. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are two such geniuses(or genii?) that belong to such a category. Eric idle on being asked of his motivation for performing immediately answered with the words "maternal abandonment". We might think P.G. Wodehouse escaped from such a fate until we realise how completely absent mothers and fathers are from his writing. And yet, he hides it well. Monty Python were too well adjusted to be entirely hilarious, and too occupied with refuting the existential angst of death with humour to see the tragedy of life even before death. The father of modern English comedy, who has nothing in common with Wodehouse other than his journalistic leaning and complete command of the English language, is Peter Cook.

It is true that Milligan came before with the Goon show, and he fathered many children in English comedy, but when it was not surreal, his comedy lampooned himself and his own. It was left to the English to do the same to their own culture and Cook was the first to explicitly name it satire with the creation of his 'satirical nightclub' pithily entitled 'The Establishment'. Having written his best sketch 'One leg too few' at the age of eighteen, his talent never waned but took different targets throughout his life. From the 'Beyond the Fringe' show which was the hit of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1960, he developed his unique brand of comedy of skits involving scenes with seemingly serious but actually absurd dialogue, but also with some monolgues. His monologue style was to look out at the audience in character and to speak in a slightly high but monotonical voice in the most banal way he could. It was almost as if the comedy had to live on its own without the intrusion of personality, but also he seems to have known, like Keaton, that comedy is more funny when presented with a serious face.

From this was born his partnership with Dudley Moore, on whom he would rely for his foil, even though Moore was funny in his own right. And in this relationship we can see something of the reason for Cook greatness, and the reason why he became more reclusive, though not less funny, in his later life. Cook's greatness was in the wit of the moment, even while working with a script. The script was the baseline that was always come back to, but it was in the comedy of the moment that Cook's genius came to the fore even more. When Moore was creasing with laughter at the line he was trying to get through, Cook would go in for the kill predatorily trying to make Moore go entirely with some improvisation on the subject. This was Cook at his best because it was to humour the other (in this case Moore) not the audience that he was going for. The audience were being let in on comedians at play who were delighting the audience through their own delight.

This focus on delighting the other seems to have motivated Cook. Whenever he was without a vehicle for this he did not do so well. When Dudley Moore went off to make films and millions in Hollywood, Cook was not so much jealous as heartbroken, or so it seems. In the most profound sense, he had lost his comedy partner. What can be worse to a comedian who finds joy in making the other laugh. He was offered much money himself for going to Las Vegas with a one-man show, with the guarantee that it didn't matter so much what he said, as the people probably wouldn't be listening too much anyway. But this was hell to him. Life for him was sometimes despair, and frustration at the way of the world. When he had someone with whom to meet it head-on with biting humour he was more than fine - a delight and a profound social commentator. Even though from a privileged background himself, he hated the way the law was weighted in favour of the rich. His nightclub was really designed to attack the real establishment and the status quo. But without this way of being responsive and spontaneous that Moore provided, standing alone he could not do what he wanted to do.

This may have been one of the factors that led to his alcoholism. His wife of the last few years of his life said that when once asked why he drank he responded, 'Despair, mostly'. Drink could defend him in the way that humour normally could, but was no longer available in the same way. Though, of course, he did drink even when he was with Moore, and was probably contributory to Moore's departure for America by himself. After Moore left, Cook did appear in various programmes, including the first episode of Blackadder as Richard the Third. But he only really got back to his own humour when periodically asked on to interview programmes. Here once again he had his old structure of two people talking, which was the basis of all his best scripts. But here, with Parkinson and Clive James he was at liberty to extemporise to his heart's content, which he did with a twinkle, smoking and drinking often as he spoke. He also appeared on the 'improvisational' 'Whose line is it anyway?', but complained sardonically that it did really suit him because they only gave him one week to learn his lines. It seems that even this imitation of spontaneity was not alive enough for his conception of wit. Then in 1993 the host of that programme, Clive Anderson, invited his friend to give four interviews on his show in quick succession. Cook did each in character, a different one each time, and was back to his best. But just look, if you get the chance at the look of pleasure in his eye at the end of each interview, and where it is directed. He is not taking the applause of the audience. It was not then for this that he was despairing. It is to his interlocutor that he beams, delighting in the delight he has caused there. This is as good an example of what it means to 'be in the moment', and also an eloquent argument in its favour.

Often carrying his bundle of almost every newspaper around with him, he never gave up on being interested in life, but it must have been too much at times. Two years after these in-character interviews he died from too much drink. We might wonder what it was he found in those dialogues that he could not find elsewhere. Just perhaps it was the way in which to truly connect with another on an emotional, as well as intellectual, level in a way that he felt he was understood. It was through comedy that he tried to right the wrongs as he saw them, and in so doing showed us that only by attempting to do so can we find an antedote to despair.

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