The photo above was taken on November 26, 2014. The coordinates: 41°24′07″N 74°19′22″W, which if you have a globe, direct you to Goshen, New York.
In “Connect the Colors,” I wrote, “Perception may be the most unique and personal portion of human experience—or it may be the most identical; either way, we do not have a means of testing it, except based on anecdotes from individuals. Perhaps strawberries taste the same for you as they do for me, or they do not.” Perhaps an exception can be made to this perception about perception: the weather. Read More
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The greatest newspaper—ever!—is and was the Weekly World News. Its presence next to every grocery store checkout lane is thoroughly missed by every non-Bat Boy walking among us.
Most American boys who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, and by most, I mean me, made this progression in our reading: from Cracked magazine, which quickly revealed itself to be a weak imitation of Mad magazine, to Mad magazine, which was brilliant but I (we) stopped looking at it around age 14, through a wasteland of our teen years and the New York Times and homework—heck, the Times and all newspapers everywhere just feel like permanent homework, don’t they? AmIRight?—to the discovery that the Weekly World News existed.
It is a three-word title and only one of those three words is correct: Weekly. Is this terrible? No. That is a .333 average and a career batting average like that would result in the hitter being elected to the Hall of Fame. So, weekly, yes. World? A printing press in central Florida certainly is on the globe. But “world” is an exaggeration. News? Well, upon finishing every article I would say out loud, “It’s news to me.”
An alien named P’lod regularly visited the White House and advised presidents Clinton and Bush? News to me. Where is CNN? Someone call somebody. There’s a boy abused by his own shadow? That’s a heartbreaking slice of life story. (An admission: When I was young, my own shadow was faster than me, too. It was only when lights were behind me, but still.) Bat Boy? You can’t make this stuff up … because why would anyone? That is why everything the WWN reported had to be true … ish … or, okay, not at all.
Twinkies are a superfood? In my life, on occasion, ‘deed they were. (I have now been sober for almost five years.) I love this article, TWINKIES: THE NEW SUPERFOOD!, by the way; look at that photo. How small a staff works there now? How small is the budget? Once upon a time, the reported paid circulation was a quarter-million readers, and of course, all of the Men in Black. The staff could not afford the minutes to leave the office and spend two dollars on some real fruit and berries and real Twinkies, so they had to copy-and-paste a clip-art photo of a broken Twinkie over a photo of some fruit? Even in the name of truth or comedy? You can see the white border around the middle Twinkie.
I would like to think that someone spent extra time to make this photomontage look this sloppy, in the same way that I like to think, for approximately six seconds, that every word in the newspaper is true.
The newspaper—and yes, only half of that term is correct, in that the publication was in fact printed on paper—the paper ran into hard times and only exists online now. It is there that you will find a few, a precious few, examples of the paper’s opinion writer, Ed Anger, who appeared in its pages from 1979 till around a few years ago. The title of his book, “Let’s Pave the Stupid Rainforests & Give School Teachers Stun Guns: And Other Ways to Save America,” gives a taste of his typical opinion.
Ed Anger was a creation of a staff writer named Rafe Klinger and then was the pet project of the editor, a man named Eddie Clontz. After Clontz died, several writers have revealed that they took turns editorializing as Ed Anger in the years since. Klinger sued the WWN, arguing that the paper could not continue to run the angry Anger editorials, but he lost. Thus, there was some real anger animating Ed Anger’s anger.
Ed Anger hates everything and everyone, especially Democrats, foreigners, religions other than his, wild animals that somehow need protection even though they have claws, complicated foods, and most television programming. Each editorial begins with, “I’m madder than a” and then promptly becomes less funny over the subsequent four hundred words or so.
Ed Anger amused me because I remembered a real Ed Anger in my hometown when I was growing up. I do not remember the gentleman’s name, but people in Dutchess County, New York, may remember in the 1970s a self-published newspaper—a blog, but on paper—by a writer who devoted pages to convincing his readers that all people of color were bad, that all Democrats were Communists, that the local Democrats were Satanists, that his new tin-foil hat was protecting him. Now, anyone can think anything they like and hate anything they want to, can write inspiringly dull sentences outlining their many hatreds, can self-publish those sentences in a newspaper or blog, can spend money getting copies printed and distributed, but this man, the real-life Ed Anger of my youth, he had advertising in his local production! His racist and anti-semitic, single-note, single-theme weekly newspaper, which was basically an eight-page run-on sentence interrupted by headlines, had ads in it. There were local businesses whose owners maybe did not want to rile people up by publicizing their political leanings, but they paid for ads in this one man’s hate-filled quirk.
As Ed Anger might have written: “You know what I think of that?” It is not printable in a family blog.
____________________________________________ The WordPress Daily Prompt for January 11 asks, “Pick a contentious issue about which you care deeply—it could be the same-sex marriage debate, or just a disagreement you’re having with a friend. Write a post defending the opposite position, and then reflect on what it was like to do that.”
John Cleese has said that for him it often took hours of “grinding” work to write several minutes of comedy, but that Peter Cook could write three minutes of top-quality material in just over three minutes. It appeared to come to him that easily early in his career.
But he did work hard. As a writer and performer, Cook worked hard at avoiding politeness for politeness’ sake if a laugh was available instead. When the Prime Minister of England, Harold Macmillan, wanted to attend a performance of the hot new West End show, “Beyond the Fringe,” either no one told him that one part of the show was the performance of a monologue by Peter Cook as Macmillan and that Cook made Macmillan sound like a sluggish dolt, or it was expected that Cook would skip that section of the performance in deference to the nation’s leader. In the monologue, his Prime Minister reports on a visit with President Kennedy: “We talked of many things, including Great Britain’s position in the world as some kind of honest broker. I agreed with him when he said no nation could be more honest, and he agreed with me when I said no nation could be broker.”
Cook performed the monologue with Macmillan sitting before him and even ad libbed a sentence for the occasion:
When I’ve got a spare evening there’s nothing I like better than to wander over to a theatre and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists, with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly old face.
To Macmillan’s credit, he is reported to have said—years later, mind you—that he felt it was “better to be mocked than ignored.” The audience, and the cast and crew backstage, reported years later that they felt a tense bubble inflate the theater that night as a great grin spread awkwardly across Macmillan’s face: Satire of this sort, the satire that names its object and is delivered in the face of the punchline himself, had not been seen in England in generations, if ever. The era of satire, which we still live in, was born.
Anything that I can biographize about Peter Cook, the brilliant wit and stylish subject of many anecdotes (about Peter Cook), can be found online quite quickly. One fact is this: The end of the story came twenty years ago today, January 9, when he died, age 57. As someone wrote today—and Cook might have said it himself—”it was too old to die young and too young to die old.“
As a writer and performer, he ended on a high note: on December 17, 1993, he was all four guests on Clive Anderson’s talk show, “Clive Anderson Talks Back.” Anderson, the bland-but-game host of the first “Whose Line Is It Anyway” was also one of Britain’s best talk show hosts in the ’90s, mostly because he could play the straight man for his comedian guests. In one tour-de-force hour, Cook was Norman House, a mild-mannered “biscuit tester” who claimed to have been abducted by aliens from “the planet Ikea”; an enthusiastic football coach, Alan Latchley, who summed up his life philosophy as “Motivation, motivation, motivation”; Sir James Beauchamp, a judge; and rock legend Eric Daley, who had a not-very convincing message for young people about drugs: “Don’t do them.”
American audiences were exposed to Cook early, but not often. “Beyond the Fringe” was created to spotlight comedians from Cambridge and Oxford universities. (Both had and have highly regarded amateur theater clubs: the Revue at Oxford and Cambridge Footlights.) Four writer-performers who had become stars in their university stage shows and were probably aware and wary of each other’s work and reputations were thrown together and asked to be funny as a group. Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore were from the Oxford Revue, and Cook and Jonathan Miller were from Cambridge. It was a star-making show for each of the four; to this day, Bennett is a beloved playwright, Miller is a stage director and documentary show host, Moore became a movie star, and Cook became the answer from most comedians to the question, “Who makes you laugh?”
The show was sent to Broadway in 1962 in a foreshadowing of the British Invasion that came two years later. (Four amusing and clean-cut young men in black suits in 1962 were followed by four amusing, clean-cut, and mop-topped young men in black suits in 1964.) “Beyond the Fringe” was the first shot fired in the satirical ’60s; before the 1960s, it was the rare comedian who would dare make fun, even gentle fun, of political leaders in Britain or the U.S. After Fringe in Britain and “The First Family” record starring the sadly cursed Vaughn Meader in America, comedians added satire to their palette.
Comedy is not funny for being ground-breaking, however. One can call the president all sorts of satirical things—and many people do, every day—but if they are not funny things, they are not satirical, either; they are merely angry ejaculations or fussy musings. Beyond the Fringe was funny. In one of the best-known skits from the show, “One Leg Too Few,” Cook and Moore take an absurd premise and visit ever more absurd spots with it. The skit is also an example of the fertile imagination Cook seemed to be born with, as it is one he wrote at age 18 and it was little-revised.
Cook and Moore became a comedy duo on television, radio, records, and film. On television, they co-wrote and starred in “Not Only, But Also” and Cook wrote the film “Bedazzled” for them, and he wrote parts of and starred in one film himself, “The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer,” which did neither. (It was mostly written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman before “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”) Cook and the world learned one thing from his performance in the film: Peter Cook may have been good-looking enough to be the lead in any film, but when an audience can see that the actor does not believe that he ought to be the lead in even one film, and the one film they are watching is it, tickets go unsold. He was neither invited to be—nor asked to be one himself—a star again.
Cook’s 1970s and ’80s were spent as the “world’s greatest slacker,” in his words. Compared to his 1960s, another artist’s busy lifetime might pale in comparison. He earned the chance to slack. In the ’60s, he wrote and starred in a ground-breaking stage show (“Fringe”) and toured the world with it, started up a nightclub that helped define the “Swinging ’60s” in London, started a satirical magazine that is still in business (and whose staff still keeps his editor’s chair empty and awaiting him), wrote and starred in a couple movies, wrote some others, appeared in others, and wrote and starred in several television shows.
In the ’70s, his alcoholism occupied him; he told the talk show host Michael Parkinson as early as 1974 that he drank because he was “bored.” He performed drunk on stage and television in his act with Moore, now titled, “Behind the Fridge.” He quit drinking several times, joined and left A.A., joined again. He watched as his on-and-off comedy partner became a movie star in America (in any profile of Dudley Moore in the ’70s, it was mandatory to use the word “unlikely” in front of “movie star,” but Moore had worked hard at courting Hollywood) and he grew resentful. The duo, “Pete and Dud,” became “Derek and Clive,” an R- and sometimes rated-X-worthy act. For audiences who only knew Moore from “10” and “Arthur,” the recordings seem to be of a different human being. The raunchy (and sometimes drunk and angry) recordings were sometimes banned and many of them were only made public through bootlegs. This short clip is not safe for work, because of copious swearing in its brief 19 seconds.
The Derek and Clive tapes were prized rumors in Britain and the states—the cool guy in college had heard of the Derek and Clive tapes, but the quiet and cool guy had them. (I was neither.)
So the world’s greatest slacker spent his remaining decades appearing in many movies, some of which (“The Princess Bride”) were hits in the United States; re-visited his old skits, with and without Moore; recorded the Derek and Clive albums with Moore; and became a frequent talk show guest, albeit the type of guest who always came on with an idea, which he sometimes let the host know about. It was not at all a low-key performing life, just not a careerist’s one.
One from Mallorca complained, ‘Far too many fish here. Love, Sven & Jutta’; another, from Scotland, insisted ‘Please ignore this card.’ One, from the Hyatt La Manga in Murcia, advised, ‘Re this: please see to that. Suggest you act on this later rather than sooner.’ Another reported ‘We’re at this pesky little place preparing for Team Levy’s Invincible Grand Prix Challange [sic].’
(Both the misspelling “challange” and “[sic]” are Cook’s in that last one.)
Rather than celebrate each birthday by blowing out candles that he was also burning at both ends, Cook kept a smaller creative flame going; it did not seem to interest him as much as it did his audience, which is too bad, but each time he was invited to participate on a television show and an old burned-out shell was expected by the host and audience, the old burned-out shell never materialized. Audiences never saw a Peter Cook who was not verbally brilliant and imaginatively accurate.
Few writers and performers embrace the show business lie, “Always leave them wanting more.” Neither did Peter Cook. His list of “did not writes” is as long as any other human being’s and is similarly useless to think about. The gift of his writing and performing in 35 years in show business is worth celebrating every day. He was funny in more ways—wit, surreal humor, drunken whale national anthems, offensive satire, absurd observations—by himself with four minutes of TV time than entire teams of comic writing staffs with big network budgets often are.
As seen in “It’s a Balloon” just above, his comedy was not cuddly and was often confrontational; he would be ridiculing anyone writing a column like this one. There have been several published today, so he would be busy.
So, twenty years on, goodbye Peter Cook. Here he and the also late Dudley Moore sing their theme song, “Goodbye,” with T-Bone Walker and Peter Sellers.
The Gad About Town 