Customer Reviews

Tragically I Was an Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook

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Sad to see sort of so-so appraisals of Cook's work. In film he was often a genius too, I think of "The Wrong Box" (where, in fact, it's Peter Sellers that comes off a bit lame) or his brilliant portrayal of the psychotic British PM in "Whoops, Apocalypse!" I remember him explaining to his cabinet--deadpan-- that British industry is suffering because of sabotage by pixies. (Michael Moore should have watched that film before directing Canadian Bacon, he might have learned a few things like political satire sometimes needs to be existential to ring true, it shouldn't always be just witch hunting). Anyway, that role alone should have made Cook's reputation. I can't imagine how anyone could not have found him funny in "Bedazzled" as his was the ultimate portrayal of the banality of evil--Satan being "bad" by scratching up people's record albums.

Cook, unfortunately for us, not him, was one of the all-time great practitioners of the art of silliness and the absurd. That sort of stuff requires something special of an audience, a willingness to not try to "find meaning" in humor. We're a literal society these days, we take ourselves a tad too seriously, our humor is a bit self conscious and often it's just cruelty or mockery--the lowest forms. (A friend once commented on how funny her friends were and I told her no, all they did was ridicule and tear each other down. She thought about that and replied "Wow, you're right") Steve Oedekerk, creator of the wonderfully funny film "Kung Pow" complained how he had to seemingly justify everything he was doing in the film. Much of it was just pure wackiness, you simply can't explain or justify it. If you need the reasons why you can't explain it explained to you then you're lost, you'll never understand. It's a higher level of understanding and you'll need to go study with Buddhists or something. They know all the good jokes anyway.

I just watched a great WC Fields flick, "International House." Someone asks Fields where he's going to sleep and he replies "On my left side, with my mouth open...wide open." The day people stop laughing at joyous absurdities like that (Most these days would seek a double-entendre or something equally dumb in that)is the day I pack up and move to Tibet.

This is a wonderful book and it's sitting here remaindered for $5.98 in a few cases. Cook's writing reminds me of Robert Benchley's--he was another gentle absurdist who, fifty years ago, was a household name and a familiar face in the cinema. That's back when non-linear weirdness could be found in Bugs Bunny cartoons and for a while even in the funny papers with Krazy Kat. Many of the best writers of his generation considered him to be the funniest man alive too and he may well have been. All his books are out of print except for a small collection. This is also sad beyond reckoning.

Honestly I don't see the shift in humor to be simply a matter of taste or trends. Not "getting" Peter Cook means dropping humor down a fair number of notches to the general level of the Scary Movie series, lets say, and that's mostly unsophisticated toilet stuff you could diagram on a blackboard.

When a whole civilization finally dumbs down bigtime nobody ever really notices or cares much. That's actually how it happens, people stop caring. In about 50 years museums will be discarding things like abstract expressionist art because everyone, no exceptions, then will think" my kid could do that." They'll no longer be able to discern the vast gulf that exists between kid scribblings and de Kooning. To primitives high levels of complexity and organization are just "noise." Everyone will find it irrelevant, boring, or laughable, and that's happening all around you with your culture right now. Much art only survives because it has an astronomical assigned dollar value. In the future you won't be able to find a Peter Cook book to save your life.

When I was in college in the mid 70's, I saw Peter Cook and Dudley Moore open their Broadway version of "Good Evening" by passing each other on stage, turning their heads, and gently saying, "Hello." If you know some of the skits, you'll enjoy the occasional discrepencies, as those that made it to recordings had been tweaked with improvised additions and improvements. If you don't know the skits, you'll probably be adding some of these to your favorites by Bob and Ray, Morcombe and Wise, Dave Allen, Monty Python talk show parodies, and so on. The writing is witty and mostly subtle, with the well placed "groaners." Mostly, the book is a tribute to a humorist who didn't quite become a household name in every household (at least in the US), but who should have.

I suppose this book is a bit like Peter Cook - ultimately it promised so much more than it delivered. For a start, why call it `complete' when overtly it's a selection? A good, representative selection, sure, but not even an attempt at being complete. Secondly, in an important sense it's ill-conceived. Much of Cook's comedic effect was based on his delivery: a set of audio recordings would be a big improvement; a video collection is really what makes sense. The scripts are funny, occasionally hilarious - but they're only a poor reflection of why Cook was so popular. It's not like, say, Sophocles, where we're left with fragments and can only imagine the whole: many of Cook's performances were for the camera. Why limit yourself to transcriptions? Why? Maybe because like me you had access to the book but not the films, shows and albums. But if I was deliberately seeking out Cook material, I'd start by looking for what was available on DVD.

This is not a biography, but there are brief biographical introductions to various phases of Cook's output. His life is less than inspiring but, something like a car accident, it's hard to look away. (Some of my musings here will be coloured by having seen a bioflick of his life more recently than having read the book. Rather than interspersing events in his life with footage of actual performances, the film used doppelganger actors to carefully copy `Pete `n Dud'. The film did more effectively convey his prototypical public school/Oxford uni stream of consciousness surreal pants-wettingly funny verbosity. It included the nice line something like, "Whereas other people breathe, Peter talks," and it seems that in Oxford days Cook's mind raced in barely controllable flights of fantasy and wit). The biographical snippets are helpful and interesting - if somewhat apologetic: the author seems keenly aware of the huge drop in quantity and (generally) quality of his work. The myth of Cook has him plummet from being a Mozart of comedy, effortlessly improvising lines that seasoned professional writers could only dream of - to being a dull, lazy, acerbic git who sat at home watching a lot of bad TV. Along the way his wit morphed from enchanting and ebullient through bitter and superlatively offensive to obscurely introspective.

Sure Cook deserves his trailblazer status - Monty Python (is Eric the half-a-bee some sort of tribute?), Steven Fry, Rowan Atkinson, a host of comedians have knelt at his robe - and he delivered following generations from the restrictions of formula music hall traditions (Spike Milligan aside). However after the most incandescent beginnings Cook's riches to rags experience seems to have taken a heavy toll. To his credit he didn't tart himself around endlessly replaying the couple of big hits from his glory days, but the muse seems to have largely flown. Later he has brilliant moments, but they are too few and far between to be called a career: his 1968 article about getting punched at a football game, for example, is a conscious attempt to amuse that fails - whereas I suspect in his Oxford days he couldn't have helped being funny if given a random topic with half the comic potential. Some would say that the pairing with Dudley Moore was inspired, and doubtless they chimed at times, but I'm not so sure that it took Cook to a better professional place. Still, maybe it wouldn't have mattered who he was or wasn't partnered with.

Enough of this ill-informed psychological analysis, I was talking about the book, wasn't I. In print, for me some of the El Wisty monologues worked best - one of the few places I found myself regularly laughing out loud (although I still would rather have heard them). Several articles were originally for print anyway, such as the eccentrically lurid tales of `The Seductive Brethren'. I suppose it's also helpful to know I'm not missing out on some vast treasure trove of comic gold - I've got a good impression of what is available in the surprisingly small Cook archive, most of which would be better viewed than read.

It's amazing it took as long as 2002 (more than five years after Peter Cook passed on) to collect this wonderful sampler of the Funniest Man in the World. Like a lot of you Boomers in North America, I became aware of Cook thru his collaborations with the Monty Python team in the Secret Policeman's Ball series of stage shows. I was immediately impressed (and still am, these many years later) at what Terry Jones called the "luminous" aspect of Cook's talent. His range, the wandering speculations of E. L. Wisty and Pete and Dud to the..."punk poetry" of Derek and Clive is unparalleled in comedy for its strong, imaginative quality, not to mention its obvious hilarity.

Editor William Cook (no relation) has written much in the comedy-as-art vein, and he is the ideal person to round up the Best-of-Peter-Cook. William bookends each sketch with fascinating biographical information on Peter. William's enthusiastic and well-informed writing reminds me of the best essays-on-comedy of Leonard Maltin, and elevates and propels this book every bit as much as Peter's comedy.

It's true that a lot of the material included here has since surfaced on YouTube (and we Peter Cook fans are both richer and eternally grateful for that), but, let this not dissuade you from buying this book. Like Buster Keaton before him, Peter Cook's comedy is so intricate and well-crafted it's best when you can really slow down and savour it, as you can here. This book is, to date, THE essential Peter Cook souvenir.

It is typical of Peter Cook that he should be simultaneously neglected and overrated. Most people, even in Britain, probably remember little or nothing of him - but those who do form the most idolatrous of fan-clubs. The Stephen Fry quote on this book's cover, "The funniest man who ever drew breath" is a typical example. Cook's tragedy was that his humour was most effective by far in a roomful of people; slightly diluted on the stage, it lost something more on TV, and I could not help but notice that I ploughed my way through this 400-page book with frequent smiles but only an occasional laugh. His attempts to break into films were actually embarrassing, as a viewing of the original "Bedazzled" will confirm.

As William Cook points out in his perceptive Introduction, "Cook was a miniaturist. His speciality was a conversation of only several minutes duration. His quick-fire creativity didn't lend itself to longer, more structured genres". Consequently, his best work was done in cooperation with others. For instance, although Cook wrote about two-thirds of the script for "Beyond the Fringe", the result would not have been nearly as entertaining without the contributions of Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore. Like a powerful spirit, Cook's wit was potent - but perhaps best when diluted even slightly.

This book is a fine collection of Cook's work, together with a good deal of information about his life. It is, however, far from "complete", although approaching this goal more closely in the later years when Cook's output was much reduced. It makes a great companion to Harry Thompson's biography of the great man.

Peter Cook is beyond description, so genius will have to do. This book, while imperfect and incomplete, is the best argument yet for his canonization. Buy it, read it again and again. My only beef (and it's a small one) is there no Bedazzled script.

Clive James said: "In an hour of casual talk he spilled out enough wit and perception---in him the two things were uncommonly near allied---to keep anybody else going for a whole television series. That was the cruel fact which so few of his obituarists, even at their most laudatory, could bring themselves to face: he wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something *again*. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it."

After all the pious testimony about Cook's genius, I was hoping this book would convince me of it. It didn't. Most of Cook's newspaper writings are submediocre. And the intermittent brilliance of his interview improvisations is just that---intermittent. William Cook's essay is a masterpiece. It's just a shame that Peter Cook was a lazy wastrel who failed to live up to his potential.