Merseyside Mirth Makers - Sir Ken Dodd

Ken Dodd

We begin our compilation of comedy legends from the Merseyside region with the 'Master of Mirth', the 'King of Comedy' and a student of humour who transcended the period from Music Hall to the present day.. As his lifelong friend and fellow comedian John Martin said " writing jokes for Sir Ken Dodd was like “mixing the paint for Van Gogh.”

Sir Kenneth Arthur Dodd OBE was born in Knotty Ash, Liverpool on the 8th of November 1927. His grandmother was Liverpool’s first woman magistrate, and each of her children played two musical instruments; with Ken's father playing the clarinet and saxophone. Ken went to the Knotty Ash School, and sang in the local church choir of St John's Church before attending Holt High Grammar School in Childwall which he left at the age of 14 to work for his father, a coal merchant. After seeing an advert in a comic "Fool your teachers, amaze your friends—send 6d in stamps and become a ventriloquist!" he sent off for the book. Not long after, his father bought him a ventriloquist's dummy, and thus the legend began.
In his mid-twenties his amateur theatricals were doing well enough for him to risk turning professional. He appeared, quaking, in variety at the Empire, Nottingham, in September 1954 but never looked back. One of his early billings was as 'Professor Yaffle Chuckabutty, Operatic Tenor and Sausage Knotter'. His career really took off in the 1960's when his show ran for 42 sell-out weeks at the London Palladium. He also made it into the Guinness Book of Records at this time for telling 1,500 jokes in three and a half hours.

Royal acknowledgement

Ken had started out as a burlesque baritone and developed this into a send up of a fictive operetta entitled 'The Stupid Prince'.
His act involved elements of 'surprise' in many different ways.
He was visually funny, making extravagant use of props, costumes and his own wayward teeth and unruly hair plus a malleable face .
His long and bright overcoat he would proudly explain was “made from 28 moggies, all toms!” His 'Tickling Stick' and 'Big Bass Drum' were used to engage his audiences as was his excellent singing voice ( he had 18 Top 40 songs and outsold everyone apart from The Beatles in the 1960's. ).
Add to that his incomparable ventriloquist act with Dickie Mint, which remained a popular and endearing part of Ken's shows throughout his career.
Also his famous Diddymen have featured in his stage and television shows, as well as in comics and even board games. Characters like Dickie Mint, Mick The Marmaliser and The Hon. Nigel Ponsonby Smallpiece are among the mythical Diddymen who work in the legendary Knotty Ash snuff quarries, black pudding plantations and broken-biscuit repair works!

"Glue? I never mentioned Glue!"

For an indeterminate number of hours at a time he would amaze, amuse, defy and delight up to a couple of thousand people at a time with his apparently inconsequential torrent of tomfoolery at the footlights.
Although at times his act seemed chaotic and ad-lib, he would have rehearsed everything down to the last, learning local place names and leaving gaps for the ebb and flow of an audience’s response when he would call upon a personal repertory of gags ancient and modern, polite or risqué, to suit the moment.
He was a serious and highly professional operator from the start. Although he enjoyed making people laugh, he was also a serious student of comedy and history, and was interested in Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson's analysis of humour. He kept notebooks in which he jotted down audience reaction to his jokes and ad-libs, jettisoning anything which didn’t work. He carried around plastic bags filled with every joke he had ever told and claimed never to have done the same show twice. He was a keen student of theatre history, likening his tickling stick to the pig’s bladder on a stick that medieval jesters carried as a comic prop, and saw himself as the natural heir to clowns like Dan Leno.  Indeed, in the early 1970's, he conceived a one-man show based on the history of laughter, hiring small theatres to test it out on audiences.

Awarded the OBE in 1982 and Knighted in 2017, it was in 2003 that he was named by the people of Merseyside as the 'Greatest Merseysider' of all time – an honour he regarded as the most meaningful ever to be bestowed upon him. "It came from the people who live in Merseyside and love it as much as I do", he said.  Runners-up were John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
When he passed away it was the last link with a music-hall tradition that began our series.

see next :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2018/05/merseyside-mirth-makers-music-hall.html