Comedy and Leadership – discuss?

How do you define funny? How do you define Peter Cook? Or are the two words synonymous….?

It’s quite impossible to think of Peter as dead because he’s a perpetual spirit

-Barry Humphries

• Cook the insulter – “Perhaps if I had been born with a club foot and a height problem, I might have been as desperate as Dudley to become a star . . . “
• Cook the foul mouth – whilst everybody else avoided the ‘c word’, Cook embraced it like a long lost friend
• Cook the sport nut – inventing a ball game called ‘Los Bollockos’ in a swimming pool whilst filming abroad

Even after his death, Cook managed to be hilariously off-the-wall….or ‘on-the-wall’ if you read this particular obituary:

THE hall is narrow and the visitor’s eye is drawn to distant chaos, so it is easy to miss the faded scribblings on the wall. Somebody has circled the reddish-brown blotch of a squashed insect and captioned it “fly”. In the same hand, with the same felt-tip, is the word “virgin”, surmounted by a doodle like the top of a palm tree. A line of arrows marches down the wall from the virgin and disappears round the corner, where the joke ends: “Not much chance here, mate. Try No 23.”

-Telegraph obituary

It’s fair to say that even though he enjoyed solo success, the name ‘Peter Cook’ is synonymous with ‘Dudley Moore’ – or ‘Pete and Dud’. So if each of them was funny on their own, together they were hilarious.

Other established comedy doubles such as Morecambe & Wise were always playing to an audience. Pete and Dud seemed to be merely content with entertaining each other. The rest of us were just listening in on their conversations:

Dudley Moore: You have a generous heart.
Peter Cook:: I do have a generous heart. I have a very generous heart. I recently caught it trying to give my liver to a wino.

Dudley Moore: Are you allergic to compassion?
Peter Cook: Only in suppository form.

[about to give a tribute to Dudley Moore on “This Is Your Life”] Alan Bennett: They wanted a glowing accolade. But I said “No. I’ll do an amusing anecdote” – because glowing accolades tend to sound so insincere.
Peter Cook: …Especially when they are.

Source – IMDB

I realise that, by the end of this blog,  I’m no closer to defining ‘funny’; comedy is an art not a science, and so by definition, what one person might find hilarious will leave another cold.

I guess ‘authenticity’ is a word which will always be thrown into the ring, but I’d like to think of great comedy as ‘uncompromising’, unafraid to offend and to alienate certain sections of the public….so in that sense, you could say that the great comedians were great leaders, with a very clear vision and disciples who bought into that vision.

Put like that, being funny is a serious business. And Peter Cook was one of the great leaders in that business.

I have learned from my mistakes….and I’m sure I can repeat them exactly

 – Peter Cook