An impression of effortlessness, of course, is rarely achieved without some effort. At school and at Pembroke College, Peter had paused naively whenever he got a laugh, in order to jot the successful line down on a scrap of paper for future re-use. These jokes would crop up again not just on stage, but in conversation elsewhere. There are probably more people who believe that they were privy to the first ever improvisation concerning the Holy Bee of Ephesus, than there are supposed fragments of the true cross. This was not a habit that Peter subsequently abandoned, merely one that he resorted to more discreetly. His daughter Daisy confirms that at home he jotted jokes down continually, on napkins and empty cigarette packets. As late as 1970, he confessed that ‘My cheque book is covered with illegible notes which are supposed to remind me of things. This morning I woke up and saw “teeth” written down. Couldn’t think what it was.’2 In public, though, he was enough of a showman to wait until nobody was looking before scribbling down these notes.
Dudley Moore was among those dazzled by his private performances. ‘Peter comes out with these sentences perfectly formed, like the best jazz,’ he said wonderingly. ‘How it happens is totally mysterious.’3 But Dudley was not Peter’s only writing partner: throughout the 1960s the staff of Private Eye also had the opportunity to scrutinise his methods at close quarters. Andrew Osmond points out that ‘You couldn’t conceive of Peter doing ordinary things, like filling in his tax return or talking about the best way through Basingstoke. You could make a huge list of things that clutter our lives – bills, babies, getting the car fixed – which he seemed to dispense with. Or if he dealt with them, it was certainly under a tight security blanket. No-one ever caught him at it. But I think he probably didn’t do those things at all. Just being Peter Cook required a sort of intensity of concentration which eliminated all the rest. The usual assumption is that he could turn it on, just like that, if he was in the mood. But who knows how much he prepared of any of it? How did the spring get coiled?
My feeling is that he may have been a bit like one of those artists, or chess players, whose mind is so completely used up by the concentration of producing those moments of brilliance in the twenty-four hours of the day, that there was nothing left for anything else. What was he doing when he was walking along the street not talking to anybody, just catching a bus or something? He was running those monologues in his head so that when the moment was right he could reach for a taprdinthe shelf in his mind. Not exactly that it was memorised or rehearsed, but he’d prepared it – he had a whole comic character ready for exposure, an invented personality that he’d been living with and testing for weeks or even months. The business of being Peter Cook, I suspect, was a full-time job; a full-time, exhausting, demanding job which sort of wore him out. I never heard Peter mention a book of any description, never heard him talk about music, never heard him talk about painting. Football, yes; but football, for Peter, was probably a bit like Wittgenstein going to the Cambridge cinema every night to watch Marilyn Monroe films. It’s what you do after a hard day’s philosophising. Genius – the exercise of genius – takes concentration. It’s strange to me that, in all that’s been said about him since he died, nobody has placed him in the ranks of those people who were worn out by the demands of their gift.’
Osmond’s perceptive analysis is shared by Richard Ingrams and John Wells: ‘For all his apparently free stream of warped, boredom-racked consciousness, he had some intricate design at the back of his mind which he was slowly and often quite laboriously working towards,’4 recalls Wells. ‘You would often see the same jokes, or patterns of jokes, re-appear elsewhere in a different context. The other thing is, Peter was famous for never writing anything down, but in fact he did write down a lot of scripts at home – I’ve only recently discovered that. There are whole film scripts even, which were never published.’ All of which is not to deny that Peter was a brilliant improviser – he was, of course – but many of his most impressive performances were voyages between islands that he had already charted in his imagination. He could vary the route or add in new and interesting detours, but he had already discreetly consulted the map before setting out. Something akin to this mental process could be observed during the run of Beyond the Fringe, when Peter would vary the Mr Grole monologue (about the miner who wished he had become a judge) every night; eventually it had almost completely metamorphosed into a different sketch, but the improvisation was never allowed to stray too far from the successful sections of the previous night’s route.
Peter could be irritable with interruptions, humorous suggestions thrown in by others for a change of direction, that threatened to divert him from where he was intending to go. Sometimes he would ignore them, and plough on regardless; at other times he would twist away in a new direction altogether, take a different route to his destination and try to shake off his pursuers in the thickets. Only if the interruption actually assisted him in his progress – if, for instance, it was the broadest or most general of helpful questions – would he be delighted to incorporate it into his flow. ‘Most of the Eye gang got the hang of it eventually,’ explains Osmond, ‘the hang of it being that you had to be the straight man. You had to keep saying things like “What do you mean, newts, Peter, what newts? There aren’t any newts.” You just had to keep putting the plain man’s point of view – protesting, if you like, on behalf of the rational world – if you wanted to trigger this flow. If you got good at it, you could keep him running for hours. “Do you dream about these newts, Peter? I mean, how big are they?”’ It is paradoxical that later in life, when Peter ceased to make such a concerted effort to be blindingly funny all the time, the impression of absolute effortlessness began to slip occasionally.
Peter had a compulsion to be funny, which in Christopher Booker’s words, ‘overrode everything else so that it sometimes seemed like a Frankenstein’s monster.’5 Dudley Moore recollects that in conversation, Peter would try to go out on a laugh line just as if he were on stage. He needed to have an audience, and to make that audience laugh. It didn’t matter if there were two people listening or twenty million, he applied maximum energy to the task. Fame, as sought after by the majority of performers, was not centrally important to him; success at what he was trying to achieve, on the other hand, was paramount. Of course he enjoyed being recognised and feted by the public, but what gave him a kick was that they enjoyed what he was doing, that he had made them feel happy.
Even in one-to-one conversation, Peter would endeavour to entertain the person he was talking to. He actually communicated through jokes. Very, very few people, most of them blood relatives, crossed the divide and attained that inner sanctum of intimacy where he felt secure enough to relax and chat naturally for any length of time. Even friends and colleagues that he knew as well as Alan Bennett and John Wells found the way barred to them. ‘Alan and I were talking about it the other day,’ reflects Wells, ‘and I was saying how difficult I used to find it being alone with Peter, because it was very difficult to manage any kind of small talk. Generally speaking he was performing, and you could either compete or drop out, as competing was almost impossible. Alan said that he too found going to see Peter very difficult, because – in spite of his politeness – he didn’t seem to have the normal social apparatus.’ In this respect Peter led a slightly solipsistic existence: he tended to be interested in the rest of the world in so far as he could relate it to his own world, appropriating parts of it as fuel to feed the furnace of his mind. If a person wasn’t in some way feeding his imagination, unless they were one of his loved ones, he wasn’t really interested in discussing the details of daily life with them. As a result, very few among the hundreds of friends who adored him ever got truly close.
Peter’s compulsion to entertain was only counterbalanced by a delight in shocking people. ‘He used to shock the shit out of me,’ says Dudley Moore. ‘I used to drop my head in sheer exhaustion at the prospect of what he was about to say. Anything could set him off – it might be this wine gla
ss – and before you knew it, he could be on a tour of every orifice in the human body. I never succeeded in shocking him, though I used to try all right. I could never match him for speed, for one thing.’6 When Peter famously described Rab Butler as ‘A flabby-faced coward’ in the early days of Private Eye, it was not because he hated Butler, or because of any profound political grievance against the Conservatives, or even – probably – because he believed Butler to be a flabby-faced coward. It was because he wanted to shock, to elicit the reaction ‘They can’t say that about the Home Secretary.’
This is not quite as contradictory as it seems. Generating laughter and generating shock are both ways of creating an effect, of making a splash. Sometimes the latter could be used as a substitute for the former; if an early cabaret in front of the Young Conservatives wasn’t going terribly well, Peter would prefer to stun them into horrified silence than to depart unmemorably as the purveyor of an ndifferent evening. His celebrated rudeness to Zsa Zsa Gabor was more of the same, a calculated decision to overturn The Eamonn Andrews Show’s atmosphere of mediocre showbiz complacency. Even if nobody there had been impressed by such a gesture, it would have banked future stocks of entertaining material in the form of a good story, and – just as importantly – it would have amused Peter himself at the time.
It must not be forgotten that Peter needed to entertain himself as relentlessly as he needed to entertain others; he required constant stimuli to ward off the boredom of everyday life. He had an intensely low boredom threshold. He once got so bored at the cinema, during a showing of A Clockwork Orange, that he jumped up, stood in front of the screen and despairingly shouted ‘Why don’t you all go home!’ at the audience. There was a brief smattering of amused applause, but nobody followed him through the exit door. ‘And once you’ve decided you have a low boredom threshold,’ Peter complained, ‘you just become more and more bored.’7 Comedy was his chief means of blotting out the ennui of everyday existence, both during his hectic early career and his more sedate later years.
Vast tracts of Peter’s comedy concerned itself with boredom. Take E. L. Wisty on royalty:
Even if it’s the most boring thing in the world, people still say, ‘Isn’t it interesting that a royal person is doing something boring?’
Or the Beyond the Fringe miner on his fellow miners:
Very boring conversationalists, extremely boring, all they talk about is what goes on in the mine. Extremely boring. If you were searching for a word to describe the conversation, ‘boring’ would spring to your lips. Oh God, they’re very boring. ‘Hello, I’ve found a bit of coal.’ ‘Have you really?’
‘The key to Peter – and this can go straight into Pseud’s Corner,’ reflects Ian Hislop, ‘is a sort of existential boredom from an early age. People have said, “Oh, he’s an absurdist playwright who appeared in sketches,” but there’s a sense in which all those grotty people he invented – the Pete and Duds, and Derek and Clives – were just hanging about, filling in time.’8 Pete, indeed, once complained to Dud about the futility of a life which consisted of ‘cups of tea, interminable games of Ludo and the occasional visit to your Aunt Dolly.’
Peter had been immersed in boredom from an early age – it was rooted in his childhood existence, and he feared it. He could identify it in others, and chase it away. John Wells recalls a feeling ‘almost like being X-rayed’. But Peter could never clear out the reservoir of black boredom that bubbled deep within himself: he could only open the vents to release some of the pressure. ‘Engaging and fascinating as he was as a raconteur,’ remarks Hislop, ‘at the end of it a looksprincome over him, which would indicate that in a sense, he too had just been filling in time.’ When he was forced to talk seriously, by a persistent or humourless journalist for instance, Peter would often make up serious-sounding lies instead, to keep himself entertained. He once claimed, for instance, that he had been a promising junior amateur wrestler for Devon.
Analysing humour is, of course, a dangerous and frequently self-defeating business. Enquire too closely into how an illusion has been performed and the mechanics will draw the attention fatally away from the results. Peter himself refrained from self-analysis, fearing that if he managed to identify the source of the flow it might dry up. ‘I think he probably analysed his humour less than almost any other comic I’ve ever come across,’ says John Cleese, although Dudley – for all his psychiatry – must have been a serious rival in this regard. Perhaps the most concise analysis of Peter’s style is provided by John Bird: ‘it wasn’t really a style, it was the way his mind worked.’9
Let’s try, anyway. Essentially, the characters that Peter performed can be roughly divided into two principal types. First, there were the droning, nasal, lower-middle-class obsessives like Pete and E. L. Wisty, their lives trapped in empty boxes like the animals on Wisty’s lap, their minds free to roam across the vastness of space and time, always unencumbered by the mental apparatus needed to make such a trip. As Bill Wallis observed, ‘They were like the train guard you meet who can quote reams of Shakespeare and who has opinions on everything, but they’re all dreadful opinions.’ As early as 1959, in one of his earliest interviews, given just after the opening of Pieces of Eight, Peter explained: ‘Sometimes I think of old men who live in single rooms. I see them listening to their portable radio sets and charting news bulletins, which then take on great importance in their pathetic little lives. They become amusing, not because one pokes fun at them, but because they make unimportant things seem important and base their lives on false premises.’ Their failure was not the point of the comedy, rather their confident lack of awareness of their own shortcomings; although, as the journalist Ed Porter has pointed out, ‘Their lack of self-knowledge was usually so vast as to represent success of a sort.’10
Someone who continues to speak to you, while remaining unaware of the gap between how interesting they think they are and how interesting they actually are, is the very essence of a bore. These characters were the boredom that haunted Peter made flesh, and the straight men trapped with them were that side of himself which could never escape. Sometimes, if he was minded to be contrary, Peter actually made these characters boring on stage, quite deliberately, as if to emphasise that however frequently he exorcised the demon of boredom by laughing at it, it would ultimately be impossible to subdue.
Peter’s other principal character was the pompous authority figure, usually upper or upper-middle-class, equally confident and unaware of his own shortcomings, equally sharply observed, equally capable of seizing control of Peter for an hour or two, but in other respects the reverse of Pete or E. L. Wisty. These were men like Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, who enjoyed power or material success or both, frequently conferred on them by accident of birth, and who were free to do anything they wished with their lives. Unfortunately, it was their minds that were trapped in boxes, unable to grasp the notion that there was a simple alternative to the futility of their existence. In the words of John Cleese at Peter’s memorial service, these were ‘men, particularly English men, so trapped by their culture that they never knew how to live’. They were of course autobiographical characters, parodic of the milieu in which Peter grew up, the traditional educational institutions where unthinking adherence to the established pattern of life was prized above all else.
Peter was sometimes at pains to deny that his upbringing ever surfaced in his humour – ‘I don’t use my background,’ he told one reporter bluntly – but this was just another instance of his protectiveness towards his family, and his keenness to distinguish them (for whom he felt nothing but love) from the institutions they sent him to (for which he felt nothing but amused disrespect). Peter never parodied any members of his family, and if they did crop up in his humour it was in the most incidental manner, not as the target of the joke. Take, for instance, this wonderful passage from A Life in Pieces, the televised autobiography of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling:
My mother was a saint. Whenever I think of my dear mother I
have an abiding image of a small, kindly, plump, grey-haired lady pottering at the sink. ‘Get away from the bloody sink,’ my mother would yell at her, ‘and get out of my kitchen you awful plump little kindly woman!’ We never found out who she was.
Peter’s abiding image of his mother was, indeed, just as Sir Arthur had described. The rest is comedy.
In contrast to his public remarks, Peter was happy in private to acknowledge the link between his humour and his past. A Life in Pieces producer John Lloyd recalls that ‘Peter said to me once, “Everything I’ve ever written is autobiographical, it comes from my own life, it’s about who I am, where I come from.”’ Wendy Cook, certainly, would agree, reflecting ruefully that ‘I’ve seen quite a few sketches that are based on incidents with me, like the one in the Amnesty show where Eleanor Bron has a balloon up her jumper and says she’s pregnant.’ Wendy’s alien encounter in the late sixties turned up many years later on a Clive Anderson Talks Back special, in the mouth of a character who claimed that his wife had been abducted by aliens.
It was when drawing on his background, and specifically when amplifying the inherent ridiculousness of the class and authority structures that he had been funnelled through, that Peter inadvertently crossed paths with political satire, and indeed practised it more effectively than many a radical comedian whose sense of ire clouded his comic judgment. As Jonathan Miller says, ‘He wasn’t springing away from and repudiating his background. He came from a very conservative background and he brought to his conscious life most of the prejudices and commitments that such a background would imply. He imitated much of what he knew in his background, but he didn’t really attack it.’ Thus were judges and politicians humbled, knowledgeably and therefore more comprehensively than by most of his more radical rivals.