The standup and Chinese graduate on the things that make him laugh the most
I want to be nice and say one of my friends but that feels like a waste when this article is supposed to be about promoting me. So I’m going to say it’s me.
Continue ReadingPaul O’Grady’s family cheered him outside court. Alan Davies couldn’t get a word in over lunch. And he got Frank Cottrell Boyce by the chuckle muscle. Stars remember the brilliantly bizarre comedian
If Doddy was doing a show in Liverpool, it was always packed out. He had a fabulous imagination that gripped children and adults. As a kid I got the Diddymen annual and would see him at the theatre and just be completely entranced. At Christmas we’d watch him on TV at my auntie’s. She’d scream with laughter. My auntie and my mum used to go and stand outside the courts to show support during the trial over his taxes. When he came out, they’d shout: “We’re behind you, Ken! Good luck, lad!” He was very much loved in Liverpool.
Related: Ken Dodd: last of the music-hall maestros
Related: Ken Dodd: farewell to the tattifilarious marathon man of comedy
Continue ReadingFrom the Diddymen to dissecting northern humour, the Liverpudlian’s sense of absurdity never deserted him
My agent died at 90. I always think he was 100 and kept 10% for himself.
I do all the exercises every morning in front of the television – up, down, up, down, up, down. Then the other eyelid.
How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows. It’s never been tried.
What a beautiful day for dashing down to Trafalgar Square and chucking a bucket of whitewash over the pigeons and saying ‘There you are, how do you like it?’
I have kleptomania. But when it gets bad, I take something for it.
What a beautiful day for Dame Nellie Melba to drop a choc-ice down her tights and say ‘How’s that for a knickerbocker glory?’
You’ve got to be a comedian to live there. I call it Mirthy-side.
What a lovely day for knocking on a TV policeman’s door and saying: ‘Hello Mrs Savalas. Have you got a licence for your Telly?’
Did any of us, in our wildest dreams, think we’d live long enough to see the end of the DFS sale?
My dad knew I was going to be a comedian. When I was a baby, he said, ‘Is this a joke?’
Related: Ken Dodd: last of the music-hall maestros
Ken Dodd discussing northern humour on Late Night Line-Up in 1965 pic.twitter.com/qMYkbjGpbz
Continue ReadingFans remember comedy legend who ‘broke the mould’ at house where he was born and died
A pile of flowers and feather dusters – or “tickling sticks” – has begun to grow outside the 18th-century house in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, where the comedian Ken Dodd was born and died.
Allan Grice, a 71-year-old former senior fire officer, made the three-hour journey from Wakefield in West Yorkshire to Dodd’s home to hand-deliver a card of condolence, after hearing of the comedian’s death on the radio early on Monday.
Related: ‘An ordinary guy who was also a comedy genius’: readers on Ken Dodd
Continue ReadingFans remember comedy legend who ‘broke the mould’ at house where he was born and died
A pile of flowers and feather dusters – or “tickling sticks” – has begun to grow outside the 18th-century house in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, where the comedian Ken Dodd was born and died.
Allan Grice, a 71-year-old former senior fire officer, made the three-hour journey from Wakefield in West Yorkshire to Dodd’s home to hand-deliver a card of condolence, after hearing of the comedian’s death on the radio early on Monday.
Related: ‘An ordinary guy who was also a comedy genius’: readers on Ken Dodd
Continue ReadingThe veteran’s linguistic prowess, outlandish appearance and musical smarts could tickle any audience into a state of collective ecstasy
The death of Ken Dodd not only leaves the nation a sadder place, it also feels like the end of an era. Doddy, as everyone in the business called him, was the last link with a music-hall tradition that stretched back through time to include legends such as Max Miller, George Robey and Dan Leno. He adapted his act to the demands of TV and radio, but he was essentially a man of the theatre who could induce in a thousand or more spectators a sense of collective ecstasy.
I claimed, when I interviewed Ken on his 90th birthday, that he and Laurence Olivier were the two performers in my theatre-going experience to be kissed with genius. But of what did that genius consist? For a start, a love of language that enabled him to usher us into a world of grotesque fantasy: a place of hairy Danes with bacon sandwiches strapped to their legs, of satyr-like seniors indulging in snuff orgies, of men with a third eye on the end of their finger. Even childhood was not immune. “I was born one day when me mother was out,” Ken used to quip. “We were so poor the lady next door had me.” That takes us back to Dan Leno who recollected a bizarre infancy in which he varnished the furniture, the cat and the interior of his dad’s boots with strawberry jam.
Related: Ken Dodd: farewell to the tattifilarious marathon man of comedy
Continue ReadingComedian with an endless desire to make people laugh known for his tickling sticks, Diddymen and marathon stage performances
The last great “front-cloth” comic of our times, and the last standing true vaudevillian, Ken Dodd, who has died aged 90, was even more than that – a force of nature, a whirlwind, an ambulant torrent of surreal invention, physical and verbal, whose Liverpudlian cheek masked the melancholy of an authentic clown. “This isn’t television, missus,” he’d say to the front stalls, “you can’t turn me off.” And then he would embark on an odyssey of gag-spinning that, over five hours, would beat an audience into submission, often literally, banging a huge drum and declaring that if we did not like the jokes he would follow us home and shout them through the letter-box.
He entered the Guinness Book of Records in 1974 with a marathon mirth-quake at the Royal Court Liverpool lasting three hours, 30 minutes and six seconds. But his solo shows, in which he would perform three 90-minute-plus sets between magic acts, or a female trumpeter (the formidable Joan Hinde), or a pianist playing country music (his partner Anne Jones), frequently lasted much longer. One good thing, he would say, was that you always went home in the daylight. “And the sooner you laugh at the jokes,” he would say, “the sooner you can go home,” as if we were in school. He admitted that his was an educational show – when you did get home you would think: “That taught me a lesson!”
Continue ReadingThe entertainer Sir Ken Dodd has died at the age of 90, just two days after marrying his long-term partner, Anne Jones. Dodd died on Sunday in the house in which he was born, in the Liverpool suburb of Knotty Ash. His publicist, Robert Holmes…
Continue ReadingStars pay tribute to Liverpudlian comic described as ‘one of the last music hall greats’
Tributes have been paid to the entertainer Sir Ken Dodd, who has died at the age of 90 just two days after marrying his long-term partner.
Dodd died on Sunday in the house in which he was born in the Liverpool suburb of Knotty Ash, his publicist said. His wife, Anne Jones, was at his bedside.
Related: Share your tributes and memories of Ken Dodd
What a wonderful day for sticking a cucumber through your neighbour’s letter box and shouting ‘the aliens have landed!’ Tatty bye Doddy. And thanks . #doddy
Comedy flowed through him like water. RIP Sir Ken Dodd. pic.twitter.com/v0FjVJVe1n
Related: Ken Dodd at 90: the rib-tickling genius is still crazy after all these years
Related: Ken Dodd: ‘I am so appreciative of what a fantastic start in life my parents gave me’
Continue ReadingDodd, who has died aged 90, was a force of nature – a cheeky master of the one-liner who spread happiness in shows that lasted until the small hours
Ken Dodd, who has died aged 90, was quite simply a master at making people happy. His shtick – childlike, cheeky, saucy; anarchic and egalitarian – was machine-tooled to disarm our cynicism, and Dodd was relentless in its application. A titter forever playing on his lips, he’d defy you to keep a straight face, to resist the silliness. Each daft joke (“My sister, she was engaged to an Eskimo. She broke it off”) was another rabbit punch to the funny bone. You’d drop your guard eventually, and he’d get you in the end with a one-liner or a flight of nutty fancy: “What a beautiful day for wearing a kilt and standing upside down in the middle of the road saying, ‘How’s that for a lampshade?’”
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Dodd’s comedy didn’t play by the rules we follow today – it was a mask. ‘I am my own double act,’ he once said
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