Ken Dodd in Academia

"I suppose when I go, I'll have to turn the lights out". (Ken Dodd on music hall and variety theatre)

Ken Dodd in Academia

Sir Ken Dodd, who has just died, aged 90, featured in a number of academic works as examples of types, whether of the grand tradition of music hall, or inventive wordplay.  Rather than re-running old ground with an obituary - after all the BBC and others are doing far more and better than I ever could, I thought it might be quirky and distinctive to look at references to Ken Dodd in academic publications

The Liverpool Music Hall Variety Heritage

In “Taking Humour Seriously” by Jerry Palmer, Palmer notes how Dodd actually took the business of humour very seriously and had engaged in his own research into what makes us laugh. Far from the one-liners, this is the more introspective and serious Dodd:

The comedian Ken Dodd is reputed to have said that the difference between himself and Freud was that Freud had never had to do a performance at the Glasgow Palais on a wet Monday night. The implication is that amateurs should keep their mouths shut, and perhaps that learned writing on the subject of jokes is simply a waste of everybody's time. And yet Ken Dodd is also reputed to have read Freud, and to have a substantial library of eminently serious books about humour-which he himself takes very seriously.

In “A Gallery to Play To: The Story of the Mersey Poets”, Phil Bowen sets the scene of Ken Dodd in a grand tradition of Liverpool Musical comedy, and its distinct geographical location, and places Dodd at the tail end of this tradition with roots firmly in its soil:

'Over the water', echoing to the mournful piping of ships' horns, lies Birkenhead. Here at Cammell Laird's, the Mauretania and the Ark Royal were built. Tugs' sirens could be heard as river ferries and ocean liners entered what was still the biggest shipping pool in Europe. A melting pot of races, it spawned a vital working-class characterized by resilience and an extreme sense of humour. It was also famous for its sarcasm, the distinctive, quickly spoken glottal accent giving rise to a dynasty of music-hall comedians from Billy Bennett, Robb Wilton and Arthur Askey, to later maestros such as Ted Ray and Ken Dodd.

Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society, 1954-1984, by Jim Curtis, also looks at the historial roots of Ken Dodd:

The music hall flourished in the working-class North of England; at one time there were no less than 22 music halls in Liverpool alone....

As music hall merged with variety theater after World War I, talent continued to come from the North, though. Such comedians as Billy Bennett, Ken Dodd, Tommy Handley, and Albert Modley—all household names when the Beatles were growing up—came from Liverpool.

The difference between working class comedy and middle class comedy is explored in “Twentieth-Century Theatre: A Sourcebook” by Richard Drain, where he locates Dodd’s tradition within life and experience of the working community from which he came:

My experience of working-class entertainment is that it is in subject matter much closer to the audience’s lives and experiences than, say, plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company are to their middle-class audiences. Of course there is a vast corpus of escapist art provided for the working class; but the meat of a good comic is the audience’s life and experience, from Will Fyffe to Billy Connolly, or from Tommy Handley to Ken Dodd. Certainly in clubs, pantos and variety shows this is the material that goes down best.

The bourgeois comedy, largely of manners, or of intellect, tends to assume there is a correct way of doing things and that that is the way of the average broadminded commuter or well-fed white, etc. Working-class comedy is more anarchic and more fantastical, the difference between the wit and wisdom of the Duke of Edinburgh and Ken Dodd.

“Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism” by John Belchem suggests that there was a very distinctive nature to Liverpudlian comedy and its working class and dockland roots.

There is a touch of Private Eye's pseuds' corner on the final sentence :

As the pearlie cockney ossified into a nostalgia figure–‘an intermittently renewed metaphor for the corrosive character of modernity’–a succession of Liverpool-raised (and ‘slightly touched’) comedians (Arthur Askey, Tommy Handley, Derek Guyler, Ted Ray, Bill Danvers, Harry Angers, Billy Bennett, Robb Wilton, Billy Matchett, Beryl Orde, Norman Evans, and on to Ken Dodd, et al.) acquired national celebrity for their humour. Although at the time there was little emphasis on Liverpudlianism, this comic efflorescence appears as a defining moment for scouse, an early instance of the Merseyside symbiosis of economic decline and cultural assertion.

In “Gladsongs and Gatherings: Poetry and Its Social Context in Liverpool since the 1960s” by Stephen Wade, again Dodd joins a list of names of a great tradition of variety comedy, and interestingly, also includes Jimmy Tarbuck at the modern end, although I would put him as more modern. Dodd never was a game show host, but Tarbuck was.

Rob Wilton, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, Ted Ray, Ken Dodd and Jimmy Tarbuck are six names from generations of famous funny men who were cradled in a city where, for as long as anyone can remember, it has been claimed with a perverse pride that ‘you have to be a ruddy comedian to stick the place.

Looking back at Ken Dodd's career, a highlight on television has to be "The Good Old Days" when he performed for a live (but period) theatre at the very height of his powers.

The Shakespearian Actor

Famously, Ken Dodd played Yorick in Kenneth Brahagh’s version of Hamlet, which not only has a skull, but also the original character seen in life.  As Martin White explains in “Renaissance Drama in Action: An Introduction to Aspects of Theatre Practice and Performance”

Kenneth Branagh's film version of Hamlet (1996) includes at this point a flash-back in which the veteran British comedian Ken Dodd plays Yorick

“Shakespeare: The Two Traditions” by H. R. Coursen, adds something not mentioned before – continuity. We know Yorick in flashback is the same as Yorick the skull, because of Dodd’s distinctive teeth:

Branagh's is the first production I have seen in which Hamlet should recognize Yorick. The skull has the same buck teeth as the Yorick (Ken Dodd) in the flashback that accompanies Hamlet's apostrophe.

Ken Dodd and his wordplay

A little of this enters into academic books, but not, alas, "tattyfilarious" and "discomknockerated.

In “A Dictionary of Catch Phrases: British and American, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day” by Eric Partridge, we have:

by Jove, I needed that!
(A drink understood.) A 'gag' popularized by Ken Dodd, who presumably 'thought it up'; he used it as an 'opener', after playing 'a quick burst on me banjo'.

nikky, nokky, noo
Nonsense phrase devised by Ken Dodd, “Humour is anarchic, I suppose, ” he says, “So, like a child, from time to time you revolt against the discipline of words and just jabber!”'

And in “Shorter Slang Dictionary” by Rosalind Fergusson, the following are linked to Ken Dodd:

diddy
small, little. Nursery slang of the 19th-20th centuries. The term became more widespread in the later 20th century, popularized by the comedian Ken Dodd and his 'Diddymen'.

tattie-bye! or tatty-bye!
goodbye! A form of farewell popularized by the Liverpool comedian Ken Dodd from the 1960s. Probably a conflation of ta-ta and bye-bye.