Ken Dodd died on March 11th

THEY couldn’t say they weren’t warned. Thick and fast the gags came. “The first thing the manager said to me was, ‘Crack on, Dodd. I’ve got to get this theatre cleared by 2am.’ I told him, ‘Looks like we’ll have to do the second half outside the town hall, then’.” “Are you looking at your watch, sir? You don’t need a watch, you need a calendar. We should be finished by Tuesday.” “The sooner you laugh at the jokes, the sooner you can go home. But they say the breakfast here is good.” “This isn’t television, Mrs. You can’t turn me off.”

They couldn’t turn Doddy off (or not for five hours or so) because once the audience was warmed up he couldn’t bear to stop. “You all represent the crème de la crème. That’s French for evaporated milk.” “Hello, Mrs. Is this your husband with you, or is it novelty night?” Between the 1960s and the 1990s he averaged 100,000 miles a year, playing nearly every theatre in Britain. Though he starred on TV too, it didn’t suit him. The Varieties at Liverpool’s Shakespeare Theatre, his boyhood passion, were his ideal. He was the last of the front-cloth comedians, meaning they dropped a cloth behind you while they cleared up the stage from the Liberty Horses and got it ready for the man who pulled doves out of his jacket, and there you were, but with an act that had been burnished until it was a jewel. And he knew he was the last, for all the greats, from Max Miller on, had crossed the boards before him.

Not that this lessened his plumptiousness. “What a beautiful day!” he would cry. A wonderful day to beat a big drum, in true trouper style, in a shaggy red greatcoat or a mustard-yellow suit (“My tailor is colour-blind”), his hair like a bats’ nest and his teeth, bucked when he’d tried to ride a bike with his eyes closed, going proud before. (“My mother used to use me for crimping the pastry.”) His chief prop was a tickling-stick, a red, white and blue feather duster extendable into the stalls to get those chuckle-muscles working and reduce the hall to that beautiful thing, helpless laughter. “How tickled I am, under the circumstances! Tell me, Madam, have you ever been tickled under the circumstances?” He brought on dancing children as the Diddymen of Knotty Ash, his home suburb in Liverpool, and smoothed his hair to sing sentimental ballads in a light baritone. One of these, “Tears”, topped the charts for five weeks in 1965; he was good at crying songs. But then he resumed the gags. He held the world record for cracking them, 1,500 in 3 hours 7 minutes, with no script. Just off the top of his wild tousled head.

Jokes about fat ladies.“An official told my big Auntie Nellie to come off the beach, because the tide was waiting to come in.” Repairmen: “On Friday there was a tap on the door. Funny sense of humour, that plumber.” Mothers-in-law: “I haven’t spoken to mine for 18 months. I don’t like to interrupt her.” Men: “How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows, it’s never been tried.” And himself. “I do exercises every day in front of the television. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Then the other eyelid.” “It’s ten years since I went out of my mind. I’d never go back.” His life (in fact coal-merchant’s son, left school at 14, sold pans and detergent out of a van, first professional gig as Professor Yaffle Chuckabutty at the Nottingham Empire in 1954) was made as mythical as Knotty Ash itself, which acquired treacle wells and black-pudding plantations. “I was born one day when my mother was out. We were so poor, the lady next door had me.”

It seemed scatty, but every joke and gesture was rehearsed and re-rehearsed. In each new town he scoured the public library for books about comedy and the psychology of wit. His house in Knotty Ash was full of them. He read Schopenhauer and Freud. “Freud said, Laughter is the outward expression of the psyche. But he never played the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday after both Celtic and Rangers lost.” In dozens of notebooks he recorded his jokes, where told, and how they’d gone down. In the Black Country he had to unfold them slowly. Nottingham liked picture gags. The south coast enjoyed a bit of spice, but Wigan didn’t. His favourite photo of himself was a back view, walking across a theatre car park in red-and-white striped stockings, tickling-sticks in hand, thinking: “I could have told that one better.”

Cash in the attic

His buoyancy was tempered only once, when the Inland Revenue in 1989 found that in his attic, together with Charlie Brown, his first ventriloquist’s puppet, and a life-raft, and a giant bottle of stout, and box upon box of scripts, there was also £336,000 in cash that he hadn’t declared for tax. More sat in shoe-boxes under the bed. He’d put some of his earnings in offshore accounts, but he didn’t trust banks. He kept his money close to remind him that he’d played the London Palladium for 42 weeks in the mid-1960s, another record. To prove he was somebody. Everyone acquitted him, and the joke-book benefited. “Self-assessment? I invented that.” “I told the Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny, because I lived by the seaside.”

By then he was invulnerable, part of the national fabric. It was just the music-hall tradition, old-style variety, that was dying on its feet. And jokes about death never went down well. Apart from the one about the mother-in-law and the sharks...the taxman and the boa constrictor....