The comic genius of Ken Dodd

With his wild hair, saucer eyes, protruding teeth and trademark “tickling stick”, Ken Dodd was one of Britain’s most popular entertainers in the 1960s and 1970s, said The Daily Telegraph. His TV shows were a huge hit, but it was as a live act, with roots in music hall, that he excelled. His shows drew vast crowds, yet they could be exhausting affairs, owing to his relentless gag rate (he once reached 7.14tpm – titters per minute), and notorious tendency to overrun, often by hours. “The sooner you laugh at the jokes, the sooner you can go home,” he’d say. In fact, his fans would often collapse into paroxysms of helpless laughter – something that owed as much to his frantic energy and extraordinary audience rapport as the quality of his zany, saucy, surreal humour. As Craig Brown observed for a profile in The Oldie in 2015, his delivery was so rapid-fire that you’d often be “laughing at the last joke but three, or perhaps just generally laughing at the surrounding laughter...”.

Ken Dodd, who has died aged 90, was born in Liverpool in 1927, in Knotty Ash. A prosperous suburb, which was his lifelong home, it would feature heavily in his comedy, as a place of snuff quarries, treacle wells and jam-butty mines, inhabited by Diddy Men (tiny people who – played by children – sometimes appeared, singing and dancing, in his act). His father was a wealthy coal merchant; both his parents were musical and supportive of his ambitions. When he was about eight, he saw an ad in a comic: “Fool your teachers, amaze your friends – send 6d in stamps and become a ventriloquist!” His parents bought him a dummy and he made his stage debut soon after, with a bit of tap-dancing and singing thrown in. (His buck teeth were the result of a cycling accident.) After leaving school at 14, he humped coal for his father and then worked as a salesman. Meanwhile, he performed in working men’s clubs, stretching the “chuckle muscles” while billed as “Professor Yaffle Chucklebutty, Operatic Tenor and Sausage Knotter”. He turned pro in 1954, began touring the seaside resorts and, by 1965, was packing out the London Palladium. That show, Doddy’s Here!, ran for 42 weeks and created such a stir that John Osborne led a delegation from the Royal Court to see it.

A man of diverse talents, Dodd played Malvolio in a 1971 production of Twelfth Night at the Liverpool Playhouse and released several hit records, one of which, the romantic ballad Tears, was the third biggestselling single of the 1960s (outsold only by two Beatles hits). In 1974, he won a place in The Guinness Book of Records by holding a “Marathon Mirthquake” in which he told 1,500 gags in three hours and 30 minutes. (“This isn’t television, missus,” he’d say, “you can’t turn me off.”) Yet the self-described “Squire of Knotty Ash” was far more than just a gag machine, said The Times. To his well-known catchphrases (“how tickled I am”, “by Jove, missus”), he added his own bizarre lexicon – “plumptiousness”, “discomkockerated’, “tattifilarious” – “and the absurdist word-pictures he painted were masterpieces of inspired lunacy, perhaps only rivalled by Spike Milligan”.

It was as though he was saying whatever flowed through his head, but in fact his act was carefully choreographed and his preparations meticulous. In the vast library he built in his family’s 18th century farmhouse, he pored over the “philosophical theories of Freud, Bergson, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein”, although he liked to point out that Freud had never played “Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost”. And with the help of his then fiancée, Anita Boutin (they were together for 22 years until her death, aged 43, in 1977), he recorded every gag he delivered, and the reaction it produced in different venues, to create a “giggle map of Great Britain”. The jokes were even colour-coded: white, at the top, was for those inspired by “the sheer joy of being alive”; at the bottom were dark colours to represent cynicism and satire.

Like many comedians, Dodd had a complex personality – which was painfully exposed to the public in 1989, when he went on trial on charges of false accounting and tax evasion. He lived frugally, yet kept wads of cash at home (in cupboards and under stairs) and had many offshore accounts. In court, his QC, George Carman, portrayed him as honest, but eccentric. Asked why he kept £336,000 in cash in his attic, Dodd replied: “It proved to me that I have played the Palladium, that I was someone.” As to having multiple bank accounts in the Isle of Man, this was because he enjoyed going around and meeting all the different cashiers. “I am not mean, but I am nervous of money, nervous of having it, nervous of not having it,” he said. Several well-known comedians appeared in court to testify to his charity work, much of it unsung, and after a gruelling 23-day trial, he was cleared of all charges (although forced to repay £825,000 in tax). The experience was traumatic for this very private performer, but he bounced back – though his TV career had by then fizzled out, he was still touring at the age of 90, still singing his signature tune: “Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess...”.

Dodd had often said that he’d love a knighthood (to “keep my ears warm in bed”); it seemed the tax case had put paid to that. But in 2017, he was finally knighted, for services to entertainment and charity. Two days before his death, he married Anne Jones, his collaborator and partner of 40 years, at home in Knotty Ash. It came out during his court case that they had tried unsuccessfully to have children.

“Doddy’s Here! ran for 42 weeks and created such a stir that John Osborne led a delegation from the Royal Court to see it”