From left: Bob Golding is Eric Morecambe, Damian Williams is Tommy Cooper, and Simon Cartwright is Bob Monkhouse, all three well-known British comic entertainers in the late 20th century, in Paul Hendy’s The Last Laugh.
Three of Britain’s leading comedians of the second half of the last century are the focus of Paul Hendy’s The Last Laugh, a play that harks back to Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound (1923) and Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians (1975). As the trio meets in a shabby dressing area of an uncertain venue for some kind of benefit performance, issues of what makes something funny and who steals jokes from whom, along with plenty of comic insults, arise.
Morecambe, one half of the team Morecambe and Wise, enjoys a pipe. Photographs by Pamela Raith Photography.
It’s a risky decision to launch Brits Off Broadway’s latest edition with a show about comedians who are largely unfamiliar to Americans. Perhaps Eric Morecambe (Bob Golding), half of Morecambe and Wise, who were often guests on The Ed Sullivan Show in the early 1960s, may ring a faint bell to a generation now using walkers. The other two are solo performers: Tommy Cooper (Damian Williams), whose often physical comedy included bungled magic tricks and whose trademark was a red fez, and Bob Monkhouse (Simon Cartwright), the nattily dressed host of British television game shows and talk shows, who carries a thick book of jokes. In spite of their obscurity on this side of the Atlantic, the difference in their styles and their choices of what works for them make for fascinating eavesdropping.
The three actors and Hendy, who also directs, have been here before, in a 2017 short film with the same title. Given that history, it’s no wonder that all three principals are presenting vivid embodiments of the originals, whose performances are viewable on YouTube. Williams, traipsing around in his underwear for half the play, is first among equals, with his working-class accent and go-for-broke jokes. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good gag!” Cooper advises Monkhouse.
But Cooper’s coughing and popping meds and consumption of alcohol bode ill for his health. A doctor has ordered him to stop drinking, but he’s incorrigible as he offers Monkhouse some Scotch:
Cooper: Drink?
Monkhouse: I thought you’re only allowed one glass.
Cooper: I’ve only used one glass!
Suave and imperturbable, even when Cooper repeats a joke he stole, Cartwright’s Monkhouse notes the contrast in their jokes:
I chisel them and then I polish them. I have to get every joke down to the absolute minimum amount of words. It has to be perfect, whereas you just say a gag and it’s funny.
Monkhouse’s humor is often self-deprecating: “My audience leave the theatre happy. ... I always give them their money back!” By contrast, Cooper will stuff a little something in the pocket of a friend and say, “Have a little drink on me.” The little something turns out to be a teabag, and he gets a kick out of the imagined reaction of the person who discovers much later that it isn’t money.
Monkhouse keeps a thick binder of jokes he has written and polished; many of them are stolen by other comedians.
Dropping in last is Morecambe, tweedy and professorial, with a pipe and a penchant for playing the ukulele (all three join in on some enjoyable, if obscure, British songs, such as George Formby’s 1937 hit “With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock”—though why Cooper describes it as “racy” is baffling). But the talk encompasses some serious thoughts about comedy, though not on the plane of Griffiths’ Comedians, whose teacher tells his students: “A real comedian … dares to see what his listeners shy away from, fear to express. … And what he sees is a sort of truth, about people … about what hurts or terrifies them.”
For the three men in Hendy’s play at the height of their careers, the discussion is more, as Morecambe puts it on entering, “dressing room banter. You know what it’s like, we’ve all got to have the last laugh.” As Tommy says:
It’s either funny or it’s not. They either laugh or they don’t. If you tell a joke and there’s laughter at the end, it’s funny. If you tell a joke and there’s silence, the chances are you’re Bob Monkhouse! Do you see what I did there?
“We stand in that spotlight and we try to make them laugh in the hope they’ll remember us.”
Still, there is an undercurrent of fear, but it’s more fear of being forgotten. Morecambe expresses it best: “We go out there. ... We stand in that spotlight and we try to make them laugh in the hope they’ll remember us. That’s all we really want isn’t it? To be remembered.” Their talk turns to British comedians of yore, such as George Formby and Max Wall, whose names are unlikely to mean anything to Americans. That invests Hendy’s engaging tribute with a sense of rue: As much as Cooper, Monkhouse, and Morecambe meant to British comedy, it’s probable that the names of Jack Benny, Rodney Dangerfield, and Joan Rivers will endure far longer.
Paul Hendy’s The Last Laugh runs through May 25 at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit 59e59.org.
Playwright & Direction: Paul Hendy
Lighting Design: Johanna Town
Sound Design: Callum Wills
Composer & Musical Arranger: Ethan Lewis Maltby
Costume Design: Amy Chamberlain
