“HOW many years have you been a journalist?” says Ken Dodd.
Twenty-five, I reply.
“Have you really? My goodness. That’s a long time to go without food, isn’t it?”
The 88-year-old comic – who brings his Happiness Show to Bournemouth’s Pavilion on Saturday, March 26 – still loves telling jokes.
"I’ll never hang my tickling stick up," he says.
He remembers his first appearance in Bournemouth in the 1950s, when the “lovely” singer Alma Cogan topped the bill.
“My name was just a little bit bigger than the printer’s at the bottom of the bill,” he says.
“I’ve been playing it every year since. I must have played it 50 or 60 times.
“I played the Pavilion and I played the Winter Gardens two or three times. That was like playing in an aircraft hangar.”
Bournemouth’s audiences, he says, tend to come from all over the country. “One or two posh people come in from Christchurch, but we have to make way for them, make sure their limousines can get to the theatre in time,” he adds.
The limo drivers will also need to pay for enough parking to last them into the early hours of Easter Sunday. Ken’s shows are known for running longer than a Bruce Springsteen concert.
“That’s an ugly rumour. I do not do long shows, I just give good value,” he says.
“In any case, when I’m on the stage there, I’m having the time of my life. I enjoy every second of it.
“I’m what they call in show business ‘stage-struck’. It means you love being a live performer and it is a marvellous feeling.
“You play an audience like you play a piano or the violin or a musical saw or the kazoo, even. With experience, you find you know where the hot spots are, where there are really good chuckle muscles, where they need coaxing. You need to romance them a little bit.”
He says he has stacks of notebooks – “hundreds of the beggars” – in which he has recorded how particular gags fared with different audiences. They make up a “giggle map of Great Britain”.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, Dodd is a clever man, who can quote Freud’s theories about humour. (“Freud never played Glasgow Empire on a Friday night second house,” he famously said).
Kenneth Branagh roped him into his four-hour film of Hamlet. “Kenneth All-Bran, he rang me up one day and said would I take part in his film of Hamlet? I said ‘Oh well I’ve got the legs for it, I’ll look good in tights’.”
He has been fascinated by laughter since his father, Arthur Dodd, took the family to Shakespeare’s Theatre of Varieties in Liverpool every week when he was around 12.
“I thought to myself why, what is a joke, why do we laugh at jokes?
“So every time I went to different towns I’d go to the library and devour whatever books they had on laughter, humour, comedians etc. I even got permission once, when we played Oxford, to go into the Bodleian Library there. They’ve got some cracking tomes – all about comedians and humour and why we laugh.
“I did read Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. I was the unconscious one.
“So I read Freud and I read Schopenhauer and I read all the different psychiatrists and psychologists, plus comedians who told you why they were a comedian.”
So does he have his own theory about why we laugh?
“A sense of humour is a sense of being able to see a comic situation, see the humour in life. It’s very posh to say … the perception of incongruity.
“Now can you spell that or do you want me to do it for you?
“How long have you been a journalist? All day?”
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