How to Grow Old by John Bishop

Author:John Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473572959
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Humour Ages Well

Getting older is definitely not a limiting factor when it comes to stand-up comedy. You just have to keep going. The American comedian George Burns was often described as ‘the oldest comedian on earth’ and was performing well into his nineties. He signed a lifetime contract at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas when he was ninety-six. He even had London Palladium booked to perform in after his hundredth birthday but sadly passed away, aged one hundred, after a career of nearly ninety years. He smoked ten to fifteen cigars and drank three or four vodka martinis every day. I once saw a journalist ask him what his doctor thought of his lifestyle. Quick as a flash, George said, ‘Nothing, he’s dead!’

Joan Rivers was eighty-one when she died. Her last performance had come a month earlier at the eighty-seater Laurie Beechman Theatre in Manhattan, during a new material night. A new material night. Just think about that for a minute. Joan Rivers was on stage, aged eighty-one, with notes and new jokes that she was trying out in a small theatre the night before she had her fatal heart attack.

What kind of octogenarian woman wants to think of funny things to say, write them down, get dressed, drag herself out of the house and stand in front of a room of strangers trying to make them laugh? It is the very essence of being a stand-up comedian because nobody in their right mind would do it. Just imagine comedy clubs all over the country with their open mic nights full of grannies, getting up and doing new material about the funny staff from their care home or what the world was like before television. Joan Rivers showed that you can still be funny if you still keep trying to be funny.

The best example of a comedian who wanted to keep going that I have met was Ken Dodd. Ken had developed a reputation over the years for doing shows that would go on for four or five hours. Even throwing in the odd song and some old material, that is an incredible amount of time to be talking for anyone, let alone a man who was still doing gigs months before his death at the age of ninety. To do that you have to really want to do it, and you have to love it.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ken Dodd on a couple of occasions. One was after seeing him perform at the London Palladium in 2007. It was fantastic to watch a real craftsman. He had great presence and great stagecraft which you do not always notice unless someone doesn’t have it. Ken made it look easy. After a career spanning seven decades, he had spent a lifetime on stage, so it looked a natural home for him.

I was invited to say hello to him after the Palladium show. Considering that he was eighty years of age at this point and had just done a three-hour

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