"Welcome to Workers' Playtime," cries Ken Dodd bounding on to the Stratford stage around noon. "It's a hell of a time of day to try to be funny." But in this discursive chat on Shakespeare and Comedy, part of an RSC mini-festival, Dodd was hilarious when he departed from his prepared script. Somewhat gratuitously, he reminded us that he wasn't a Shakespearean academic. "But," as he said, "how many of them have to take on a Blackpool illuminations hen night?" His comments on Shakespeare and his life-enhancing ability to lift you up rather than drag you down were largely confined to generalities. Where Dodd really established a link with the playwright was in his own ability to play with words. Women comics "make fun of our little peccadillos," or, "What do you call a short-sighted dinosaur? - a doyouthinkhesaurus." Best of all was his loving rendering of Billy Bennett's A Sailor's Farewell to His Horse with the line "The sea was as smooth as a baby's top-lip." Even Shakespeare, Dodd suggested, never wrote anything as good as that.
Dodd was also illuminating on the nature of comedy. "Humour," he told us, "is a perception of incongruity." And he demonstrated the rainbow-like spectrum of laughter from his own form of celebration to the cynicism of WC Fields, who once suggested people "Smile every morning - get it over with." But if Dodd had a general point, it concerned the therapeutic nature of comedy: "If you don't use your chuckle-muscle, it dries up and drops off."
Time is a concept as alien to Dodd as it was central to Shakespeare. "Brevity is the soul of wit," he mused. "I never got the hang of that." No indeed; and, as he reluctantly quit the stage after an hour-and-three-quarters, you felt this great embodiment of the comic spirit was just starting to warm up.
