Ken Dodd dies: The beloved stand-up's 13 best jokes, one-liners and zingers
'I haven't spoken to my mother-in-law for 18 months - I don't like to interrupt her'
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Your support makes all the difference.The late Ken Dodd, the legendary Liverpudlian stand-up comic who has died aged 90, was remembered by his publicist Robert Holmes as "one of the last music hall greats".
Beloved of audiences in his hometown and across the country, Dodd's humour was indeed rooted in nostalgia for the sing-along stage acts of yesteryear like Max Miller as well as the north's proud tradition of working men's clubs, pantomime and the saucy seaside postcards of Donald McGill and the Bamforth Company.
The "Squire of Knotty Ash" was also a classically surreal figure - his bulging eyes and untameable hair ensuring he resembled Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter - and took inspiration from the Marx Brothers and the zanier acts of early cinema.
A household name for five decades, Doddy was known for his "tickling stick" and endurance stage act, famously claiming a Guinness World Record in 1974 after telling 1,500 one-liners in three and a half hours at Liverpool's Royal Court Theatre - a gag rate of one every 7.14 seconds.
The man who billed himself as "singer, photographic playboy and failed accountant" also released a hit single, "Tears", at the height of Beatlemania and could even play in Shakespeare, donning the yellow cross-gartered stockings of Malvolio in Twelfth Night in 1971 and a fool's garb to play Yorick in Kenneth Branagh's film version of Hamlet in 1996.
To celebrate this truly unique legend of British light entertainment, here are a selection of his finest quips and witticisms.
- “The trouble with Freud is that he never played the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic both lost.”
- "I just read a book about Stockholm Syndrome - it started off badly but by the end I really liked it."
- "I have kleptomania - when it gets bad I take something for it."
- "We have a Frenchman that makes his own gravy - the Count of Monte Bisto."
- "How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows - it’s never been done before."
- "Honolulu’s got everything. Sand for the children, sun for the wife, sharks for the wife’s mother."
- "I haven't spoken to my mother-in-law for eighteen months - I don't like to interrupt her."
- "Do I believe in safe sex? Of course I do. I have a handrail around the bed."
- "Love makes the world go round, or it does if you are a man over 50."
- "So it turns out that if you bang two halves of a horse together, it doesn’t make the sound of a coconut."
- "Men's legs have a terribly lonely life - standing in the dark in your trousers all day."
- "It's ten years since I went out of my mind. I'd never go back."
- "Fifty-five years in show business, ladies and gentlemen. That's a hell of a long time to wait for a laugh."
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