I’m going to miss Spike Milligan, that zany, anarchic, lovable comedian who died two days ago. He was, of course, the creator of The Goon Show, and which of us who were children in the fifties didn’t wait for it to come round each week, with its surreal plots and crazy characters, Harry Secombe as Neddy Seagoon, Peter Sellers as Major Bloodnok, Spike himself as Eccles, and Count Moriarty.
Most of us in those days, from my schoolmates to the Prince of Wales, used to spend much of our time doing excruciating Goon impressions, and only my respect for the BBC stops me from doing one now. I’ve no doubt that right now in heaven he’s keeping the angels entertained. Meanwhile down here on earth he kept his last joke to the end. He asked that on his tombstone should be engraved the words, ‘Here lies Spike Milligan. I told you I was ill.’
I didn’t know, until I read his obituary yesterday, that he suffered from manic depression and had at least ten serious mental breakdowns. But I might have guessed. There’s a certain kind of humour that only comes from deep pain, and the fact that he lived well into his eighties suggests that maybe it did more than make us laugh. It kept him alive.
It was the American sociologist Peter Berger who called humour a signal of transcendence and actually wrote a book about its religious significance. He called it Redeeming Laughter. What I think he meant was that humour is one of the great signs of the power of the human spirit to overcome tragedy and defeat despair. What we can laugh at, we can survive. Humour is the first cousin of hope.
So it’s not surprising that groups who have suffered most often tell the best jokes. I used to love the Jewish comedian Jackie Mason who began his act with the words, ‘I may start slowly but little by little I die out completely.’ Or Woody Allen’s famous line. ‘I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’
The Talmud tells a story about how the prophet Elijah one day came down to earth and showed one of the rabbis two people destined for special reward in the world to come. The rabbi went up to them and asked them what they did. ‘We’re jesters,’ they said. ‘When we see someone sad we cheer them up. We turn tears into smiles.’ That’s what you did for us, Spike, and may you share that reward.
