Whatever it is, I Don't Like it by Howard Jacobson Page B

break-up of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and I will resist saying that they are together again, now, in comedic Elysium, at last. Like all the best double acts, theirs was a love affair. Did you see that film footage of Jerry Lewis breaking down in a limousine, remembering his days with Dean Martin? Did you see Ernie Wise on television after the death of Eric Morecambe? Widows, both of them. Their grief unbearable to behold. But Peter Cook and Dudley Moore seemed to be entwined even tighter still. And that was because Dudley Moore appreciated Peter Cook’s genius to the depth of his soul, got him as no one would ever get him again. And the sign of that appreciation was his laughter, his failure, no matter how hard he struggled, to keep his face straight, his divine incapacity, once his partner was in full flight, to hold himself together.
    There, I think, you have the story of Peter Cook’s life. He had the fortune (maybe the misfortune) to meet someone who broke up more spectacularly, more profoundly – I will even risk saying more erotically, for there is undeniably a sexual component to such disarrangement – than any other person on the planet. Thereafter, what else was there to live for but to go on cracking Dudley up, splitting him asunder, dissolving him, tearing his very heart out with laughter. You can hear it on that sublimely filthy record, Derek and Clive (Live) – Peter Cook scaling wilder and wilder heights of scatological absurdity and invention, in order to test what condition of hysteria he could reduce Dudley to next. Sex? Yes, but even better than sex.
    And there was the tragedy of it – because finally Dudley left. Finally, no doubt, Dudley had to leave. Put yourself in his place. He wasn’t the stooge. His role was always more active than that. But he was the convulsed sea to Peter Cook’s controlling moon. There comes a time when you want to exert your own magnetic force.
    For a while – and Peter Cook malevolently encouraged this view himself – it looked as though envy was the engine house of their estrangement. The contrast in their fortunes was too great: Dudley getting off with beautiful women twice his height in Hollywood, and Peter Cook getting pissed at Private Eye lunches in Soho, no disrespect meant to the latter. But I know in my bones it wasn’t primarily envy, though envy will insist its way into everything. It was heartbreak. You can’t enjoy such complete and cultivated admiration, then have it stolen from you. Not in the matter of your jokes, you can’t. Alas, poor Peter.

Cherie Baby and the Bombers
    As a bald statement of consequences, free of all history and context, it is so unexceptionable and self-proving as to be without meaning. ‘As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress.’ Step forward whoever believes that as long as young people have got no hope but to blow themselves up, we are making excellent progress.
    Myself, I’d go further than Cherie Blair. Why stop at young people? Surely as long as any people – the middle-aged, the elderly, the geriatric – have got no hope but to blow themselves up, we are not making progress. Unless you would argue that in the case of the geriatric we are making progress, since their blowing themselves up in large numbers would be some sort of solution to the problem of an ageing population. That is as long as they are only blowing themselves up, and not indiscriminately blowing up other people along with them. It begs a question, you see, this phrase ‘blowing themselves up’. Indeed, it doesn’t only beg a question, it buries it.
    Try the sentence again, then, paying more attention to the specifics. ‘As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow up as many other people as they can, you are never going to make progress.’ Put like that, progress becomes a rather pale