Spike Milligan? Who's Spike Milligan?

Whilst trolling the internet (instead of editing a particularly difficult chapter of my next book), I found this wonderful appreciation of the peerless British comedian, Spike Milligan. It appeared in the NY Times' yearend People Who Died issue in 2002. Enjoy!



"December 29, 2002

Insanely Funny

By MARSHALL SELLA





The best comedy is a science, a rigorously structured subversion of logic. Absurdist humor lost its greatest illogician this year, though most Americans didn't notice. Spike Milligan, who died of kidney failure in February at 83, wrote and performed ''The Goon Show,'' a BBC radio program that was broadcast from 1951 to 1960. It generally had a cast numbering only

three -- Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe -- but the trio played dozens of roles, ranging from witless vagrants to witless ministers of Parliament. The Goons' influence has long outlived its radio years. Troupes like Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python, by their own admission, were the Goons' clear descendants; some would even argue that their work was

derivative of Milligan's anarchic style.



''The Goon Show'' never caught fire on this side of the Atlantic. With its fast pace, difficult accents and very English in-jokes, it sounded like a foreign language to American audiences. In the States, radio has long been regarded as a crippled form of TV, but Milligan brilliantly exploited every virtue of the form. That you could not see the action was the entire point.

In one episode, Milligan, playing his central role of a toothless idiot named Eccles, inexplicably falls in love with one of Peter Sellers's characters. ''My little darling, I want you to have these,'' Milligan drawls, arriving at Sellers's door. ''I picked these for you. I grew them

myself.'' Sellers tries to be gracious. ''A handful of hair!'' he responds. ''How sweet. Butler! Put these in a jar of hair oil.''



Shows were created and performed within a single week, like ''Saturday Night Live'' -- but without a separate writing staff. And unlike that show, each episode offered a completely self-contained story line. You'd hear titles like ''The Phantom Head Shaver'' and ''The Great String Robberies,'' all punctuated with deliberately off-key trumpet tah-dahs after the worst jokes.

The plots were ostentatiously silly. One episode recounted a bold effort to climb Mount Everest from the inside.



''Goon'' comedy was in equal parts the harmless violence of Warner Brothers cartoons, the wordplay of James Joyce and the lowbrow japes of the English music hall. Presiding over the chaos, Milligan suffered 12 nervous breakdowns in his life. [Egad!--MG] His troubles, he liked to say, only began with being wounded and shellshocked in World War II; it was ''The Goon Show'' that shoved him over the edge. Once, when the BBC protested the late delivery of

his weekly scripts, Milligan seized a knife and tried to break into Sellers's apartment. ''I was so mad,'' he later said, ''I thought that if I killed Peter, it would come right. I think I just wanted them to lock me up.'' Milligan landed in an asylum, confined for a time in a straitjacket, before returning to write more scripts and laugh onstage with his friends.



If violence and confusion were Milligan's private demons, they also drove his comedy. The Goons' disorder and subversive punning (often sneaking filthy jokes past BBC censors) were a direct result of Spike and his pals' antipathy for the regimentation they endured in the war. The basis of the Goons' humor, Milligan once said, ''is one man shouting gibberish in the

face of authority, and proving by fabricated insanity that nothing could be as mad as what passes for ordinary living.''



Milligan was the quintessential British eccentric, and never missed a chance to rail against (in no particular order) smoking, overpopulation, noise, abortion, animal cruelty and tardiness. He was also an ardent advocate for the conservation of Victorian lampposts. And although ''The Goon Show'' made him famous, his career hardly ended in radio. Among Milligan's other works

were ''The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film,'' directed by Richard Lester in 1959. The concept of that 11-minute film -- which is pretty much what it sounds like -- would ring bells for anyone who ever laughed at a 1964 movie directed by Lester, ''A Hard Day's Night.'' What we recall as classic early-Beatles humor was often pure Spike. When John Lennon, on his

first tour of the States, was asked how he found America and quipped, ''Turn left at Greenland,'' Americans howled; English people fondly remembered the Goons.



To the end of his life, Milligan remained irreverent and prolific. He wrote more than 50 books, including ''Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall.'' He heralded the birth of surrealist TV comedy with his 1956 series, ''A Show Called Fred.'' His experimental 1969 show, ''Q5,'' appeared just as the Monty Python gang was writing its first series. ''When we first saw 'Q5,''' John Cleese once said, ''we were very depressed, because we thought it was what we wanted to do, and Milligan was doing it brilliantly.'' Terry Jones has called Milligan ''the father of Monty Python''; Cleese called him the ''great god of us all.''



Prince Charles, who had done Goons impressions as a boy (to the courtly, seething dismay of his family), was perhaps Milligan's biggest fan and the patron of the Goon Show Preservation Society. Spike repaid the compliment as only Spike would. During a live TV broadcast of a lifetime-achievement award in 1994, he was read an adoring letter from the prince, and responded by describing Charles as ''a groveling little bastard.'' Charles alone appreciated the joke.



Milligan was the last Goon to die, following Sellers in 1980 and Secombe in 2001. He had always wanted his epitaph to read ''I told you I was ill'' -- so his funeral was anything but staid. Mourners arrived at his memorial greeted by the sound of wedding bells.



Ask a Briton over 40, and he'll tick off any number of lines that prove the immortality of the Goons. In one show, Sellers and Secombe cautiously lower a boat into the Amazon. When they reach land, Milligan is already standing there. ''How did you get ashore?'' he is asked. Milligan answers proudly, ''I came across on that log.'' The other two are baffled. They shoot back: ''Log? That's an alligator!'' ''Ohhh,'' Milligan dimly explains. ''I wondered why I kept getting shorter.''