Category: default || By jt3y

I was a weird kid. This should come as no surprise to people who know me as a weird adult, but I was. I was entertained by things that I had no right being entertained by --- and I'll thank you to get your mind out of the gutter.

When I was just a little shaver, I discovered a show on PBS that I didn't know of anyone else watching --- I don't think my parents watched it, anyway --- and I thought it was just about the most wonderful thing in the world. It was just a dapper-looking Irishman, sitting on a stool with a glass of what appeared to be whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, telling stories, with occasional breaks for sketch comedy. Usually there was a theme linking the stories with the sketches, but not always.

He was calm, suave, droll --- imagine an Irish Dean Martin with a PhD, and you'll have something almost, but not quite, like the impression he gave. For one thing, he was much more dismissive of authority than Dean Martin ever appeared to be. It wasn't until years later that someone pointed out that he was missing part of one of his fingers; I never noticed that. I was too busy watching him. This is what being an adult --- a man of the world --- was about.

I can thank him for opening my eyes and making me more accepting of many things later on --- sketch comedy and British humor (or should I say "humour"?), for instance, and Douglas Adams and Monty Python in particular. He also showed that it was possible for humor to be adult without being profane, and for you to make jokes about religion without being sacrilegious. He was a lapsed Catholic (or as he put it, "an atheist, thank God") but his jokes about the Church, or the differences between Protestants and Catholics were pointed without being vicious.

His show was on Saturday nights. We used to go to Mass Saturday nights. Can you imagine the irony? Our priest was an Irishman, too, and a kind and decent man, but he was as dry as the sands of the Mojave, and prone to giving these long stem-winding homilies. Then I'd go home and sneak off and watch another Irishman (and an atheist, no less) deconstruct the Catholic Church!

Like I said, no wonder I turned out weird. Years later, in high school, I discovered that the guy who would turn out to be my best friend --- still is, in fact, thank God --- also knew about this comedian, and like me, had snuck off to watch his routines on Saturday nights. To this day, when one of us is getting ready to tell a story, we'll lean way back on our chairs, pantomime holding a cigarette and a highball glass, and begin, "So an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a pub ..."

At some point, WQED stopped running the programs --- which were several years old when I first saw them --- but I never lost interest in the comedian. Occasionally, notes about him would appear in the newspaper (not much, however, because he never made much of a splash in the U.S.), and I even called a talk-radio program one time when the topic was "obscure celebrities."

Later, the Internet made it easy to track him down --- he was still working clubs in the U.K., had a regular series on the BBC, and had done bit parts in a few European movies. There was even a minor scandal a few years ago when a joke he told on the Beeb included the big granddaddy of all swear words: "We spend our lives on the run. We get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work, and then we retire. And what do they give us? A f--king clock!"

(Echoing the sentiments of Lenny Bruce 30 years earlier, he explained that it was the only appropriate word to use in the joke. "It's a disdainful word," he told reporters, "because it's not a damn clock, it's not a silly clock, it's not a doo-doo clock. It's a f--king clock!")

I had thought of him just the other day, and Googled his name --- soon I found a Website for British TV buffs where many of the posters had the same kinds of memories as I did. I kept hoping that PBS, which keeps cramming 30-year-old British sitcoms down our throats, would some day rediscover this guy and import some of his newer stuff to our shores, but they never did. I don't have digital cable, so I don't know if any of his stuff ever showed up on BBC America, but if it did, I never heard about it.

Like I said, he was a much bigger star in the U.K. and Australia than he was here; his humor was an acquired taste. Maybe Americans prefer British comedians to work in broad farce, like Benny Hill and John Cleese. Still, I was hopeful; everything else is coming out on DVD, including "Hee Haw," for crying out loud. Surely, sooner or later, someone would do a retrospective of his work, right?

And then yesterday, I checked in at Ivan Shreve Jr.'s "Thrilling Days of Yesteryear" and learned that Dave Allen had died suddenly over the weekend at the age of 68. The poor sod didn't make it to St. Patrick's Day, which doesn't quite seem fair.

I learned a lot about him from reading the obituaries in the British press; he was the son of a famous journalist, Cully Tynan O'Mahoney, an editor of The Irish Times. Allen wanted to be a reporter himself at one time, and worked as a copy boy for a while before getting a job at a British resort, the Times of London reports. He tried out his comedy act on tourists in the talent shows and was encouraged enough to go on a BBC talent show in 1959. In the early 1960s, Allen gained some notoriety as the opening act for a then little-known band called The Beatles at many of their performances in the U.K. and France; given the group's subversive sense of humor, that's some how not surprising.

He produced a number of documentaries and hosted several TV series in Britain, the last of which left the air in 1993. Allen also continued to tour the U.K. and British Commonwealth countries with success, though a series of concerts in Boston in 1981 was apparently a disaster. According to the Manchester Guardian, "U.S. audiences (found) the sacrilegious content of his act more difficult to stomach." No offense to the Grauniad, but Dave Allen was about as sacrilegious as a Jesuit, and the fact that his concerts in Boston were received so poorly says more about the uptight nature of that city's Catholics than it does about him.

One of the obits I read mentioned that a collection of Allen routines had just been released on DVD. I checked the usual suspects --- Amazon, Barnes & Noble, even Chapters in Canada --- and none of them had it, or could get it. I finally found the DVD on Amazon UK, and they're shipping it to me; technical support at Dementia Unlimited assures me that I'll be able to watch it on my computer. (Warning: If you don't know the difference between a "Region 1" DVD and a "Region 2" DVD, educate yourself before you order a DVD from overseas.)

I'm hoping that the routines are just as funny to me now as they were 20 years ago. I think they will be. When it arrives, I intend to sit back with a glass of whiskey (I don't smoke) and watch with a big happy grin on my puss.

In the meantime, Dave Allen, wherever you are, your sign-off makes a fitting epitaph: "Good night, and may your God go with you."