# Ken Dodd | My Site 1 ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article0.00998d930354.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[My Site 1]] - Full Title: Ken Dodd | My Site 1 - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Ken Dodd shared his thoughts on comedy, emphasizing the importance of building trust with the audience. He explained that while humor reflects our lives, comedy is about the technique used to convey it. Dodd also noted that comedians can often have serious sides, contrasting their on-stage personas with their real lives. - URL: https://www.rob-chapman.com/kendodd ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > My father was a great variety fan, and he used to take my brother, my sister and myself, and my mum, to theatres all over Merseyside, in fact all over the north-west, anywhere where there was a variety bill, my dad took us. He loved all the old comedians, so I was brought up on comicing and laughter. We had a house full of laugher. Everyone laughed in our house. We laughed. We sang a lot too because there was no lock on the bathroom door. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jd9p535de861mnd0py79gs81)) > That buckled mill wheel, life out of true quote has stayed with me ever since. I’d read Aristotle’s Poetics almost exactly 20 years earlier during the first weeks of my degree course, but had retained little memory of those founding principles. A buckled mill wheel however I could relate to. That in essence is what comedy is. It looks like a wheel, it ostensibly acts like a wheel, but then it veers off in another direction entirely. If you don’t get that analogy then you probably don’t get comedy. Comedy is an amoral zone. The rules are different there. It isn’t intended to be a security blanket or a smug affirmation of your world view. If anything it serves to pull the rug from underneath you. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jd9p7fpd2nd758pazvnm58m8)) > Oh yes. Lots of people ask me over the years, “have you ever died? Have you ever flopped?” Course you do. Probably a couple of shows this year haven’t exactly bene runaway successes. An audience can vary. They change nightly, the same theatre. The first house can be easy, and the second house can be terribly hard. It’s nothing to do with geography. There’s lots of different variables, different permutations of situation. It can be the weather. It’s a marvellous thing to stand on the stage in Blackpool, that giant opera house there, three thousand five hundred people, and it’s been raining all afternoon, really pouring down, a good old British summer’s day. And you can actually see a cloud hovering about six feet about them. A cloud of dampness. And they can be affected by current events, or if there’s a major financial upheaval in the country, or a political upheaval. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jd9p8nwp1w6fcmskaqynh4j9)) > But hard audiences, there’s no such thing as a hard audience, only bad artists. You’ve got to understand what happens when a comedian starts his act. First of all, posh actors they call it [posh voice] “establishing rapport.” Gracie Fields used to say it was an invisible thread that went from the artist, the entertainer, to the audience. I prefer to call it “building a bridge.” You really have to get their trust and confidence, particularly with comedy, because they are trusting you with their sense of humour. And people are very proud of their sense of humour, they don’t give it easily. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jd9pa8d9jh1wza7mq07kv8z4)) > An engineer at the BBC at the time of the interview told me of the time they had to virtually force Dodd off the stage at a live BBC recording. Coach parties of elderly people were in the audience, ‘some with stronger bladders than other’, and coaches were waiting outside engines running. Even when all the studio lights went on Dodd still didn’t take the hint, ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jd9vjz4j1nz62xk2ztafv67y)) > A joke is a beautiful thing. A joke is like a watch, a very good watch. It has lovely movements in it and rhythms. They reckon you shouldn’t dissect a joke, you shouldn’t really pull it to bits, it’s like taking the wings off a butterfly. But if you did examine a joke for what it is, a really good one, and a joke that a comedian is confident with, he has told this joke for quite a while and he knows by taking words out, putting words in, there’s a rhythm, there are inflections to the voice where you raise the voice and lower the voice, where you emphasise, where you underline certain words. And gradually you get as far as the tagline. And the tagline is the final thrust, it has to be delivered with absolute meticulous timing. There’s an oomph of daylight between the structure of the gag you’ve built up and just as you slip it in or push it in or stab it in or fire the gun. Any use of metaphor you want, any picture you like to use, it’s there. The fact is that the tagline has to be delivered with great finesse and great timing. And if you examine a gag like that, you’ll realise how delicate it is, how beautiful it is. It’s almost like a little play on its own, a little sort of one-act play. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jd9qwv89q0btqfjq68fr0e0h))