What Heaven's Like For Comedians

Tommy Cooper was practicing a new trick, and his sleight of hand was perfect – too perfect to be considered funny at all. Even if he tried he couldn’t cock it up in the brilliantly comic style that had allowed him such success when he had existed on earth. Yet, he couldn’t feel frustrated at all as he glowed with an inner happiness he had never known in his mortal life. The same went for his friend Les Dawson who was unable to hit even one comic wrong note on his celestial piano, playing as he did with the poise and skill of Franz Liszt. Lizst, who was on the century below, couldn’t play for toffee, and between himself Mozart and Paganini on violin made an unholy racket. Unholy because none of the holy overlords could bear to listen to it, and deliberately ‘went out’ any time the trio started up.

Heaven is run on a sort of cooperative basis, each incumbent, one-hundred and six billion, four-hundred and thirty-two million, seven-hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine hundred and fifty-three of them, have an equal share of ownership. Each millennia, all seven-hundred and two thousand of them, are represented by an Executive Committee (or soviet as V.I.Lenin insisted upon calling them, he’s very persuasive, and so loves his politics), which is subdivided into death centuries each occupying a heavenly strata or floor. A committee exists on each floor to decide what resources it needs, access to mediums, etc. and tenders its bid through the soviets to the Infinite Fund of Plenty, though this has long been thought (for the past one-hundred and seventy thousand millennia at least) to be a ridiculous name; the misnomer being that the word plenty is superfluous following the word infinite which suggests definitively that there is an endless supply of everything.

In a spiritual sense heaven is all about conundrums, and writing words in italics for emphasis. The conundrums that existed for humans on earth are unravelled (told you) and solved in heaven.

That’s why R.D.Laing’s sitting over there with his cocoa, left to ponder why someone who wrote so wisely about the destructive effects of family dynamics could allow himself to be such a god-awful father.

It was why Tommy Cooper couldn’t be funny. Because, in life, being constantly funny had made him unhappy. He was an unhappy funny-man. The other part of that conundrum was why people had laughed at him, like they’d laughed at other unhappy funny-men – Tony Hancock, Fatty Arbuckle. Why did people laugh at unhappy men?

Tony Hancock was over there – look – pulling faces at an audience of women from his own generation who were crying remembering his unhappiness.

One conundrum that a sub-committee of elder’s had been discussing was how they were going to treat Paul Daniels when he finally snuffed it, and why anyone on earth had found him funny in the first place?

They decided in the end that he utter the word ‘dinner-set’ before everything he says, thus his famous catch phrase would be adulterated to ‘dinner-set you’ll like this...not a lot, but you’ll like it’ and be rendered puzzling at best.