Plan B Forum

Gob wrote:Next Feb we're seeing the master (although he's a little past his prime I think,) Billy Connolly.

Sue U wrote:Now that was really funny -- not so much the punchline, but the delivery.

After 100 years, Mark Twain Autobiography out


In 1904, Mark Twain wrote that he had "hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography."

What he had discovered, says historian Robert Hirst, was the art of dictation. Instead of writing down his autobiography, Twain wanted to tell stories to another human being. And instead of telling his life story in chronological order, Twain wanted to talk about what interested him at that moment — and to allow himself to change the subject as soon as his interest flagged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Allen_%28comedian%29

David Tynan O'Mahoney (6 July 1936 – 10 March 2005), better known as Dave Allen, was an Irish comedian, very popular in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s; he also became known in America through repeats of his shows on public television. His career had a major resurgence during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Allen's act was typified by his relaxed, rueful and intimate style; he would sit on a high bar stool facing his audience, smoking and occasionally sipping from a glass of what he always allowed people to assume was whiskey, but in fact was merely ginger ale with ice. Literally and metaphorically, he was a sober-minded man who, though sometimes appearing deliberately crotchety and irritable on stage, always gave off an air of charm and serene melancholy both in his act and in real life. Each day he would pore over the newspapers, constantly scribbling notes and ideas which he then expanded for his routines.

He was an atheist (according to Allen himself, "what you might call a practising atheist", and often joking "I'm an atheist, thank God") as a result of his deeply held objections to the rigidity of his strict Catholic schooling, and consequently religion became an important subject for his humour, particularly the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, generally mocking church customs and rituals rather than beliefs.

At the end of his act Allen would always raise his glass and quietly toast his audience with the words "Goodnight, thank you, and may your God go with you", an original and inclusive catchphrase that typified Allen's amiable style.