The copy of Beyond the Fringe on which Your Humble Blogger got his grubby paws is the hardback published more or less concurrently with the New York run of the review. It’s not the acting copy, and it’s not a oh-this-was-a-seminal-moment-in-British-comedy look back with glossy pictures and whatnot. There are a few pictures of Messrs Miller, Cook, Moore and Bennett, although it often isn’t clear which sketches they show. And for some reason the famous one-legged Tarzan sketch isn’t in the thing at all. Were they not performing it in New York? Was there some sort of copyright issue over the fact that it had been used in earlier reviews? I don’t know.
And, of course, the Most Brilliant Comic Monologue Ever (if you ask me today) reads curiously flat on the page. The suggestion that the tests for a judge were too rigorous for the speaker seems to be a rather ordinary statement of fact, not a stimulus for gales of laughter. Mr. Cook rarely (as I understand it) hewed closely to the prepared text for the piece (or to much of anything except drink), but even the prepared text itself seems as if it should be funnier.
The topical stuff, of course, is not funny at all these days, particularly the stuff that relies on the inherent wackiness of, for instance, women’s liberation, the dignity of homosexuals, the self-rule of African nations, etc, etc. Not that I can claim that any of the sketches were racist as such, but there is one or two that are…awkward.
Still. I had never read it. My experience of Beyond the Fringe is from the bad videos of the Amnesty International fund-raisers, where it’s true some of the skits printed here are presented, some of them wonderfully, some of them unintelligibly. I should see what’s available on YouTube, I suppose.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.