A madcap extrovert on stage, Sir Ken Dodd has died aged 90.
Here we remember some of the comedian’s best-known jokes.
– “I haven’t spoken to my mother-in-law for 18 months. I don’t like to interrupt her.”
– “Men’s legs have a terribly lonely life – standing in the dark in your trousers all day.”
– “It’s ten years since I went out of my mind. I’d never go back.”
– “The trouble with Freud is that he never played the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost.”
– “You think you can get away, but you can’t. I’ll follow you home and I’ll shout jokes through your letterbox” – when he was still going strong at a show as it approached midnight.
– “I’ve seen a topless lady ventriloquist. Nobody has ever seen her lips move.”
– “Do I believe in safe sex? Of course I do. I have a handrail around the bed.”
– “It’s a privilege to be asked to play here tonight on what is a very special anniversary. It is 100 years to the night since that balcony collapsed” – Addressing people in The Gods at a provincial theatre.
– “The French didn’t object to British beef in 1940.”
– “Honolulu: it’s got everything: sand for the children, sun for the wife, sharks for the wife’s mother.”
– “Age doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese”, on approaching his 80th birthday.
– “Doctor, ‘How old are you?’ ‘I’m approaching 50.’ ‘From which direction?'”
– “How do you make a blonde laugh on a Sunday? Tell her a joke on a Wednesday.”
– “How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows. It’s never been tried.”
– “Fifty-five years in show business, ladies and gentlemen. That’s a hell of a long time to wait for a laugh.”
– “Tonight when you get home, put a handful of ice cubes down your wife’s nightie and say: ‘There’s the chest freezer you always wanted’.”
– “My act is very educational. I heard a man leaving the other night, saying: ‘Well, that taught me a lesson’.”
– “Love makes the world go round, or it does if you are a man over 50.”
– “My dad knew I was going to be a comedian. When I was a baby, he said, ‘Is this a joke?’.”
– “So this fellow tells the doctor, ‘Every time I sneeze I feel very sexy.’ The doctor asks, ‘What do you take?’ ‘Pepper’.”
– “I used to think I was marvellous in bed until I discovered that all my girl friends suffered from asthma.”
– “An official went to ask my big Auntie Nellie to come off the beach because the tide was waiting to come in.”
– “The man who invented cats’ eyes got the idea when he saw the eyes of a cat in his headlights. If the cat had been going the other way, he would have invented the pencil sharpener.”
He also even came up with a few quips regarding his famous tax fraud trial…
“They stole that idea from me” – Referring to the Inland Revenue and self-assessment of income tax.
“I told the Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny because I lived near the seaside.”
“In the 1800s, one of the MPs in London decided to introduce tax. In those days it was 2p in the pound. I thought it still was.”
“I thought it would be a good idea to go into politics. Maybe I am a little old. but you know, I’d love to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. That way I’ll be united with my money.”
“Good evening, my name is Kenneth Arthur Dodd, singer photographic playboy and failed accountant.”
When asked by the trial judge what it felt like to have a hundred thousand pounds stashed in a suitcase in his attic, Dodd replied: “The notes are very light my lord.”
