Cook and Waugh: The Comic Sense of Life

 Two of the greatest English humorists of the postwar 20th century were born on the same day – today – albeit two years apart. Peter Cook would have been 83 today, in the wildly unlikely event that he'd lived so long (in fact he did well to make it to 58), and Auberon Waugh, had he lived, would have been 81 – which again was never going to happen, given the various legacies of his near-fatal (accidentally self-inflicted) war wound and his heroic smoking and drinking. 
  Peter Cook achieved legendary status remarkably early in life – something that probably encouraged his innate idleness. He was a naturally funny man, one of those who could barely open his mouth without at least seeming to be funny. His TV work with Dudley Moore in Not Only But Also is widely regarded as classic, though the more you see of the original shows the more laboured they seem: they shine bright in the memory because the actually funny bits (mostly the Dagenham Dialogues) are indeed so gloriously funny. The general view on Cook is that, after his initial blaze of glory, he never turned his prodigious talent to something worthy of it. This is probably true, but we'll never know, and it doesn't really matter: it was his talent to do what he wanted with, and he did enough to establish himself as one of the funniest men of his time, which is more than most of us can say.
  As for Waugh, he was, in contrast to Cook, an extremely hard-working hack, turning out vast amounts of copy, all of it in lucid and elegant prose, most of it worth reading, and much of it extremely funny. The best of his work is to be found, I think, in his glorious memoir, Will This Do?, and in his Diaries (of which I've written before). His novels, too, are good fun and deserve to be better known – in fact that reminds me, I must get on and finish my project of reading them all (see Nigeness passim)... He was a tireless scourge of the humourless, the pompous and the self-important, and, in person, a good-humoured and generous man – which is by no means always the case with humorists (or hacks).
  What Waugh and Cook had in common was the sense they gave that very little in life needed to be taken seriously, and very little couldn't be turned into comedy. They had the genuine comic sense of life – a rare thing, and becoming rarer in our over-serious times.