Review: The Last Laugh, Three British Comedians Walk into a Dressing Room

“I’m a comedian,” Bob Monkhouse (Simon Cartwright) says with a wink early on in The Last Laugh, now playing a 59E59. “I tell you that now to avoid any confusion later on.”

It’s an altogether unnecessary reminder. Nobody talks about anything other than the joys and trials of cutting wise onstage in this near-idolatrous tribute to three British comedy figures who peaked together in the 1960s: Monkhouse, Tommy Cooper (Damian Williams), and Eric Morecambe (Bob Golding). The Last Laugh imagines a backstage dressing-room meeting of the three comedians in which they roast each other’s acts and wax nostalgic about their comedic forebears while they wait to be called to the wings.

The thin Sartrean premise for why these three have shown up in the same place may be glaringly obvious from the start. Playwright Paul Hendy (who also directs) punctuates the plotless proceedings with the occasional coughing fit for Cooper and Morecambe, who double over wheezing as the lights flash ominously. “A touch of indigestion,” Morecambe explains after one violent episode, to which Monkhouse replies, dramatically, “There’s a lot of it about.”

But despite the ham-handed melodrama, the hammy heart of The Last Laugh is the actors’ recreations of beloved bits from half a century ago. Williams fares best, persuasively making the case that the fez-topped Cooper, who here as in life, boisterously wields a mechanical duck that can pick a card from a deck, was something special. There’s something almost tragic about the compulsive buffoonery, the way that Cooper just can’t fight the impulse to turn absolutely everything into a joke. (When the real Cooper died onstage, on a television broadcast with millions of viewers tuned in, the audience initially laughed, assuming it was part of the show.)

But instead of turning every serious exchange into a joke, The Last Laugh insists on turning every joke into a drawn-out, serious exchange. The three comedians scrutinize the construction of every gag, denigrate one another’s delivery, and ponder questions like whether it’s laudable to repurpose someone else’s joke and which of them should be the most celebrated.

Hendy effectively delineates the three comedians’ schticks and styles for the uninitiated: Cooper was a prop comedian who pretended to be a dud magician, a clear ancestor of last season’s Mind Mangler; Monkhouse was a drily witty standup who became a gameshow host; and Morecambe did the funny voices against Ernie Wise’s straight man as part of a double act. Many of the jokes they tell are from their actual acts, but few of them really land in this context, so immediately are they parsed and prodded. The rare zinger that hits was presumably invented by Hendy: “Ed Sullivan called me the funniest man on the planet.” “Did he say which planet?”

While 59E59’s annual Brits Off Broadway lineup can often shed exciting light on new voices across the pond, The Last Laugh requires a fair amount of nostalgic affection for comedy icons about which most New York theatergoers know diddly squat. The dressing room wall features rows of framed photos of deceased comedy legends—one spot on the wall remains forebodingly empty—and the comedians turn frequently to this collection to inspire their reminiscences. If you’re not familiar with Cooper, Morecambe, and Monkhouse, watching actors do impressions of these comedians doing impressions of their comedy forefathers like Max Wall, George Formby, and Max Miller may land you rather deep in the labyrinth of inscrutable British comedy references.

The comedians trade barbs and biographical details in equal measure, but the Wikipedia-tipped repartee diminishes much of the comedic impact. “It’s not really a tan,” says Monkhouse when called out for his orange glow, “it’s makeup to cover my vitiligo.” That was true, and it’s fodder for Morecambe’s rejoinder: “Vitiligo? I think Joan and I went there for holiday.” Har har. There’s also a late-blooming pop psychology reflection session, where pensive piano music plays while everyone dutifully blames their parents.

The Last Laugh really only takes off when the characters, somewhat daffily, explode into song. There are a few tunes, some historical and one from Hendy and collaborators. But watching these three comics in a musical number suggests that The Last Laugh might be better, if not as a full-fledged musical, as a show that embraces structural whimsy and unpredictability in the way its subjects did in their acts.

Even Hendy’s heroes seem to know they’re squashing their laughs by dissecting them. As Tommy Cooper says in a throwaway line about his rampant infidelity, “It’s a bit like comedy, it’s probably best not to analyze it.”