A laughing matter

Barry Cryer, defiantly old-fashioned in a dinner suit and red-velvet waistcoat, sits in a director’s chair and addresses his audience as if they are devoted friends. Most of them are: every joke he tells is met with affectionate laughter of a kind given only to national treasures. Butterfly Brain, which is currently touring, is structured around the alphabet, but each letter is simply a starting point for masterly flurries of unconnected comedy.

Some of these, such as ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ sung to the tune of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, come directly from I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, on which Cryer has appeared ‘since before sound’. Others are anecdotes collected across a lifetime of listening to backstage stories. Most are jokes he wrote for others. (The great irony of Cryer’s career is that audience members often mutter that he stole a certain joke from some iconic comedian — Tommy Cooper, Bob Hope, Eric Morecambe — for whom he in fact wrote it.