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 Alan Coren: a stoic
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Coren bitten by his own humour
69 FOR 1.
by Alan Coren.
JR Books £14.99
YOU have to be a bit of a stoic to smile at death. Alan Coren did – twice. The great Hampstead humorist described by one critic as being born with a silver spoof in his mouth, who died in October from cancer, had a brush with death only a year before.
He tells of it with enjoyable glee in this welcome posthumous collection of 69 of his precious pieces – hence one part of what he insists is a non-sexual title — the one referring to his life itself since he nearly passed away a year before after being bitten by a mysterious bug while on holiday.
He was snoozing in the moonlight one hot summer night in the South of France. “Something bit me as I snored: could have been a gnat, could have been a scorpion, could have been a werewolf,” he records. “It left no note, merely a breach into what a billion opportunist steptococci plunged and set up a colony called Septicaemia.”
For the next month he was in a coma in a Nice hospital – “my conked out organs on a lot of machines to do it, too, and kept me on them for ages, seriously threatening the French National Grid; a thousand kilometres away, Parisian diners would glance up from their soupe de poisson and wonder why the lights were flickering,” he insists.
But when he did emerge it was not some Eureka moment of joy and not following some near-death experience of “floating through a long tunnel at the end of which James Thurber and Bernard Levin were waiting with a dry martini” to welcome him into humorists’ heaven.
His first words were: “Get me a hand-grenade!” And that was because during his comatose state he was literally fighting the wartime Boche in France. Fortunately, he recovered and returned home to his beloved realm of Cricklewood before cancer struck him down.
“I did think of calling the book 69 Not Out, but then I had this feeling that I’d already tempted providence enough,” he announces. Alas, he had.
But his legacy is here neatly packaged by his publisher friend Jeremy Robson and presented to us as a delightful remembrance of a genial comic genius with a natural wit always open to invasion by an outrageous imagination. It enabled him – and thankfully us – to see the funny side of life, even in the dark moments facing death.
There never was a better anniversary, birthday, Christmas, New Year, Easter or to-read-on-the-beach present to make, in tribute to a truly funny man who always had us howling with delight.
Gerald Isaaman
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