"SPOOF."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19780, 29 October 1927, Page 7 (Supplement)

"SPOOF."

A COMEDIAN'S MEMOIRS.

What is "Spoof?" Murray's New English Dictionary defines it thus: " Spoof—slang. (Invented by Arthur Roberts, b. 1852, comedian). A game erf a hoaxing or nonsensical character." Roberts, however, in his recently-pub- j lished book of memoirs, *' Fifty Years of Spoof" (The Bodley Head), disclaims the honour of the invention. The word is confidence-trickster's slang, but the thing, he declares, is what keeps him still youthful at 75. " A joke contains the eternal secret of youth." These random memories include many* good stories. The author's encounter with W. S. Gilbert is related with great spirit. The Savoy tradition was a good deal more rigid than the laws of the Medes and Persians, so when Roberts, the prince of gaggers, t-ook a part" in " Trial by Jury " trouble was likely to ensure. And it did! Angered by the over-bearing boorishness of Gilbert—whom he describes as possessing " a choleric face, liverish eyes, anil eyebrows that reminded me strongly of some prawns 1 had eaten the day before at Romano's"—he made his part as one of .the jurymen so conspicuous by his absurd by-play that his first performance was also his last.

No memoirs covering tho " nineties" would be complete without a reference to Oscar Wilde, and Roberts gives an amusing account of a dinner at which Wilde was a guest. "It was conducted very largely on the Moore and Burgess minstrel plan. One or two of the guests would act as interlocutors feeding Wilde with an occasional question or remark, and Wilde, acting as the super-cornerman, managed to send his select audience into thrills and wriggles and spasms of delight without the bones and the tambourines. I enjoyed his dinners very much. Like his epigrams, they were perfectly prepared." As is only natural m an idol of Victorian days who sees his particular line growing out of date, Roberts is rather pessimistic in regard to the modern drama which he considers " lives on the offal of modern manners." " 1 was never a brave man," is one of his " mots," 'Vbut I'm not a Noel Coward."

Of all the changes witnessed in Robert's long life, it is not the modern inventions, cinema, wireless, etc., which strike him half so forcibly as what might be described as a spiritual change—the " universal decay of personality . . . we are afraid of being ourselves, afraid of mannerisms, afraid of any outward sign or act of individuality."* His descriptions of the " characters" of earlier days ranging from Harris, the sausage king, who always wore evening dress and an opera hat in the daytime, and pressed packets of his favourite sausage upon his reluctant friends, up—or down —to the most noble Marquess of Aylesbury who once attended the races wealing five pound gold pieces for buttons on a huge check overcoat. These reminiscences will hardly convince the younger generation that the disappearance of such oddities is a loss to the present day.

However, if the author is inclined to view his palmy days through a rosy mist, he possesses a vein of cheery philosophy and his farewell to the reader is characteristic. "Well, cheerio! Here's all the best to all the best of us! We shall all' meet again. I hope in a better land. At any rate, if you send me on as an advance agent I will do my best to find a better climate."