Double Act - United Kingdom

United Kingdom

In its British form, the two actors would usually be composed of a "straight man" or "feed" and a "comic", the purpose of the feed being to set up jokes for the comic. This would rely heavily on comic timing.

Morecambe and Wise are arguably the quintessential British double act. They followed the traditional formula with Eric Morecambe as the comic and Ernie Wise as the feed. However, other British acts such as The Two Ronnies, Hale and Pace, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, Reeves and Mortimer, French and Saunders, Mitchell and Webb, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, Fry and Laurie, Lee and Herring, Armstrong and Miller, Peacock and Gamble, the role of "comic" and "straight man" are less obvious, largely interchangeable or dispensed with altogether. More obvious British examples of the comic-feed dynamic are Cannon and Ball, Little and Large or the children's entertainers The Chuckle Brothers, where the straight man acted largely as a humourless set up for the comic.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore perhaps also deserve a mention as being the first double act to go against the grain, and turn their double act into a complex analysis of the two's relationship. In many of the sketches (especially the Pete and Dud exchanges) Cook played the domineering know-it-all (who knows nothing) and Moore the put-upon dimwit (who also knows nothing).

This dominance was accentuated by the difference in height between the two, and the speed of Cook's mind, which meant that he could ad-lib, and force Moore to corpse in a Pete and Dud dialogue, leaving him helpless to respond. As the partnership progressed into the often improvised Derek and Clive dialogues, these light-hearted attempts to make Moore laugh became, as a result of Cook's growing insecurity and alcoholism, aggressive attacks on the defenceless Moore. However, carrying on the tradition of going against the grain of traditional double acts, when the partnership dissolved in the late 1970s, it was Cook whose career stalled due to boredom, alcoholism and lack of ambition, while Moore went on to become one of Hollywood's most unlikely leading men.