Ronnie Barker - Acting and Writing Style

Acting and Writing Style

"I'll tell you who my favourite performer is. Ronnie Barker. Surprised? You shouldn't be. He's really great."

Barker became a comic actor in his theatre days, noting "I think it's better to make people laugh than cry." He has been described by The Times as "not a comedian, an actor with a talent for comedy," who "slipped into characters with apparent ease." Barker felt he was only funny in character. The BBC wrote he was "able to deliver the great tongue-twisting speeches required of his characters, Barker pronounced himself 'completely boring' without a script." Peter Hall spoke of Barker's skills as a dramatic actor, calling him "the great actor we lost" and lamented that Barker was unable to take a role in one of his Shakespearean productions. Barker, though, preferred comedy, and felt it was "as good and as important as serious work" and he was not "dumbing down" by doing it. Actor Gene Wilder compared him to Charlie Chaplin in saying "no matter how farcical was ... there was always an element of reality to what he did."

Barker's writing style was "based on precise scripts and perfect timing." It often involved playing with language, including humour involving such linguistic items as spoonerisms and double entendres. He "preferred innuendo over the crudely explicit, a restraint that demanded some imagination from the audience and was the essence of his comedy." He "never liked sex or obscenity on television, but there was no shortage of frisky gags in The Two Ronnies". Corbett said he had "a mastery of the English language".

In private, he annotated a copy of A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear, penning punch lines of his own for each limerick. On the title page he wrote, "There was an old fossil named Lear, Who's verses were boring and drear. His last lines were worst - just the same as the first! So I've tried to improve on them here." The annotated copy of Lear's book, signed and dated November 2001, was auctioned in 2012.