COMEDIAN/POET/WRITER ETC: Spike Milligan

As with all the descriptions I do, this is nicked from Wikipedia:
Terence Alan Milligan KBE (16 April 1918–27 February 2002), known as Spike Milligan, was an Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet and playwright. He played the piano, trumpet, guitar and saxophone and was the creator, the principal writer and a performing member of The Goon Show.

Milligan was born in Ahmednagar, India, on 16 April 1918, to an Irish-born father who was serving in the British Indian Army. He spent most of his childhood in Rangoon (Yangon), capital of Burma.

During most of the late 1930s and early 1940s he performed as an amateur jazz vocalist and trumpeter, both before and after being called up for military service, but even then he wrote and performed comedy sketches as part of concerts to entertain troops. After his call-up, but before being sent abroad, he and fellow musician Harry Edgington would compose surreal stories, filled with puns and skewed logic, as a way of staving off the boredom of life in barracks.
During World War II he served as a signaller in the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, D Battery, as Gunner Milligan, 954024 with the First Army in North Africa and then in Sicily and Italy. He rose to the rank of Lance-Bombardier and was about to be promoted to Bombardier when he was wounded in action in Italy. Subsequently hospitalized for shell shock, he was demoted by an unsympathetic commanding officer back to Gunner.
After his hospitalization, Milligan drifted through a number of rear-echelon military jobs in Italy, eventually becoming a full-time entertainer. He played guitar with a jazz/comedy group called The Bill Hall Trio in concert parties for the troops. After being demobilised, Milligan remained in Italy playing with the Trio but returned to England soon after. While he was with the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies" he began to write parodies of their mainstream plays, that displayed many of the key elements of what would become The Goon Show with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.

Milligan returned to England in the late 1940s and made a precarious living with the Hall trio and other musical comedy acts. He was also trying to break into the world of radio, as either a performer or as a script writer. His first successes in radio was as writer for Derek Roy show. Milligan soon became involved with a relatively radical comedy project, The Goon Show. Known during its first season as Crazy People, or in full, "The Junior Crazy Gang featuring those Crazy People, the Goons!", the name was an attempt to make the program palatable to BBC officials by connecting it with the popular group of comedians known as The Crazy Gang.[citation needed]
Milligan was the primary author of The Goon Show scripts (though many were written jointly with Larry Stephens, Eric Sykes and others) as well as a star performer.
Milligan also wrote verse, considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense, for children, the best of which is comparable with that of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, the most famous probably being "On the Ning Nang Nong". This nonsense verse, set to music, became a favourite Australia-wide, performed week after week by the ABC children's programme Playschool. Milligan included it on his album No One's Gonna Change Our World in 1969 to aid the World Wildlife Fund.

While depressed, Milligan wrote serious poetry. He also wrote a novel Puckoon, parodying the style of Dylan Thomas, and a very successful series of war memoirs, including Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971) and Rommel: Gunner Who? A Confrontation in the Desert (1974). Milligan's seven volumes of memoirs cover the years from 1939 to 1950 (essentially his call-up, war service, first breakdown, time spent entertaining in Italy, and return to the UK).
He wrote comedy songs, including "Purple Aeroplane", which was a parody of The Beatles' song "Yellow Submarine". Glimpses of his bouts with depression which led to the nervous breakdowns, can be found in his serious poetry, which is compiled in Open Heart University.

Spike Milligan also wrote the one-act play The Bed-Sitting Room which premiered at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. It was adapted to a longer play, which premiered at the Mermaid Theatre, London.





On the Ning Nang Nong
On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

I know you like him and I wanna check him out. Any recommendations?

Ummm... his books about WW2 are really good

Adolf Hitler. My Part in His Downfall.
Mussolini. His part in my downfall
etc. etc.


Also his poems are rad

Revolution Rock:

Ummm... his books about WW2 are really good

Adolf Hitler. My Part in His Downfall.
Mussolini. His part in my downfall
etc. etc.


Also his poems are rad

Cool, thanks.

He has an awesome tombstone.

omg, slags!!

Bittersweet.:

He has an awesome tombstone.

Isn't it "I told you i was dying"

We're Outlaws, Yeah!:

Bittersweet.:

He has an awesome tombstone.

Isn't it "I told you i was dying"

ill

Bittersweet.:

We're Outlaws, Yeah!:

Bittersweet.:

He has an awesome tombstone.

Isn't it "I told you i was dying"

ill

I was close x]

That was like, the only book I read when I was a kid... everyone ese wanted the hungry caterpillar instead.