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Cog dead

Started by SpiderChrist, April 12, 2019, 11:58:28 AM

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SpiderChrist

Ian Cognito has died, according to Rufus Hound on that there Twitter. Don't know what the CaB opinion is on him, but I liked him.

Blinder Data

Neither do I, but it sounds like he became unwell on stage and never recovered. Bloody hell

Blinder Data


DrGreggles

Seemed to be on the circuit for years.
Always good value on the few times I saw him, and the tweets I've seen today suggest he was very popular with other comedians.

RIP Ian

Small Man Big Horse

I only saw him the once but thought he was great, not exactly subtle or nuanced but he did make me laugh a good deal.


paruses

Quote from: Small Man Big Horse on April 12, 2019, 02:36:44 PM
I only saw him the once but thought he was great, not exactly subtle or nuanced but he did make me laugh a good deal.

Same (except I didn't see him). I ended up with some MP3s of him back in about 2003 somehow which I listened to a lot at work and laughed at a lot. I always hum "Ken Barlow's fucking boring" when the character is mentioned.

Sad to hear this.

rasta-spouse

Sad to hear. He died on stage in a chair with people laughing who had not realised he was dead. So I assume lots of folk will say something like "the ultimate death for a comic" (Jimmy Carr's sort of saying that) or somesuch...but who knows.

Saw him only once just by luck at LST doing a short set about ten years back. He's spoken of in the same hallowed way as Sadowitz, isn't he?

hummingofevil

I saw him in Edinburgh a few years back where his run was considered something of a big return. Was really funny.

Didn't he once get chinned by Ricky ??? - big fella, ex boxer stand up who was in Getting On ? What was story there?

RIP

pigamus

Just saw this on the BBC news site. Awful. RIP.

Keebleman

Saw him about 25 years ago.  Very loud and energetic - I remember the sweat dripping off his chin - and pretty funny.  He mentioned in the set how he had been banned from most places, and then I read shortly after that most comics couldn't stand him and, yes, how one had recently decked him.

He's Ian terra firma, now.


holyzombiejesus

Why have you posted a clip of Tommy Cooper dying, you prick?

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on April 12, 2019, 08:55:44 PM
Why have you posted a clip of Tommy Cooper dying, you prick?

A bit of dark relief?

a duncandisorderly


MidnightShambler

I'll be honest I'd never heard of him before. Just watched a bit of him on YouTube and I quite liked him, though he was best suited to five minutes or so. The video of him at Glastonbury started well but dissolved into pointless ranting after a while and you could tell he'd lost the audience so the atmosphere was flat. Still, I've seen much worse and he delivered everything well and did have lots of presence so maybe he's one you had to see in person to fully understand. Or maybe he just wasn't that funny. RIP anyway.

Sixty years-old when he died.  That's some age - stating the obvious, as it's a finite amount.

Spiteface

Quote from: SpiderChrist on April 12, 2019, 11:58:28 AM
Ian Cognito has died, according to Rufus Hound on that there Twitter. Don't know what the CaB opinion is on him, but I liked him.
Feel like I'm missing something here.
I saw him back in Uni (early 2000s - there was a standup comedy night every other Tuesday) and thought he was shit and felt really fucking awkward because he was going on a bit of a rant about minorities that made me and my friend, who happened to be muslim, rather uncomfortable. We left early during a break before he came back out.
Was there an "act" here? Like a schtick he had? Because whatever it was, it was REALLY unfunny, yet every time his name came up afterwards, people talked about how good he was.

Dusty Substance


Saw him three or four years ago and he was excellent. One of those comedians who had the audience laughing before he'd even said a word. That one time I saw him, though, he told a joke about footballers and domestic violence (*"George Best - Great footballer, but hit his wife. Dennis Wise - Great footballer, but hit his wife. David Beckham - Great footballer, but if there's one footballer who should hit his wife...."). He followed it up with some jokes to counterbalance the sudden tension in the room but was interrupted by a loud woman who had stood up and said "That's it. You've gone too far. There are some things you don't make jokes about**". He then pointed out that during the previous 20 minutes, he'd made jokes about cancer, war, disabilities, religion etc. but for some reason she'd decided that domestic violence was a step too far.

Funny man. There have been some lovely comments about him on social media today from fellow comics.

P.S - I made the mistake of giving into morbid curiosity and watching the Tommy Cooper video about ten years ago when it surfaced onto YouTube. Really wish I'd hadn't.




(* Approximate wording)

(** Again, paraphrasing)

Pancake

Hated the guardian article on this; someone's died but here are the people you've heard of from the panel shows that come on in front of your faces every evening expressing their condolences, and because he's not on those panel shows he's 'shunned the mainstream', I hate these people, is then now! Is now now? Well soon it won't be Peter

Brundle-Fly

I saw him perform a set in Crawley in late October 1990, the week Maggie resigned. Cognito marched furiously onto the stage with a huge stack of notes written on A4 and shouted at us in the front row covering me in spittle,

"Here's all my Thatcher material." and then threw the lot into a bin by the stage, "Well, that's HALF my act fucked then." 

He was a tornado that night. R.I.P.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Spiteface on April 12, 2019, 09:30:09 PM
Feel like I'm missing something here.
I saw him back in Uni (early 2000s - there was a standup comedy night every other Tuesday) and thought he was shit and felt really fucking awkward because he was going on a bit of a rant about minorities that made me and my friend, who happened to be muslim, rather uncomfortable. We left early during a break before he came back out.
Was there an "act" here? Like a schtick he had? Because whatever it was, it was REALLY unfunny, yet every time his name came up afterwards, people talked about how good he was.

As mentioned above, similar to Sadowitz - a lot of people say "ah, but irony - aaaaahhhhhhh" about him, but it's nigh-on impossible to see the line.  I saw Cognito quite a lot on the Bristol circuit (he was a regular in the independent clubs like Jesters and The Hen & Chicken, and he lived in Bristol for quite a while I think) and, like you (and similar to my opinion of Sadowitz) I have to say I found him to be quite unfunny as well.  The times I saw him he seemed to have two parts to his act - the Sadowitz-like "shocking" stuff about general minorities, and then more targeted and pointed stuff about individual people in the audience.  And it wasn't typical front-row odd one-liner like Frankie Boyle - it was lengthy confrontational attacks about the way someone looked and/or dressed.  It's sort-of the latter that made Ricky Grover smack him in the face after a shit-faced Cognito started to verbally abuse Grover's wife for the way she looked. 

But "ah, irony - aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh" and, like Sadowitz, because the lefties generally love him it's okay, even though the material isn't all that different from yer Mannings or Chubby Browns.  Because "ah, irony - aaaaaaahhhhh".


Others' mileage obviously varies, though.

easytarget

I saw him in Bristol (I think) almost 20 years ago and he was great. Walked on stage, pulled a hammer out of his coat pocket, banged a nail into the back wall and hung his coat on it. I'd read about that "gag" which is supposed to end with him saying something like "never anywhere to hang your coat is there?" - he didn't say this just plowed into his act.
I also remember someone heckling and him ranting "I've been doing this for 17 years, even if I only thought of 2 comebacks a year that's still 34 comebacks..."

He had a brilliant webpage too with a long bio about being a comedian in the 80s/90s - can't find it now :(