Stanley Unwin (comedian)
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Stanley Unwin (June 7 1911 – January 12 2002), born in Pretoria, South Africa, sometimes billed as Professor Stanley Unwin, was more than just a British comedian and comic writer. He was an inventor of his own language, "Unwinese," referred to in the film Carry On Regardless as "gobbledegook".
Unwinese was a special and mangled form of English in which only a few words were intelligible; this was enough to make the listener think he was being talked to - but without actually allowing him to understand the sentence concerned, the effect of which was make the listener feel confused.
On a more serious front, as well as being useful for entertainment purposes, Unwin's use of language also gives us an insight into the way our minds understand words.
Unwin's early career and training introduced him to wireless and radio communication, and this, coupled with work in the BBC's War Reporting Unit from c. 1944 was ultimately to prove to be a conduit into the media.
Some appearances and works
In the ensuing years, Unwin made the following:
- 1956 Fun at St Fanny's a 1956 film vehicle for Cardew Robinson
- 1958 a cameo appearance in the first episode of the radio series Beyond Our Ken
- 1960 an LP of gobbledegook entitled Rotatey Diskers with Unwin. This has since been reissued on CD.
- 1961 The Miscillian Manuscript, a collaboration with artist Roy Dewar; a kind of Unwinese travelogue with cartoons and collages by Dewar.
- 1962 House & Garbidge, a spoof of home and lifestyle magazines, again with Dewar.
- Some time in the 60s, there was an American who was campaigning against animal nudity, and came to Britain to further his cause. He was invited to appear on a current affairs programme Tonight(?), and was interviewed by Unwin. Unwin started off with intelligible English and gradually slid over into Unwinese.
- 1966 Rock-a-bye Babel and Two Fairly Tales, a selection of spoof nursery rhymes and fairy tales in which Unwinese surrealism almost reaches Joycean levels; with Dewar.
- 1967 narration for "Happiness Stan" on side 2 of The Small Faces' LP Ogden's Nut Gone Flake.
- 1968 an appearance in a small role, and a few lines of gobbledegook, in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as the Chancellor of Vulgaria.
- 1969 his voice and likeness were used in Gerry Anderson's puppet series The Secret Service, in which he (or rather, his puppet double) played Father Unwin. Each episode contained a scene where he would try to confuse people with his gobbledegook. Unfortunately as soon as Anderson's boss Lew Grade heard Unwin's character speaking gobbledegook he cancelled the show on the grounds that people wouldn't understand it - despite the fact that they weren't meant to.
- 1980s a tyre advert on television, using the slogan 'Outstandifold in the wetty grippers'.
Unwin was less active in later decades, but still made occasional appearances. In the 1970s he appeared in The Max Bygraves Show on ITV, sometimes speaking normally and sometimes in gobbledegook. In the final episode Max tried out some gobbledegook phrases on Unwin, who claimed he couldn't understand them.
In 1994 Unwin collaborated with British dance music act Wubble U, on their single Petal. A 1998 re-release took the track to number 55 in the UK Chart.
Here are some phrases from Unwinese:
- Deep joy: Pleasing.
- Goodlilode: Good or excellent.
- Nockers (as in I did nockers): Not.
- Terribold: Terrible.
- Remarkibold: Remarkable.
- Horribold: Horrible
Unwin's advice for those who have overeaten at Christmas dinner:
"If you've done an overstuffy in the tumloader, finisht the job with a ladleho of brandy butter, then pukeit all the way to the toileybox."
Stanley Unwin died in 2002 in Daventry, England.