Somebody was talking about Isaac Newton and his apple, and I immediately thought of Clement Freud.
To say he was a funny man or comedian is a serious understatement of his capability and achievements. His surname alone represents richness in history and philosophy. But Clement Freud stood out by his own intellectual merits and in diverse professions, as writer, commentator, politician, even chef. True, nobody could ever refrain from repeating that he was the grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, no more and no less than the forever remembered Sigmund Freud.
He was also brother of the artist Lucian Freud, with whom there existed a strained relationship. Though born in Berlin, he spent most of his life, from 1933, in Britain, with his family running away from the Nazis. Thanks to his very acute, sharp and ingenious humour, often cutting and sometimes black, he became a popular commentator, and host of radio and television programmes. He instill great humour in the public from seemingly total imperturbability, as they say, without moving a muscle.
This ability, to me anyway, is as important as the joke or humour itself. There are people, even some professional comedians, who tell jokes While, or even Before he gets to the punch line by laughing out loud himself, occasionally to such a point that they can hardly continue the joke, with the punch line drown in their own hysterical chuckle. Not Clement. Nearly never laughed, but always and extremely funny. Not just the funny ha ha, but funny thought provoking.
For more than 30 years, he was one of the principal stars of the British BBC Radio programme with comical hints, called 'Just a minute'. At one occasion, he was talking about the great inflation the country was suffering at the time: "A farmer was telling me the other day 'The apples are going up' to which I said "That would surely be a great blow for Isaac Newton.". Intelligent humour; my kind. I wish I hadn't missed out that radio period.
His perspicacious character and his talent for communication led him to be elected for the British Parliament's Liberal Party in 1973, which he carried through for 14 years to 1987. He later became the chef of the famous Hotel Dorchester for the elite, and years later became the proprietor of a nightclub, and writer of food provisioning the political and sports circles.
As writer, he had worked for several mainstream British newspapers, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, and The Daily Express. In 2002 he was elected as the Principal of the University of St. Andrews, the post he had already developed earlier in 1974, in the University of Dundee.
He passed away in 2009, in his London home, at the age of 84.
That's only facts written for the record. I guess he would live forever.
Tags:clementfreud,humour
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