Stanley Unwin (comedian)

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Cover from Rock-a-bye Babel by Stanley Unwin and Roy Dewar.

Stanley Unwin (7 June 1911 – 12 January 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, also known as "Basic Engly Twentyfido", was a special, ornamented and mangled form of English in which many of the words were corrupted in a playful and humourous way. Unwin’s performances could be hilarious yet disorientating although the meaning and context were always conveyed in a disguised and picturesque style.

Unwinese was very poetic in the way it alluded to its subject – e.g. Elvis Presley and his contemporaries are described as having ‘wasp-waist and swivel-hippy’ – and it was often punctuated with moments of clarity and directness to accentuate the ‘nonsense’ – e.g. ‘Deep joy!’ ‘Oh yes’.

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 claimed his gift came from his mother, who once told him that on the way home she had "falolloped over and grazed her kneeclappers". This phrase eventually turned up in one of Unwin's monologues, Goldiloppers and the Three Bearloders.

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.

Stanley Unwin died in 2002 in Daventry, England.

His work is thought to have been a significant influence on the two books written by John Lennon in 1964/5 – 'John Lennon In His Own Write' and 'A Spaniard In The Works'.

1 Some appearances and works
2 Some phrases from Unwinese
3 Not to be confused with
4 External links

[edit] 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
c.1959 A television commercial for Flowers IPA beer, with the slogan "For the best pickit in a brewflade, pick Flowers".
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 He appeared in Gerry Anderson's puppet series The Secret Service, a mixture of live and puppet action in which he and 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 press advertisement for IBM word processors with the prophetic 'throw away your old tripewriter'.
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.