Sir Norman Wisdom, comedian, died on October 4th, aged 95

What a chirpy little fellow that Norman was! All puppy eyes, rubber legs and innocent smiles, even when the world was crashing round him. Show him a grand piano, and he'd have to dive into it. Suggest a manhole, and he'd plummet straight down it. Run a cable across the road and he'd go flying into next week. He'd fall over his own shadow, or box it into a pulp behind the sofa; he'd fall over his own feet, and saunter on singing.

It's true they didn't find him uproarious everywhere. He'd rock them in the aisles in Blackpool, but raise only a shrug in New York. His mime of eating a sandwich on a fast-moving train would leave them cold in Glasgow, but make them fall about in Tehran—and in Moscow and Buenos Aires and, very oddly, in Tirana, where perhaps the only possible reason was that they were as mad as himself.

He was born grinning, it seemed. He was certainly born small, and never made much progress after. The littlest in his gang at school, the tiny cabin boy aboard the Maindy Court sailing for Argentina, almost the scrawniest in his regiment in India in the 1930s. Everyone's mascot, jester, dogsbody, hoping to foil the punches by rolling over and begging for a pat on the head. He was five-foot-four on a good day, easily dwarfed by bosses, army sergeants, aristocrats or rivals for the willowy girls who strolled into his life. When his second wife walked out on him in 1968 he couldn't help remarking, bitterly, that she had left him for someone handsomer and taller.

Smallness shaped Little Norm, but poverty taught him something, too. As a boy, thrown out by his drunken father, he slept rough in London and stole to eat. The gutter wasn't a bad place, considering. He learned things there, such as how to lift eggs very nimbly and delicately from a stall and secrete them, uncracked, in his pockets. He also acquired the trick of making his lower lip tremble when asking, his pathetic face only just above the counter, for a free pie from a coffee stall. By the time of his first hugely successful film, “Trouble in Store” (1953), he could stretch the pathos really far: to the point where, soaking wet after a tumble into a duck-pond, he sadly serenaded his love in a teashop, and then found he had nothing in his pockets to pay with except one small, wriggling fish.

Yet he'd always find a swagger from somewhere, and carry on. With this attitude he worked his way through provincial theatres in the 1940s, dying and thriving by turns. When theatre managers slammed doors in his face he'd just keep on, “Give us a chance, Mr Smith”, “Let me sing you a song, Mr Jones”, until he wore them down with sheer persistence. When he was allowed on the stage for long enough, tap-dancing and pratfalling all over the place, everyone loved him and the audience went wild. And never wilder than on that April night in 1948 when he marched through the door of Bernard Delfont's London Casino and became an overnight sensation. “Welcome to the West End, Norman,” Mr Delfont said.

Life's physical batterings trained him up, too. His father sometimes beat him so savagely that his head hit the ceiling before he crashed, but that taught him how to fall. People bullied and belted him, so he learned how to box, and that became part of his act on a regular basis. Did he whip his tormentors? Not half! Every time he went down, on stage or screen, he would struggle up with smouldering determination. Even pounded into the mud until he swallowed it, as he was in a football match in “Up in the World” (1956), he emerged as “that dangerous little man”, baring his teeth like a tiger.

He never forgot to be dignified, though. Perhaps this was why Albanians liked him. Higher-ups (and his world was entirely full of higher-ups) could treat Little Norm with contempt, but he would triumph somehow. He would walk on their grass, turn his hose on their tailored backs, or tip the entire navy top brass over the rail and into the sea. He was as good as they were. Scruffy he might be, with tie askew and too-short trousers, but he was not a tramp. And though barked at by his superiors, especially the despairing Mr Grimsdale, he would just come sunnily back with his bright but disastrous ideas.

Once he had decided that comedy was his life, he practised and practised. This discipline the army taught him—as well as how to play 11 instruments, and trip up people on parade. When he caused hilarity once by falling off a horse, he rehearsed more such tumbles until he was black and blue. At work, he would go through his routines from 9am till just before six in the darkened theatre; out of work, he would spend hours pulling faces in mirrors. His reward was stardom in the 1950s and 1960s, a knighthood in 2000, a yacht and several gleaming motors. He had to skip in the 1980s to a mansion in the Isle of Man, so the tax man wouldn't get him.