Spike Milligan

Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones was an American musician and bandleader specializing in performing satirical arrangements of popular songs. Ballads and classical works receiving the Jones treatment would be punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, and outlandish vocals. Through the 1940s and... early 1950s, the band recorded under the title Spike Jones and his City Slickers and toured the United States and Canada under the title The Musical Depreciation Revue. Jones' father was a Southern Pacific railroad agent. Young Lindley got his nickname by being so thin that he was compared to a railroad spike. At the age of 11 he got his first set of drums. As a teenager he played in bands that he formed himself. A railroad restaurant chef taught him how to use pots and pans, forks, knives and spoons as musical instruments. He frequently played in theater pit orchestras. In the 1930s he joined the Victor Young orchestra and thereby got many offers to appear on radio shows, including Al Jolson's Lifebuoy Program, Burns and Allen, and Bing Crosby's Kraft Music Hall.
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William Claude Dukenfield , better known as W. C. Fields, was an American comedian, actor, juggler and writer. Fields was known for his comic persona as a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist who remained a sympathetic character despite his snarling contempt for dogs, children and women. The... characterization he portrayed in films and on radio was so strong it became generally identified with Fields himself. It was maintained by the movie-studio publicity departments at Fields's studios and further established by Robert Lewis Taylor's 1949 biography W.C. Fields, His Follies and Fortunes. Beginning in 1973, with the publication of Fields's letters, photos, and personal notes in grandson Ronald Fields's book W.C. Fields by Himself, it has been shown that Fields was married , and he financially supported their son and loved his grandchildren.
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Brian O'Nolan was an Irish novelist, playwright and satirist regarded as a key figure in postmodern literature. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he is best known for English language novels such as At Swim-Two-Birds, and The Third Policeman as well as many satirical columns in The Irish Times... and an Irish language novel An Béal Bocht . O'Nolan wrote prodigiously during his years as a student at University College Dublin where he was an active, and controversial, member of the well known Literary and Historical Society. He contributed to the student magazine Comhthrom Féinne under various guises, in particular the pseudonym Brother Barnabas. Significantly, he composed a story during this same period entitled "Scenes in a Novel by Brother Barnabas", which anticipates many of the ideas and themes later to be found in his novel, At Swim-Two-Birds.
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Edward Lear was a British artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularised. From childhood he suffered ill health, including epilepsy, of which he was ashamed, and depression. He... travelled widely over much of his life before settling in Sanremo. He never managed to marry, though he did propose it, but he had good friends and doted on his cat. When, after a long decline in health, he died of heart disease, sadly, none of his friends was able to attend his funeral. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a illustrator of Tennyson's poems. As an author, Lear is principally known for his popular nonsense works, rather than as a travel writer. These show a great ability to use with relish the sound of real and invented English words.
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