Les Dawson

Leslie "Les" Dawson (2 February 1931 – 10 June 1993) was a popular English comedian remembered for his deadpan style, curmudgeonly persona and jokes about his mother-in-law and wife. Raised in the Collyhurst district of Manchester, his first job was in the parcels department of the Manchester Co-op. He worked briefly as a journalist on the Bury Times. Dawson began his entertainment career as a pianist in a Parisian brothel – according to his entertaining but factually unreliable autobiography. As a club pianist ("I finally heard some applause from a bald man and said 'thank you for clapping me' and he said 'I'm not clapping - I'm slapping me head to keep awake'"), he was to find that he got laughs by playing wrong notes and complaining...