Album: Derek and Clive (Live) (1976)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Jump," also known as "Jump, You F--ker," is a comedy song about a man who is perched in an upper-story window during a fire. Urged to jump into a blanket by the crowd below, he jumps and breaks his neck, the joke being there was no blanket.

    With the banking crash of the first decade of the 21st century, this joke was revived by performers on both sides of the Atlantic, with the transformation of the victim into a banker.
  • Derek and Clive are the comedy duo of Dudley Moore (1935-2002) and Peter Cook (1937-95).
    Moore, known as an actor, was a talented jazz pianist and composer who had worked with Cleo Lane, among others; as a youth he was awarded a scholarship to study music at Oxford.

    Peter Cook attended that other renowned British university, Cambridge. Once described bizarrely by the actor Stephen Fry as "the funniest man who ever drew breath," he teamed up with Moore to form Derek and Clive in the mid-'70s.
  • In 1976, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore released an album of this sort of humour, though it was never intended for release. Derek and Clive (Live) started as a private joke in 1973, but when bootlegs began appearing, the not-so-dynamic duo decided not unreasonably that they might as well jump on their own bandwagon, and, adding some live material to the album, released it commercially. Whatever did we do before the Internet? >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Alexander Baron - London, England, for all above

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