Noddy's Bubbles Celebrate Forty Years of Transience

 Finally, some good clean fun. A hundred years ago, it's said, a performer could go their whole life touring just twenty minutes of material, but then talkies and television came along, and that all changed. Not for Tom Noddy though. Here's the inventor of the bubble cube at a festival in 2018, performing almost exactly the same routine he performed on Johnny Carson back in 1983.

(Update: that video has since been taken down, but here's some from 2019)

 I say "almost" because he now uses a tiny smoke machine instead of a cigarette, but the patter's identical, charming enough to have spanned four decades and counting. This wasn't a comeback either. Noddy's just never stopped, never gone out of fashion: Las Vegas, Letterman, The Paul Daniels' Magic show, Bubblefest, Experimentarium, forty years performing the perfect act, using nothing but soap, smoke and straws. Here's his very first television appearance from 1980, in which host Charles Kuralt describes him as a "wandering minstrel", as "transient as his bubbles". Well, yes and no. I love Tom Noddy.

"I've never blown an ugly bubble."