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, until talkies and
television came along, and all that changed. Not for Tom
Noddy though. Here is the inventor of the bubble cube at a festival in 2018, performing almost exactly
the same routine he performed for Johnny Carson back in 1983.
(Update: that video has since been taken down, but here's some from 2019)
I say "almost exacly the same" 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 just never stopped, never went 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... transient as his bubbles". Well, yes and no. I love Tom Noddy.
"I've never blown an ugly bubble."
