Sibling revelry: the sisters who became ferociously funny comedy duos

When you’ve shared jokes since childhood, you can be brutally honest with each other. Flo & Joan and Ruby Wax’s daughters, Maddy and Marina Bye, on becoming family double acts

They’ve been described as “the other popular comedy duo” from TV’s golden age, second only to Morecambe and Wise. But double-act life was not kind to Mike and Bernie Winters. They were together, they split up, they reunited. They agreed to separate for good, but set the date five years into the future. This, wrote one chronicler of comedy, was to “discover ever more rancorous ways to despise each other”. When they finally parted in 1978, it was only because their father had died: he had, Mike reported ruefully, “always wanted us to be together”. After that, Bernie replaced Mike with a St Bernard dog that became more popular than either of them.

The Winters – born the Weinsteins – were brothers, of course, posing the question: who, knowing the fraught history of the comedy double act, would enter into such a relationship with their own sibling? Creative and financial co-dependency, meet deep-seated familial rivalry! And yet the sibling comedy twosome endures. From the Chuckle Brothers to This Country duo Charlie and Daisy May Cooper – and beyond, into a new generation of mostly female sibling double acts – the hope springs eternal that mutual acrimony can be forestalled by love and a sense of humour shared since infancy.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/39whzkL