Parenting & Family Quote by Tommy Cooper

Tommy Cooper’s line is a perfect trapdoor: it lures you in with tabloid grotesquerie, then drops you into the banal machinery of language. Two kids are doing cartoonishly self-destructive things - battery acid, fireworks - the kind of headline that signals moral panic and invites a stern lecture. Cooper refuses the lecture. He treats the whole scenario as raw material for a bureaucratic punchline, pivoting from bodily danger to paperwork: “They charged one and let the other one off.”

The intent is misdirection with a double meaning, and it works because the pun isn’t decorative; it’s structural. “Charged” belongs to policing, but also to batteries. “Let off” belongs to legal leniency, but also to fireworks. Cooper compresses two worlds - authority and physics - into a single sentence where the police sound less like guardians and more like technicians following the logic of objects. The kids stop being people and become props in a lexical machine.

Subtextually, it’s a joke about institutional reflex: even when the situation is absurd, the system reaches for familiar verbs, familiar procedures. The comedy comes from that deadpan inevitability: of course a battery-acid kid gets “charged.” Of course the fireworks kid is “let off.” The language does the thinking for everyone.

Context matters, too. Cooper’s persona thrived on “delightful incompetence,” the magician who fails on purpose and wins by timing. This is that same sensibility applied to law-and-order storytelling: the real trick is making the audience realize the punchline was hiding in plain sight, inside the words we use every day.