Max Wall was like some little music hall goblin who had uncurled himself from the backstage skip where he had been sleeping for 60 years to amaze and enchant the rock and roll generation. Mott the Hoople took the King of Funny Walks on tour in the 1970s and he also appeared with Ian Dury, a long-time fan.
In his one-man shows, Wall's persona was a contemptuous version of himself - a cheap, tatty comedian mournfully telling terrible old jokes but at the same time standing apart from the performance and mocking it, deconstructing his act and examining its pitiful components.
Battered, truculent, often a bit drunk, ridiculous in his bedraggled wig and motheaten tights, he would leer insolently at the audience: "Wall is the name, ladies and gentlemen. Max Wall, standing before you in the flesh, not a cartoon. Man's answer to the peacock".
Born into a show business family in 1908 - his father was the Scots comedian Jack Lorimer - Wall originally trained as a ballet dancer. The skills he learned were useful in variety, when he created the character of Professor Wallofski, the demented concert pianist who funny-walked his way up and down the stage to a drum-roll with a meld of jerky "legmania", sharp-shooting tap techniques and ballet steps.
Behind the grotesque parody, it was evident that Wall was a superb dancer.
During the 1940s and early 1950s, he was one of Britain's top comedians, but professional disgrace came when he left his wife and children to run off with a beauty queen in the mid-1950s. The popular press pilloried him, and his career as a star seemed over.
He was reduced to appearing before rowdy drunks at working men's clubs in the north of England and bit parts in Coronation Street and Emmerdale. His three marriages were failures and he was estranged from his five children.
The big comeback arrived when he was discovered by a new generation in the 1970s, and took his one-man show to the West End. He smiled wryly as the New York Herald Tribune hailed him as "a genius... the funniest man in the world".
His name was up in lights again, but after the show each night Wall, an undischarged bankrupt, would return alone to his shabby bedsit, where his only possessions were a typewriter, a radio, some books and his stage props. Late in his career, he turned to straight acting, appropriately becoming one of the most intuitive interpreters of Samuel Beckett.
A fatalist, Max Wall was perfectly resigned about his extraordinary up-and-down career. "It's all written in the sand," he would shrug. But his command of his audience at those one-man shows was total, almost hypnotic, even though his performance, at once arrogant and self-hating, was so rich in seedy irony.
In his book, Light Fantastic: Adventures in Theatre, John Lahr wrote: "He was an isolated, sullen, feisty man who brought his sadness on stage and dumped the hostility that came with it hilariously in the audience's lap.
"In his sorrowful caperings, Max Wall took the audience where only a great clown can: to the frontiers of the marvellous".
Wall himself had a different view. "It's all a horrible send-up, really," he said. He died in 1990, aged 82.
More on Max Wall at www.talks.ndirect.co.uk/MAX2.html