Foftly, Foftly, Blowf the Gale

Tony Hendra was born in London in an air raid during the German blitz, and his first toy was a piece of shrapnel that landed in his cradle. Nic Ullett, also born in London, was soon evacuated to the countryside, where he was given the privileges of living in a corrugated-iron hut and attending school with six other boys and 65 girls. By the time the two of them met a couple of decades later at Cambridge, their thoughts had somehow acquired a satirical hue. Written down, polished, and delivered onstage with maniacal precision, their reflections on the state of the world have fetched Hendra and Ullett all the way to the colonies, to three guest shots so far on Ed Sullivan's TV show, and currently to an imposing seven-month run at the Manhattan cabaret PLaza 9-.

Their act, honed to within an inch of everybody's life, is among other things a pigeonholer's nightmare, swooping from low burlesque to high camp, from keen wit to Raggedy Ann clowning, from one-line gags to intricately orchestrated sketches. W.illiam Wordsworth's The Daffodils is revived, lyrics faithfully intact, as a rock-'n'-roll song, with Ullett wreaking vengeance on a mangy guitar and Hendra doing a Cambridge version of Teresa Brewer. The BBC news coolly reports that an H-bomb has been dropped on Ireland and asks public-spiritedly: "Would anyone who saw this accident report to the local authorities?" Hendra reminisces about one of his ancestors, a 16th century poet known as "the Scarlet Pimp,"" who composed the immortal ballad beginning, "Foftly, foftly, blowf the gale,/ Upon my miftreff bofom."

Who's Flown Before? Much of their madness is visual, relying on Hen-dra's cucurbitaceous shape and Dolly Sister face and on Ullett's saturnine suavity. Put them both in riff-R.A.F. hats and let them pose as World War II briefing officers, and things quickly get out of hand. Announcing that tonight's mission will be over Frankfurt, Ullett pauses to inquire: "Who's flown before? I see. Can anyone drive? Oh good. Stand up so they can see you. You'll be flight leader. The rest of you divide up in groups of three and decide among yourselves who'll be pilot and navigator and all that sort of thing. You'll be flying our new steam-powered jobs. Your maps, I'm afraid, are a little out-of-date, but you'll have no trouble. You'll fly out over Gaul and drop your bombs just north of the Holy Roman Empire --but don't fly too far or you'll fall off. When you're shot down, pretend to be a tourist. We have provided you with a manual containing such typical German phrases as 'Get out of my way before I kick you in the groin.' "

Yellow Men. Much of their comedy is sharply contemporary, and carries a sting. A reference to "the 13 Frenchmen who actually fought in the last war" is followed by a summation of Lyndon Johnson in his Viet Nam visit: "Shortly after he arrived, he left." An African head of state is asked by an English interviewer about his country's firm resistance to Red Chinese infiltration. "If God had meant there to be yellow men," the chief explains, "he would have made them like you and me." Hendra and Ullett, both 25, arrived at their joint lunacy three years ago when they went to work in a London nightclub owned by a Lebanese gangster. Moving on to the U.S. in 1964, they were booked into Dallas, where transoceanic satire is as welcome as revisions in the oil-depletion allowance. "It was murder," Hendra recalls. "They canceled us in a week." The boys have since played everything from the Catskills' Borscht Belt to a shortlived TV show called The Entertainers. Their favorite gig was at Mister Kelly's in Chicago, which burned down while they were onstage. The band played Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and Nic stepped out to reassure the patrons: "Don't worry, my partner once quieted down an audience in a fire to avoid panic, and they all burned to death."

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