In 1978, the year before the film 10 made a Hollywood star of Dudley Moore, the comedian appeared alongside his long-standing double-act partner, Peter Cook, on the Saturday-night chatshow Parkinson.

“Do you find some difficulty working together?” asked Michael Parkinson, the host.

“Tremendous difficulty,” said Moore, with a smile.

“There are storms,” said Cook. “There have to be. There are tensions. We weep a lot.”

“It’s like a marriage,” said Moore.

“How is it like a marriage?” asked Parkinson, cross-legged and slouched on his swivel chair. Finally, from Cook, the kicker: “We’re getting divorced.”

At the time, Cook and Moore, who performed in the satirical group Beyond the Fringe before becoming a formal double act, were at the height of their fame. If Cook’s drinking had already curdled into alcoholism, the disease was yet to blunt his talent. Later that evening, Parkinson asked another of his guests, the boxer John Conteh, whether it was true that he avoided sex before a fight. As Conteh squirmed, Cook delivered a comeback of extravagant brilliance. “I wouldn’t ask you if you have sex before a show,” he said to Parkinson. A beat, then: “I can see that you have.”

Nevertheless, Cook’s quip about divorce soon proved true. Moore’s subsequent success in America (by 1982, he had won an Oscar nomination for his role as an alcoholic millionaire in Arthur) all but ended the partnership. When the pair reunited to record new material as their sweary alter egos, Derek and Clive, jealousies boiled over. Under the flimsy cover of character, Cook would issue barbed remarks about Moore’s new career. At one point, Moore fled the recording booth. During a rendition of the pair’s well-known “Mother” sketch, Cook drowned out Moore’s attempts to be heard on tape by shouting: “Why don’t you shut your fucking face and die!”

The comedy double act is one of the most delicate of all creative collaborations. In the writers’ room, a comedian must trust their partner with an unproven joke, and in doing so risk that most mortifying of all feedback: the absence of a laugh. On stage, the stakes are equivalent to those faced by a troupe of trapeze artists: a mistimed catch will leave one partner hanging, the other tumbling. Success and longevity rely not only on timing and compatibility, then, but also on trust. And there are few places where trust is as fragile as in the double act, with fused identities and jostled egos.

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Shortly after Richard Herring auditioned for the Oxford Revue with a song titled My Penis Can Sing, he met Stewart Lee in the corridor outside. The attraction was immediate. “We had a similar sense of humour – a common sensibility,” Herring recalls backstage at the Leicester Square theatre, in London. “Also, we thought what everyone else was doing was rubbish. We may have even decided right there and then to write some sketches together.”

Stewart Lee (on left) and Richard Herring in the early 90s

The pair began by drawing up agreed lines on the kind of material they wouldn’t perform (no pillorying celebrities, no parodying TV). They would write alone, before swapping their material for the other to amend. After university, where both men performed for a while in a septuple act called the Seven Raymonds (“As if seven Raymonds had met and, like the Two Ronnies, decided to perform together,” says Herring), the pair moved to London as flatmates, writing together for Radio 4 programmes such as Week Ending and On The Hour. In the evenings, Lee began to find success as a solo standup comic. “It was weird, because sometimes we’d have a conversation and then Stewart would turn that conversation into a very successful piece of standup,” Herring recalls. “And I’d sort of be at the back going, ‘Yeah, that’s my idea…’”

The two comedians became Lee and Herring after they were commissioned to create a radio programme, Fist Of Fun. The issue of whose name should come first in the billing immediately came up. “Our producer, Sarah Smith, said, ‘It should be Herring and Lee, it sounds better,’” recalls Herring. “I said I didn’t care, but he wanted to be first. He said: ‘It has to be Lee and Herring.’”

Herring now hosts a weekly podcast series, in which he routinely plays the role of the jilted, failing performer; there are near constant references to life in the shadow of Lee’s success. It’s a comic exaggeration, but those feelings of insecurity in the double act came early. “Because Stewart got sort of successful with the live stuff and I wasn’t, there was an imbalance,” he says. “He felt he’d done lots of standup and was occasionally a bit snooty about performing together. I would say: ‘Look, I’ve done exactly the same amount of being a double act as you have. We’re equally experienced with this.’”

He probably didn’t, ultimately, want to be in a double act. But I’d put all my eggs in that basket

If this early episode revealed a flicker of resentment, it would be years before it blossomed into a physical confrontation, in the pair’s office. “Stew was trying to write something, and he was never good with computers, and something on the computer went wrong,” Herring recalls. “I tried to help him, and he told me to get away. So I just kind of kicked his chair. All of his resentments for me, or whatever, came to the fore and he went for me. I hit my head on a table. I think we tried to hit each other but failed. That night, before a gig, I said backstage: ‘We’ve had one fight in 10 years – that’s fine.’”

For Herring, the moment represented an explosion of mutual feelings of mounting frustration. “It’s an odd relationship,” he says. “You’re so close, because you’ve worked so hard together to create something. But you’re also stuck together on tour so at some point you inevitably want to go off in different directions.” There’s a risk, too, that partners in a double act begin to believe the onstage characters they play, and the dynamic of that relationship – the Derek and Clive effect. “I think, as it progressed, Stew felt like the double act was a bit beneath him; he certainly was drawn to the autonomy of standup. He probably didn’t, ultimately, want to be in a double act. But I’d really put all my eggs in that basket.”

In the early days following their split, Herring says he suffered by comparison with his former partner. “I started doing standup just as Stewart became the most successful standup in the country, or at least the most feted,” he says. “People would say that I was doing Stew’s jokes, which was unfair.” It hurt, Herring says, that no one suggested there could have been any pollination in the other direction. He recalls one tweeted barb that clearly stuck: “Can you believe Richard Herring was ever in a double act with Stewart Lee? It’s like Lenny Bruce being with Les Dennis.”

Richard Herring: ‘We tried to hit each other.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks/The Guardian

For Herring, then, the shtick that Lee is the successful one is, like so much of comedy, a way to process emotion. It’s also, on some deep level, an acknowledgement of the curious melancholy to the former double-act performer. “I think I’ve mentioned Stew in pretty much every standup show I do,” he says. “While he does occasionally mention me, he’s sort of wiped that part of his career away. But the supposed bitterness I have? That is the joke. Ultimately, it’s like a marriage in that you divorce, it’s painful, and then, eventually, none of that stuff really matters. You reach a point where you’re pleased if the other one’s doing well.” During the past five years, Lee has appeared on Herring’s podcast twice.

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Examining the end of a double act has the same unsavoury, voyeuristic feel as poring over the details of a divorce, the he-said-she-saids. Splits often represent a painful moment from which all parties involved wish to move on (Cook’s wife Lin fought hard to keep the tapes of her husband and Moore’s gruelling bickering out of the public domain). Few double acts speak openly about why their partnerships failed. As in marriages, some partners naturally drift apart. In others, seeds of resentment, perhaps planted in the January of a partnership, bloom into an autumn reckoning, one that’s often delivered in dramatic cliche: the hurled plate, the slammed door, the night spent in the poky spare room. Occasionally, the cause of death is nothing more than the corrosive effects of celebrity.

Success arrived quickly for Rob Newman and David Baddiel, the first double act to sell out British arenas. The pair met as students at Cambridge, but only became friends later, during an open writing session for a Radio 4 comedy. After a stint writing radio sketches, the pair were asked by a BBC commissioner to join with another double act, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, to launch a new comedy programme. The Mary Whitehouse Experience proved a success with Radio 1 listeners, and Newman and Baddiel – or Baddiel and Newman, as they were originally billed – began touring as a double act, interspersing sketches with their individual standup routines.

We had been friends but the double act destroyed that friendship

For some duos, the daily pressures of writing and performing together build trust and synergy. For others, they create irreconcilable rifts. “Fame proved toxic for the relationship,” Baddiel tells me. “I sensed that Rob, who is prodigiously talented – a dangerous and charismatic performer – had an anxiety or paranoia about being misrepresented by fame. And all the anxieties and insecurities a person might have are magnified by success.” Baddiel believes that Newman, who was strikingly handsome, feared people saw him as the poster boy of the outfit, and Baddiel, the bookish, bespectacled partner, as the intellectual force. “It wasn’t true. We were a symbiotic partnership – we wrote all our double-act material together.” The pair began to argue over whose name would come first in the billing, or how they would stand during photoshoots. Newman insisted they were interviewed separately. Baddiel was then reported as saying that he thought his partner was going mad.

Rob Newman (top) and David Baddiel in 1994. Photograph: Rex Features

In November 1993, close to the end of their revealingly titled final tour, Newman And Baddiel Live And In Pieces, the pair were being driven in an expensive car from Glasgow to Leicester. Tensions between the two were untenably high. “He was incredibly angry about stuff I’d said in the press and just shouted at me for the entire journey,” Baddiel recalls. “I remember thinking that it was a bit like when you see footage of people being beaten up, and they just curl into a ball because they don’t know how to respond.” For three days after the altercation, the men spoke only on stage.

For a while, Newman and Baddiel kept their feud off stage. Then, shortly before they performed their climactic gig, conflict became uncontainable. “We were at De Montfort Hall, and during my standup section of the show I tried a new joke,” says Baddiel. “It was about the IRA not being allowed to speak in their own voices on the TV. At that time I wasn’t watching Rob’s standup section.” As Baddiel moved to walk off stage, he saw Newman coming out from the wings, dressed as Jarvis, an aristocratic sex predator character. “The first thing he said to me in three or four days was: ‘You cunt, you knew I did a joke about that and you’ve tried to ruin it.’” In turn, Baddiel went into Newman’s dressing room during the interval and shouted obscenities at him for 20 minutes. “That’s the point I knew it was over. We had been friends but the double act destroyed that friendship.”

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The number of male double acts that have split far outnumbers their female counterparts. When Dawn French, who worked with Jennifer Saunders in a double act for two decades, appeared on Herring’s podcast last year, the conversation inevitably turned to the subject of broken creative partnerships.

“Isn’t it just the men that fall out?” asked French.

“But aren’t you competitive?” says Herring, gently pressing.

“I suppose I was a bit surprised at how much success she had on her own – that was a cocktail of strange emotions,” she said, before admitting that, after Saunders won an award for her sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, French sent her friend a bouquet of flowers with a card that read: “Congratulations, you cunt.”

“She’s like a sister, where you’re delighted and jealous, but good jealous,” French continued. “I have that kind of envy that is also pride and delight at the same time.”

The American comedian Corinne Fisher, who works alongside Krystyna Hutchinson in the double act Sorry About Last Night, and on Guys We Fucked: The Anti Slut-Shaming Podcast, says she finds women just as difficult to work with as men “but in different ways”. Nevertheless, she says, gender plays a role in the potential longevity of a double act: “I think I’ll tolerate more bullshit from women than men, if we’re being quite honest.”

Corrine Fisher (on right) and Krystyna Hutchinson: ‘We’re not twins who sleep in bunk beds.’ Photograph: Reed Young/The Guardian

Fisher was an agent at Liebman Entertainment when the New York management company hired Hutchinson as an intern and the pair became close. One evening, Fisher watched her friend perform at an open mic standup show. “I had been watching the American comedy–folk duo Garfunkel & Oates’ progress, and it seemed like comedy was just more fun with a friend,” says Fisher. “So I Facebook messaged her the idea of working together in a duo and she was immediately onboard.” The pair established firm boundaries from the off, including the rule that they only discuss work matters over email, never text.

“Sometimes Sorry About Last Night feels more like a marriage than my seven-year relationship with my boyfriend,” says Hutchinson. “We’ve had to learn how to talk directly to each other when one of us is upset or annoyed or frustrated,” says Fisher. It’s this communication that, Hutchinson says, distinguishes many male double acts from their female counterparts. “Principally there are more male double-act divorces because the number of men in comedy outweighs the number of women,” she says. “But in my experience, women are better communicators, too. Nowadays we can resolve a conflict quickly, and I’ve learned not to take things so personally.”

Nevertheless, both find it difficult to deal with the loss of individual identity that has come with double-act success. “People don’t seem to understand that we’re not identical twins who sleep in bunk beds,” says Fisher. “We’re often considered as interchangeable within the comedy community. People we’ve known for years call us by the other’s name.” To keep from being subsumed by one another, Fisher says that it’s crucial to keep an open working relationship, as it were. “For us to continue to work together, it is imperative we also work with other people.”

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For the comedy writer Graham Linehan, who started out writing sitcoms in a partnership with Arthur Mathews, a clear hierarchy is crucial to a happy double act, even if the power dynamic switches between specific projects. Linehan met Mathews when he joined the Dublin magazine Hot Press as a music journalist. Mathews worked in the magazine’s art department, and made an immediate impression on Linehan. “A group of us were coming down some stairs and Arthur fell down them just to get a laugh,” he recalls. “He did it really slowly and with this confused look on his face. It was spectacularly funny. I immediately felt a jolt of something very close to love.”

When he fell down stairs really slowly, just to get a laugh, I felt a jolt of something close to love

When the pair began writing sketches for a local comedy act, The Joshua Trio, Linehan’s admiration for his partner, who is nine years his senior, dictated the way in which the pair worked. “We never quarrelled because I was intimidated by Arthur, so I’d never say: ‘I don’t like this.’ I’d just take something he’d written and say: ‘I love it, but just let me try one thing.’ The rule became: as long as what I wrote was funnier, Arthur was fine with it. He had no ego in the face of humour.”

Linehan and Mathews moved to London and, while renting an apartment from Griff Rhys Jones, who was in the double act Smith and Jones at the time, they wrote the sitcom Father Ted. As well as their friendship, Linehan believes the pairing worked because of the ways the writers complemented one another. “Subconsciously, I think we both knew that there were aspects in the other person that we didn’t have,” he says. “For example, I am terrified of the blank page. I worry and obsess over structure. Has this been done before? Then I’d turn around and he’d written three pages. I needed someone like that. Then I brought the structural stuff a bit more, and loved taking the stuff he did and seeing if I could think of set-ups and payoffs. It was beautiful, a lovely working relationship. When it ended, I had to learn how to write on my own.”

The end of the working relationship followed a shift in the dynamic, perhaps due to a maturing on Linehan’s part. The pair wrote a pilot for Hippies, a BBC2 sitcom set in the late 60s and starring Simon Pegg and Sally Phillips. “I just could not relax about it,” says Linehan. “I didn’t like the idea and didn’t know what we were trying to say. I wasn’t sleeping.” Mathews, sensing Linehan’s reservations, suggested that he write the series alone. Linehan soon began writing another sitcom, Black Books, about a cranky, sotted secondhand bookseller. When the pair tried to collaborate again, the recipe no longer worked. “The structure that we’d built had disappeared,” he says. “Now I had confidence, so I was much more likely to say: ‘I don’t like this.’ We’d lost the dynamic and couldn’t pick it up again.”

John Oliver (on left) and Andy Zaltzman in 2012. Photograph: MediaPunch/Rex/Shutterstock

The greatest pressures are exerted on a comedy partnership in the writers’ room. After the collapse of his partnership with Rob Newman, David Baddiel met Frank Skinner on the comedy circuit. Skinner, who had recently split from his wife and had nowhere to live, moved in with Baddiel. When the opportunity arose for Baddiel to make a TV series based on fantasy football, he talked to Skinner, with whom he would spend hours watching football. “We thought: let’s build a show around our home life,” he says. In the writers’ room, the friendship was immediately tested. “When Frank and I first started writing together, he suggested a joke and, unusually, I said, ‘That’s not funny.’ He got really pissed off. I knew it was hurtful – possibly the worst thing to say to a comedian – but in a double act you must be able to say when you think something’s not funny. It’s very difficult to negotiate.”

Greater than the risk of a bruised ego is the threat that credit for your work will be taken away, or at least redistributed. “With all double acts there is often a tension over whose idea something was,” says Baddiel. “But you have to make a commitment that it doesn’t matter who said what first. Even if an idea is principally thought of as being by ‘Partner A’, by the time it’s being performed, ‘Partner B’ will have brought all kinds of elements to the piece. Territorial disputes are what double acts flounder on more than anything else.”

Whether due to rifts cleaved in the writers’ room, or secret ambitions, often one member of a double act begins to work on side projects. When someone is lured away by a career in Hollywood (Joe Cornish, who worked with Adam Buxton as Adam and Joe), or a hosting gig on TV, the jilted comic can feel a triple death: of a partnership, a brand, even a future.

Unfathomably, he chose to work on a leading satirical TV show rather than speak to 30 people in a tiny room in Edinburgh

In 2006, Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver, who were at the time writing their third Edinburgh show together, travelled to London to audition for a role on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Only Oliver, however, was called to a second audition. “When they offered him the job, unfathomably, John chose to go and work on the world’s leading satirical TV show rather than speak to 30 people in a tiny room in Edinburgh,” Zaltzman tells me over a Diet Pepsi in a London pub. After the swift departure of Oliver, who now presents HBO’s primetime political talkshow Last Week Tonight, Zaltzman was left to write and, two weeks later, perform the Edinburgh show alone. “It was difficult because I had nothing to replace this wonderful working relationship and friendship,” Zaltzman says.

The year after Oliver left for America, Zaltzman “bumbled along” performing political standup. Then they were offered the opportunity to record a weekly topical podcast, the Bugle. Oliver agreed to rejoin the double act (albeit via a telephone line) as co-host. “It worked well straight away,” says Zaltzman. “There hadn’t been any great falling out, so in that sense it was easy for us to work together again.”

The podcast, a satirical take on the week’s news, ran from 2007 to 2014 without a break. It then had a hiatus while Oliver focused on launching his new TV show; he soon found that the show was taking up too much of his time, and the Bugle came to an end in 2015. Then in 2016, Zaltzman relaunched it without Oliver, instead partnering with a roster of comedians including Nish Kumar and Hari Kondabolu.

“To lose [Oliver] after having worked so closely for years left a void,” says Zaltzman. “But my frustration was not with his success. I like to think I haven’t become a bitter, twisted, resentment-fuelled showbiz cliche. But maybe there is a residual awkwardness about the different paths we’ve taken.”

Andy Zaltzman: ‘I like to think I haven’t become a resentment-fuelled cliche.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks/The Guardian

Is the double act in terminal crisis? Certainly the past two decades rattle with defunct partnerships, even if some of the friendships have endured: Skinner and Baddiel, French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie, Adam and Joe. “There aren’t really any true double acts these days,” Vic Reeves wrote in the Sun, following the news that comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams had parted ways after 20 years. Culturally, it may be that the traditional double act, which in its wholesome artifice suited British audiences in the 60s and 70s, is less relevant in this new confessional, individualistic age.

Curiously, this trend may have reunited at least one pair of comedic divorcees. Baddiel’s latest show, My Family, which he wrote and starred in as a solo performer, offers a celebration of his childhood and the lives of his characterful parents that is transgressive in its honesty. “It’s the truest stuff that I have ever done, which is something to do with not being in double acts any more,” he tells me. “It’s difficult to be wholly yourself in a double act, because you are beholden to the other person.” Last year, perhaps responding to Baddiel’s public display of vulnerability, his former partner, Newman, sent a public message over Twitter requesting two tickets to the show. Baddiel says the pair have since become friends again.

Evidently, the spark that originally forged a pairing can, occasionally, survive somewhere in the rubble. “Finding a person who complements you is so precious,” says Linehan. “You have to keep hold of it however you can. When you’re young, you don’t see this; ego, fear and money all get in the way. I love it when I see a partnership that is still going, with people who are clearly still friends. They are obviously a bit wiser than the rest of us.”

• This article was amended on 27 January 2018 at the request of David Baddiel to make clear that the idea for a show based on his home life with Frank Skinner was thought up by both of them.

• Andy Zaltzman is on tour with Satirist for Hire. Richard Herring is on tour with Oh Frig I’m 50!. David Baddiel’s standup show My Family: Not The Sitcom will be touring the UK from 28 January.

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