This Guy Was Funny Across the 50s, 60s, and 70s

No posts yet. So here's one.

"Soupy Sales" is worth a look and a listen on YouTube.

He's one of those classic acts -- he officially hosted a "kiddie show," but adults dug it then, and kids of then who are adults now -- dig the memory.

Here's why: though the jokes were not always the most intellegent or hip(it was a kid's show after all) the PRESENTATION was hip. You can see Soupy's ability to keep making facial expressions that show "the smart man behind the goofy" host and he had a kind of hipster slur to his voice that "sold" the comedy. (Close your eyes, and you might just hear Bill Cosby, for better or worse.)

It was a show that rather made fun of "Captain Kangaroo" THEN, and rather predicted the TV version of "Pee Wee's Playhouse" LATER -- our host moving about a single set of a house -- with windows and doors and interacting with "comedy sidekicks":

White Fang(a giant white dog presented only as giant white paws entering the frame from the side to point at Soupy, embrace Soupy's face -- or slap it -- with an unintelligele "ruh row voice" that required "translation" for the quick-witted Soupy.

Black tooth (a much nicer black dog presented only as black brown pays entering the frame to caress Soupy.)

Pookie (a rather ragged-looking "lionface puppet." One great Youtube clip shows Pookie lip-synching to some scat singing with cutaways to Soupy's ever-changing facial eactions.

You'd also get "unseen voices" talking to Soupy at his front door and usually ending their conversation with -- a pie hitting Soupy right on the face.

Guaranteed laughs every time, those pies. Each pie hits fast, hits hard(with a gunshot/slap sound effect) and hits accurately -- covering Soupy's face from the forehead down.) Each pie also hits "out of nowhere" with no warning, which makes it funnier.

Soupy Sales eventually opined that he had been hit in the face by 20,000 pies over the course of his career.

Evidently, celebrity kids and the celebrity hosts themselves loved Soupy's comedy enough to come on the show and get hit in the face with pies themselves. One famous episode has some Rat Pack participation -- Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Trini Lopez (in for Dean Martin to no effect) dropping by Soupy's set to take a pie or two in the face.

For real nostalgia(if you are of a certain age) there was a "Naval base sitcom" of the 50s/60s cusp called "Hennessey," starring Jackie Cooper in the title role and with one of the best opening theme songs in TV history -- snappy, uplifting, quirky and cool.

Well, in one episode of "Hennesey" from 1962, the plotline was that Soupy Sales brought his show down from Los Angeles to the San Diego Naval Base where Hennessey was set.

I found the Hennessey/Soupy crossover on Youtube..in a very "smeary" tape(a commenter's comment), but the sound is clear and the story can be understood.

Above all, the 1962 episode speaks to the "innocence" of TV in that era. Star Jackie Cooper interacts with his "Admiral," an oldtime actor from the forties named Roscoe Karns. Love interest Abby Dalton(also a staple of game shows around these years) is in it too. The lines are just OK, but very nice -- it was a simpler time to be sure, and a time in which Navy veterans (and others) could enjoy a present day Navy sitcom without worries of, say, that Vietnam War that was coming.

But the Hennessey episode and the Sinatra/Davis Jr. episode were one-off gimmicks. A review of the Soupy Sales stuff on Youtube reveals that he kept up a great semi-improvised and very funny show, episode by episode, day by day.

Soupy Sales was a bigger deal, I think in the black and white episodes of the 50s and 60s(I recall a 1965-66 peak to that VERSION) but he came back -- in COLOR -- with a brief 1978-1979 version which proved -- even as he and his puppets were pretty much the same as before -- that you can't go home again. The 50s/60s cusp was a different time in America than the disco/Happy Days/Three's Company banality of the late 70s.

Anyway, try a little Soupy Sales sometime. Another bonus -- reminiscent of Ernie Kovacs "back then"(he DIED in 1962 in a car crash) and David Letterman later -- is the "live laughter" of the crew to keep Soupy's show nice and current. Especially back in the sixties.