[78-L] Soupy Sales: One of jazz's best friends is gone

[Taylor Bowie]

Thanks for posting the obit and the link,  Cary.   The Clifford Brown clip 
had been on YouTube but vanished somewhere along the way.  I recall reading 
somewhere else that this TV appearance was just a week or so before Brownie 
died in the car accident.

Soupy Sales was also the best Password player I ever saw.  Smart,  verbal, 
witty,  but not afraid to be silly...good combination.

Taylor



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cary Ginell" <soundthink at live.com>
To: <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 7:56 AM
Subject: [78-L] Soupy Sales: One of jazz's best friends is gone



Like every other kid of the '60s, I watched Soupy Sales every day but didn't 
realize how much he loved jazz until I started writing my book on Terry 
Gibbs.  Soupy would invite famous jazz musicians to appear as literal 
"walk-ons" on his show. Soupy might be doing a skit, when, without warning, 
Thelonious Monk would just saunter across the stage in back of him, minding 
his own business. Five minutes later, he'd walk back across the other way. 
Click on the Youtube link at the bottom of the article for a rare TV 
appearance by Clifford Brown on the '50s version of his show.



Cary Ginell







October 23, 2009

Soupy Sales, Slapstick Comedian, Dies at 83



By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned the smashing of a pie to 
the face into a madcap art form, died Thursday night. He was 83.

Mr. Sales’s former manager, Dave Usher, said the entertainer died in a 
hospice in New York City after suffering from multiple health problems.

Cavorting with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie the Lion 
and Hobart and Reba, the heads in the pot-bellied stove, transforming 
himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the 
ever-present “nut at the door,” Soupy Sales became a television favorite of 
youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers and college students.

Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie, shuffling through his Mouse dance, 
he reached his slapstick heyday in the mid-1960s on “The Soupy Sales Show,” 
a widely syndicated program based at WNEW-TV in New York.

Some 20,000 pies were hurled at Soupy Sales or at visitors to his TV shows 
in the 1950s and ’60s, by his own count. The victims included Frank Sinatra, 
Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, all of whom turned up just for the honor of 
being creamed.

His memoir “Soupy Sez!” (M. Evans, 2001), written with Charles Salzberg, 
supplied the precise ingredients for successful pie-throwing: “You can use 
whipped cream, egg whites or shaving cream, but shaving cream is much better 
because it doesn’t spoil. And no tin plates. The secret is you just can’t 
push it and shove it in somebody’s face. It has to be done with a pie that 
has a lot of crust so that it breaks up into a thousand pieces when it hits 
you.”

But the key to his comedy went beyond the smashing of a pie.

“Our shows were not actually written, but they were precisely thought out,” 
he explained in his memoir. “But the greatest thing about the show, and I 
think the reason for its success, was that it seemed undisciplined. The more 
you can make a performance seem spontaneous, the better an entertainer you 
are.”

For all the staged mayhem, the truly unpredictable did occur. “I remember 
one time we were working with Pookie at the window,” Mr. Sales recalled. “He 
was doing a bit where he was breaking eggs and one of the eggs turned out to 
be rotten. My God, the smell was terrible! And I’m sure, watching us at 
home, everyone knew there was something wrong from the look on our faces.”

Soupy Sales was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, N.C., where his parents, 
Irving and Sadie Supman, owned a dry goods store. His last name was 
pronounced “Soupman” by neighbors, so he called himself Soupy as a 
youngster.

Drawing on the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers and Harry Ritz, he 
entered show business after graduating from Marshall College in Huntington, 
W.Va. Working as a teenage dance-show host and D. J. on television and 
radio, he appeared on stations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then began 
“Lunch With Soupy” in 1953 on WXYZ-TV in Detroit. He took the name Soupy 
Sales in part from the old-time comic actor Chic Sale. After appearing on 
local TV in Los Angeles and on the ABC-TV network, he made his debut on WNEW 
in the fall of 1964.

Then came an infamous moment. On New Year’s Day 1965, Soupy Sales asked 
youngsters to go through their parents’ clothing and send him little green 
pieces of paper with pictures of men with beards. He later reported 
receiving only a few dollar bills and said he donated them to charity, but 
Metromedia, the station’s owner, suspended him briefly after a viewer 
complained to the Federal Communications Commission that he was encouraging 
children to steal.

That stunt only heightened Mr. Sales’s appeal to young people as a tweaker 
of authority, and when he headlined a rock ’n’ roll show at the New York 
Paramount the following Easter, perhaps 3,000 teenagers were snaking through 
Times Square hoping for seats at the morning performance. “He’s great, he’s 
a nut like us,” a 13-year-old boy told The New York Times.

Mr. Sales was later a longtime panelist on TV’s “What’s My Line” and he was 
host for a variety talk show on WNBC Radio in the 1980s.

Mr. Sales is survived by his wife, Trudy, and his two sons, Tony and Hunt.

For all the shenanigans, one episode remained etched in the Soupy Sales 
pie-throwing hall of fame. “One of my younger fans made the mistake of 
heaving a frozen pie at me before it defrosted,” he once wrote in The New 
York Journal-American. “It caught me in the neck and I dropped like a pile 
of bricks.”

Soupy was a big Jazz fan too:

Clifford Brown On The Soupy Sales Show
http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=safari&rls=en&q=Clifford+Brown+%2B+Soupy+Sales&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=-L3hSoTNLIigsgOdmrm5Aw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQqwQwAA#



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