Pie-splattered comedian Soupy Sales dies at 83 By DAVID N. GOODMAN, Associated Press Writer17 mins ago Aww, gee he was one of the great ones! I'm gonna miss him. :frown1:
I truly thought he was already dead. I never found him funny ever. He didn't even have one good joke.
I also thought that Soupy Sales had passed already. (Sorry Soupy :-( ) I remember his show in Los Angeles. Sales career and comedy styling was a style that would not work today, and had zero sophistication. It was total slapstick and at times it was difficult to find the humor. He was an early TV icon and was in the company of Bozo the Clown, Buffalo Bob Smith, Shari Lewis, Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney, and others that tried to mix comedy with afternoon children's programming. A great deal of Sales stylings were lifted by watching the final years of Vaudeville. I may not have personally appreciated his humor and or style, but, the man came in at a time when television was still young, and a time where shows were often "live" and not on tape. Good or Bad, Soupy often had a great deal to contend with to make it work. One of the worst or best of the time was Larry Harmon who franchised out his operation as Bozo the Clown in many TV markets. Harmon came from the days of live television. I am 56 years old and remember a show where some poor little kid was trying to throw a balloon through a hula hoop about 6 feet away. The poor little kid was not doing well and in his frustration this young game peformer became a little careless and at the bottom of his breath uttered a few "explatives". If Harmon had let it go, few would have noticed. Instead Harmon as Bozo went over to the kid and quietly and nicely said "That's a Bozo No No!" The young kid responded: "Cram it Clown! Cram it!" Soupy, I wish you well. . . .
Soupy's schtick-o-riffic sense of humor left me cold as well, but my adolescent TV watching would have been very different without his ubiquitous presence. I think his brand of humor worked on the very easily amused.
I love Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and adore Chaplin who was one of the most brilliant satirists in the world, but Sales didn't have what they did by any means. To see the absolute genius of Chaplin, see this. It made Hitler FURIOUS beyond words because it was vastly more effective than anything Goebbels put out. On rare occasion, art effects politics at a level which outstrips any words. Films like this have changed the world. The speech at the end (where a lookalike is playing the dictator) is astounding. That's the genius of comedy at its most potent. Good art, in the hands of masters, influences the world.
I don't think I ever saw Soupy except in a couple reruns on a game show channel. Was he sort of like a poor man's Jerry Lewis or a 2nd-rate Buddy Hackett?
The balloon scene is a great reminder that, among his many gifts, Chaplin was a brilliant dancer: that one-bound leap onto the table is breathtaking. And the speech at the end is an obituary for the 20th century, delivered 60 years too soon but unchanged in its estimation of the errors of the century despite all of the promise it held. It is also, especially at the end, still very radical. We'll have a long way to go before we're ready to embrace that level of freedom and prosperity. No wonder why he was blackballed as a Communist. The Great Dictator effectively ended his career, didn't it?
