Soupy Sales: A Farewell to Larmes
Soupy gets his head scratched by his dog White Fang.
Thursday, October 22, 2009: One of the people who made me laugh hysterically as a young teenager died today at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, New York. Soupy Sales was 83.
How do you thank a man who gave you a thousand, thousand laughs?
Soupy Sales showed a young me that laughter was a highly appropriate response to a good deal of what fate might dish up in your face. This is my modest addition to his memory.
“Oh-luh-uh-Oh” bellowed White Fang, the large mean dog, so big we kid viewers only saw one giant paw as it slammed into poor Soupy Sales’ head and knocked him off camera.
Innocent Soupy came back on camera, his face, smiling, beaming widely, but bearing Soupy’s trademark look of astounded wonder. Soupy said, “What was that? Do you hate me, White Fang, doggie of mine?
Remember we kids viewers only saw the paw of White Fang, like Soupy’s head, in big close up. BCU in old television tech. talk, borrowed from film scripts.
The paw dropped in a fake mope gesture and White Fang sulked. “Luh-uh-uh.”
Soupy perked up. “Okay, White Fang, I forgive you.”
This time White Fang’s paw bunched into a fist and slammed Soupy square in the kisser. “Awwwww, can’t we be friends, White Fang?” begged Soupy.
White Fang emitted a suspicious, non-commital “Luh-uh.”
Soupy smiled as widely as humanly possible. White Fang smashed the cream pie directly into Soupy’s forehead.
Soupy with White Fang's paw and puppeteer Clyde Adler. A behind-the-scenes photo I'm glad we kid TV watchers never saw. As an old TV producer, I note the old Zoomar Extender on the lens, clicked on so Soupy's BCU will be in focus.
Before he went full network, Soupy had the lowest budget of any kids’ show in America. Most of the show was a medium-wide shot of Soupy’s kitchen, a tatty cardboard set, whose walls swayed and bulged every time an actor walked past it. There was the infamous backdoor at which Soupy received his only guests. Beside the door was the wall buzzer with the sign above it: Do Not Touch. Every show the buzzer rang.
The budget was so low, only two persons could appear on camera, Soupy and his long-time puppeteer and collaborator, Clyde Adler, creator of White Fang (bad dog), Black Tooth (good dog) and Pookie the Lion. Clyde was the puppeteer behind Hippy the Hippo and Marilyn MonWolf. Clyde was also The Man at the Door. Basically, Clyde was everybody on the show who wasn’t Soupy.
There was never a studio audience because the set and the set-ups were so cheap, they would have been embarrassing. But "no studio audience" was perfect for the early Soupy. The two guys and the Detroit TV news-and-weather crew shooting the show had thirty minutes of surreal silliness each show. Compare honest Soupy to the wheedling treacle of Buffalo Bob on Howdy Doody, smarming the kiddies like an old queen up her last alleyway and so arthritic she can barely lift her skirt one last time. Buffalo Bob was a symphony of cringing, lickspittle pleadings all of whose subtexts were “please, please like me.” The smarter kids in the Peanut Gallery on Howdy Doody always knew that Buffalo Bob was a phony-baloney suck.
Whenever one of Soupy’s solo flights of silliness had petered out, there would come a knock at the back door and viewers would see usually only the two arms of the visitor, almost always in the early days of the show, puppeteer Clyde Adler’s arms.
Of what shticks, pratfalls, slapsticks, whoopee cushions, rubber chickens and wheezy old gags did the Soupy Sales Show consist? Whatever they were, their cheapness, their showbiz tawdriness, was my chief delight. Soupy lip-synched badly to crappy pop songs. Screamingly funny because of Soupy’s facial takes. Soupy’s pie-in-the-face smile told viewers that anarchy did indeed reign in his world. But he couldn’t help it. He loved being alive and fifty setbacks per day were NOT going to waylay our Soupeleh. He did not have a mean bone in his body. Shucks, he and we just happened to be trapped in this shoddy little earth space; yet he loved it although it was insane. If you, the viewer, would shrug your mental shoulders, then you too could learn to love it.
Pookie the Lion, an arm puppet at the window: “While you were away, Soupy, a guy came to the door and wanted to see you.”
Soupy: “Gee. Did he have a bill?”
Pookie: “No, he had a nose just like you.”
That joke was ancient even in the earliest days of vaudeville. But Soupy’s beaming delivery brought it back to goofy life.
A Bit of Biography
Although I knew none of this when I was 14, here’s a swatch of internet potted bio:
“Sales was born Milton Supman in the tiny town of Franklinton, North Carolina, on January 28, 1926. He was the son of the only Jewish family in a town where his father's dry goods store sold sheets to the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. The family's name was so often mispronounced as "Soupman" that his parents jokingly nicknamed his brothers "Hambone" and "Chickenbone," bestowing on him the name "Soupbone," which was eventually shortened to Soupy.
After fighting in the Pacific in World War II and participating in the invasion of Okinawa (while honing his comedic chops aboard his ship's public address system), Sales returned and began his entertainment career in 1949 in Cincinnati, where he worked as a morning DJ and did stand-up in local clubs. By the early 1950s, he did stints as a script writer at radio stations in West Virginia and Cleveland, while moonlighting as a stand-up comedian and DJ and moving to Detroit.”
Soupy at his Detroit home base TV station. Note the lenses mounted on a sprung, hand-turned turret. I think the cameras are an old Westinghouse pedestand and an RCA ped runner.
Why We Loved Soupy
My brother and I screamed with laughter at Soupy’s smiling acquiescence to dire predicament. One of the reason’s he was funny was the very looseness of the performance. Although some of the jokes were on cue cards (which Soupy often showed to the camera) Soupy was never up tight or nervous. Shit happens, he seemed to say, and you gotta roll not with it, but IN it. Oh my!
My brother and I loved Soupy because of this guileless anarchy. Whatever happened got laughed at. Nobody else on TV could do Soupy’s insouciance or even come close to it. Only 1950s TV watchers will remember the carnival of Halloween death-doll masks that appeared on television then: live-from-the-grave Ed Sullivan, Dinah ‘Phony-as-a-Recorded Fart’ Shore (No, Dinah, YOU go and see the USA in your Chevrolet), Perry Como (“Folks, Honest, I only put a little Thorazine in my Old Spice Aftershave”).
Bunch of stiffs.
But Soupy was alive and kicking and, of course, was a blessedly inane dipstick.
Only one other comic ever made me laugh harder and that was Curly in “The Three Stooges” barking his animal sounds as beautiful women scorned him or authority figures dismissed him. As a dorky teenager, I identified like mad with both Soupy and Curly.
In the mid-1950s Soupy’s off-the-cuff, anything-goes style was new to TV.
Did Soupy, a noble pioneer, pave the way for Monty Python and Saturday Night Live and yadda-yadda-yadda? I don’t know but I suspect not.
Soupy Sales was the sole proprietor of his very own lunatic kitchen.
His death today made me remember how many glum November noons he brightened with his unique brand of existential nonsense. Whatever else Soupy accomplished on earth, he showed two Canadian boys that, yes, the world was crazy and funny and full of shit, but those qualities did not give the world ANY immunity and we were free to laugh at it. The indifferent cosmos gave no fecal exemption for earthlings.
Rockin’ good advice, Soupy.
Wherever you are, thank you, sir, for a million crack-ups, fallings-down-on-Casselman-living-room-rugs, amid bursts of immoderate laughter so deep that mildly embarrassing personal misfortunes of a urinary nature once or twice befell a certain onlooker.
Soupy performs his famous mouse dance.
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Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009
Hey Bill:
That was a great tribute to Soupy....your digression on Buffalo Bob was hysterical and it re-kindled memories of sitting at Jacob’s ice cream parlour downtown and watching Howdy Doody at 4 pm......and then home to watch Sagebrush Trail at 6 pm on WBEN TV from Buffalo.
Soupy was so funny to us....what a simple format as you have shown with the photos of staging...
They had so much fun doing those shows...there would have been a lot of ad-lib...I will try to get some video clips of an old show on internet..
Talk soon.
“Oh Lo-Oh Lo....” WHAP !.....( pie in face)
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