Word: pied
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...from the 1950s through the '70s, had the seeming informality of a friendly fellow you would hire to entertain the tots. He'd crack venerable jokes, play with puppets, teach the occasional verity ("Don't eat just before dinner") and, at the end, get a custard pie in the face. Simple stuff, really, but delivered with a brio that kept generations of children giggling. So his death on Thursday in a Bronx hospice, at age 83 after years of declining health, had to raise a tear, and a reflective silly grin...
...love you and give ya a big kiss." They returned the affection. Lunch with Soupy Sales soon gained converts of all ages and went national in 1959. For a brief spell in the early '60s, he was a prime-time star; Frank Sinatra showed up to get a pie in the face. (See a pictorial history of stand-up comedy...
...Stern. His cheerful comedic style seemed antique compared with the grouchiness of those two audio superstars. But even in the '50s and '60s, parading his encyclopedic memory for shtick, he was a throwback to every baggypants tummeler, every silent-movie clown. And like those masters, he knew that a pie in the face was the visual equivalent of a rim shot. Set up the joke, do the punch line, get a goopy Soupy face. He explained this precise, predictable rhythm in a 2002 interview with Ed Grant on the Manhattan cable-access show Media Funhouse: "Guy says, 'Where...
Levity may not have attended the passing of Milton Supman. There were presumably no last rites with custard filling. But given all the knockabout pleasure Soupy Sales gave innocent kids and sophisticated adults, he certainly deserves a pie...
...idealized picture of the American heartland, baseball, mom and apple pie feature prominently. The Italian version? Soccer, spaghetti and, yes, la mamma. But in recent years, the folkloric image of the doting Italian mother has been joined in the national consciousness by something a tad less idyllic: the mammone, or mama's boy, the hyper-coddled son (daughters are statistically less susceptible) who grows up so attached to his home, and to his mamma in particular, that he never really becomes independent or a self-sufficient...