Word: vernon
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...style of comedy would, on someone else, be labeled deadpan. But Jackie Vernon's pan is not dead; it is dying, painfully, by degrees...
...long while the pain was real; persistent obscurity, cancellations when his act bombed, endless bouncing from cellar to dive in search of a sympathetic audience. At last he found one. Its name was Steve Allen, who caught Vernon's act in Canada and booked him for his TV show. After Allen came Jack Paar, Ed Sullivan, Hootenanny-and success. Last week Vernon fans gathered at Manhattan's Hotel Plaza to pay homage to their anti-hero-the first stand-up comic to play the staid Persian Room in 41 years...
...Vernon, now 36, is the classic loser. His act, always in the same minor key, begins with an apology: "I'm only doing this because I couldn't get a job in my regular line of work. I'm a Viking." He lugubriously narrates his biography: "My grandfather was an old Yugoslavian guerrilla fighter. My grandmother was an old Yugoslavian guerrilla. My family was so underprivileged we used to get food from Europe. Finally I was adopted by a Korean family...
MUSTARD GAS." Nothing helped. At last, lonely and morose, he sought the companionship of a watermelon. "I figured if things didn't work out I could always eat it." But the watermelon died. And he was left alienated once again. Vernon's miseries will be worth $100,000 this year. And future bookings are pouring in. Still, Vernon is taking no chances, planning no new routines. "I've been a real loser too long," he says. "I'm sticking with failure. It's been good...
...after hour, the toll mounted: 27 dead at week's end, nearly 600 injured, 1,700 arrested, property damage well over $100 million. Minute by minute, police radios logged a Wellsian cata logue of carnage: "Manchester and Broadway, a mob of 1,000 . . . Shots at Avalon and Imperial . . . Vernon and Central, looting . . . Yellow cab over turned . . . Man pulled from car on Imperial Highway . . . 88th and Broad way, gun battle . . . Officer in trouble." The riot was the worst in the city's history, one of the worst ever in the U.S. To help quell it, California...