Soupy Sales (b. January 8, 1926, d. October 22, 2009) had a long and prolific entertainment career, but was best known for his children's tv show, Lunch with Soupy Sales (originally titled 12 O'clock Comics and later called The Soupy Sales Show), which was jam-packed with sketches, jokes, and gags that typically ended with a pie in his face, which became his trademark. Soupy Sales is famous for turning pieing into an art form. There is probably not a way to be pied that Soupy hasn't done - on top the head, both ears, from behind, hitting a stationary pie with his face, if you can think of it, he probably thought of it (and did it) first.
"Be true to your teeth and they won't be false to you."
“I'll probably be remembered for the pies, and that's all right.
That's fine and dandy.”
"Producers say, 'Hey, all he does is throw pies.' It kept me off a
lot of shows."
"I've never done a pretentious show; it's always had a live feeling,
the kind of thing that comes across when you don't know what's going
to happen next. I've never done anything simply because I thought I
could get away with it. I've just wanted to do the funniest show."
Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced comedian whose anything-for-a-chuckle
career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV
appearances across a half-century of laughs, died at the age of 83
at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx, NY.
At the peak of his fame in the 1950s and ‘60s, Sales was arguably one of the
best-known faces in the United States. His former manager
said,
“If President Eisenhower would have walked down the street, no one
would have recognized him as much as Soupy." Even with the excessive
fame, Sales retained an openness to fans that turned every
restaurant meal into an endless autograph-signing session.
“He was just good to people,” said Usher.
Sales was born Milton Supman on Jan. 8, 1926, in Franklinton, NC,
where his was the only Jewish family in town. His parents, owners of
a dry-goods store, sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan. The family later
moved to Huntington, WV.
Sales returned from the Navy after the Second World War and became a
$20-a-week reporter at a West Virginia radio station. He jumped to a
DJ gig, changed his name to Soupy Heinz and headed for Ohio.
Sales began his TV career in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then moved to
Detroit, where he drew a large audience on WXYZ-TV. He moved to Los
Angeles in 1961.
After moving to Los Angeles, he eventually became a fill-in host on
The Tonight Show.
He moved to New York in 1964 and debuted The Soupy Sales Show, with
co-star puppets White Fang (the meanest dog in the United States)
and Black Tooth (the nicest dog in the United States). By the time
his Big Apple run ended two years later, Sales had appeared on 5,370
live television programs — the most in the medium’s history, he
boasted. He had a pair of albums that hit the Billboard Top 10 in
1965; Do the Mouse sold 250,000 copies in New York alone.
Sales remained a familiar television face, first as a regular from
1968-75 on the game show What’s My Line? and later appearing on
everything from The Mike Douglas Show to The Love Boat. He played
himself in the 1998 movie Holy Man, which starred Eddie Murphy.
He joined WNBC-AM as a disc jockey in 1985, a stint best remembered
because Sales filled the hours between shock jocks Don Imus and
Howard Stern.
His greatest success came in New York with The Soupy Sales Show – an
ostensible children's show that had little to do with Captain
Kangaroo and other kiddie fare. Sales' manic, improvisational style
also attracted an older audience that responded to his
envelope-pushing antics.
The comic's pie-throwing shtick became his trademark, and
celebrities queued up to take one on the chin alongside Sales.
During the early 1960s, stars like Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and
Shirley MacLaine received their just desserts side-by-side with the
comedian on his television show.
“I'll probably be remembered for the pies, and that's all right,” he
said in a 1985 interview. “That's fine and dandy.”
His first pie to the face came in 1951, when the newly christened
Soupy Sales was hosting a children’s show in Cleveland. In Detroit,
Sales’ show garnered a national reputation as he honed his act — a
barrage of sketches, gags and bad puns that played in the Motor City
for seven years.
His
influence was also obvious in the Pee-Wee Herman character created
by Paul Reubens.
Soupy Sales experienced a bit of controversy during his career.
Sales was once suspended for a week after telling his young listeners to empty mommy's purse and mail him all the pieces of
green paper bearing pictures of the presidents.
The cast of Saturday Night Live cast later paid homage by asking
their audience to send in their joints.
Sales was plagued by false rumors that he was telling inappropriate
jokes on his children's show. As Soupy himself explained in
his autobiography, none of it was anything he could have gotten away
with on television in the mid-1960s and still have remained on the
air:
"[A]bout those myths. There were all these other things I was supposed to have said, like 'What begins with 'F' and ends with 'UCK' ... a firetruck,' or, 'I took my wife to the ball game and kissed her on the strikes and she kissed me on the balls,' or, 'My wife is a great cook, she makes great pies — I eat her cherry and she eats my banana.' And people would swear that I said it! Now, you know that in those days you couldn't say nuthin' [like that on television]. I got so annoyed at these stories that I used to have a standing offer of ten thousand dollars cash to anyone who could prove that I said any of the things that people claim I've said. Look, at every TV station, whether you know it or not, there's a little spool in the master machine in engineering that records everything that's said, everything that goes on. And believe me, if I said half the things I'm supposed to have said, they would be on some blooper record making the rounds."
Soupy assessed how these rumors came to be associated with his TV show:
"After many years, I think I finally figured out how these ridiculous stories got started. Kids would come home and they'd tell a dirty joke, you know, grade school humor, and the parents would say, 'Where'd you hear that?' And they'd say 'The Soupy Sales Show,' because I happened to have the biggest show in town. And they'd call another person and say, 'Gladys — did you hear the joke that Soupy Sales was telling on his show?' and the word of mouth goes on and on, until people start to believe you actually said things like that."
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*The Fine Print
