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Soupy Sales, Flinger of Pies and Punch Lines, Dies at 83
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
October 24, 2009

Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned a pie in the face into a madcap art form, died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 83.

Hisformer manager, David Usher, said Mr. Sales had died in a hospice after suffering from multiple health problems.

Cavorting with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth and Pookie the Lion, transforming himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the ever-present “nut at the door,” Soupy Sales became a television favorite of youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers, college students and many adults as well.

Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie and shuffling through his Mouse dance, he reached his slapstick heyday in the mid-1960s on “The Soupy Sales Show,” a widely syndicated program based at WNEW-TV in New York.

Beyond the pie-throwing, Mr. Sales was especially remembered for one infamous moment. It came on New Year’s Day 1965, when he asked youngsters to go through their parents’ clothing and send him little green pieces of paper with pictures of men with beards.

Mr. Sales reported receiving only a few dollar bills, and he said he had donated them to charity, but Metromedia, the station’s owner, suspended him briefly after a viewer complained to the Federal Communications Commission that he was encouraging children to steal.

That stunt only heightened Mr. Sales’s appeal as a tweaker of authority. When he headlined a rock ’n’ roll show at the Paramount Theater the following Easter, as many as 3,000 teenagers were snaking through Times Square hoping for seats at the morning performance. “He’s great, he’s a nut like us,” a 13-year-old boy told The New York Times.

Mr. Sales was rumored to have told off-color jokes to his young listeners, but he denied that. As he put it in his memoir, “Soupy Sez!” (M. Evans, 2001), written with Charles Salzberg: “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.”

By his own count, some 20,000 pies were hurled at him or visitors to his TV shows in the 1950s and 60s. The victims included Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, all of whom turned up just for the honor of being creamed.

Mr. Sales had precise requirements on the ingredients for successful pie-throwing: “You can use whipped cream, egg whites or shaving cream, but shaving cream is much better because it doesn’t spoil. And no tin plates. The secret is you just can’t push it and shove it in somebody’s face. It has to be done with a pie that has a lot of crust so that it breaks up into a thousand pieces when it hits you.”

But the key to his comedy went beyond pie.

“Our shows were not actually written, but they were precisely thought out,” he explained in his memoir. “But the greatest thing about the show, and I think the reason for its success, was that it seemed undisciplined. The more you can make a performance seem spontaneous, the better an entertainer you are.”

Mr. Sales felt that his shows appealed to adults as well as the children who laughed at his antics. “Once I found out that adults were watching, too, I never consciously changed anything to play to them,” he recalled.

Soupy Sales was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, N.C., where his parents, Irving and Sadie Supman, owned a dry goods store. Neighbors pronounced his last name “Soupman,” so he called himself Soupy as a youngster.

Drawing on the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers and Harry Ritz, he entered show business after graduating from Marshall College in Huntington, W.Va. Working as a teenage dance-show host and D. J. on television and radio, he appeared on stations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then began “Lunch With Soupy” in 1953 on WXYZ-TV in Detroit.

Mr. Sales, who had a large collection of jazz and big-band music at the time, invited leading figures in the jazz world, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to perform live on his evening program in Detroit, “Soupy’s On.” He made Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite” his theme song.

He took the name Soupy Sales in part from the old-time comic actor Chic Sale. After appearing on local TV in Los Angeles and on the ABC-TV network, he made his debut on WNEW in the fall of 1964. Mr. Sales was later a longtime panelist on TV’s “What’s My Line,” appeared on many other game shows and was a host for a variety talk show on WNBC Radio in the 1980s.

His survivors include his wife, Trudy, and his sons Tony and Hunt.

For all the staged mayhem on his shows, the truly unpredictable did occur. “I remember one time we were working with Pookie at the window,” Mr. Sales recalled. “He was doing a bit where he was breaking eggs and one of the eggs turned out to be rotten. My God, the smell was terrible! And I’m sure, watching us at home, everyone knew there was something wrong from the look on our faces.”

One episode remained etched in the Soupy Sales pie-throwing hall of fame. “One of my younger fans made the mistake of heaving a frozen pie at me before it defrosted,” he once wrote in The New York Journal-American. “It caught me in the neck and I dropped like a pile of bricks.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/arts/television/24sales.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&pagewanted=print