I saw him open for a band about 25 years ago.
A Distinguished Professor With a Ph.D. in Nonsense
By COREY KILGANNON
The first thing Irwin Corey ordered when he sat down to lunch recently at the Friars Club was a tube of denture cream. Unfazed, the waiter returned five minutes later and placed it in front of him like an appetizer.
“I always bring my dentist with me,” Mr. Corey said, putting in his teeth amid the usual raucous lunchtime scene at the legendary comedians’ club on East 55th Street in Manhattan.
“The Friars doesn’t have denture cream on the menu,” said Mr. Corey’s longtime agent, Irvin Arthur, 81. “It probably should.”
Mr. Corey nodded and said, “The median age at the Friars is: deceased.”
“And the word you hear mostly here at the Friars is: ‘Ehh?’ ” he said, cupping his ear and leaning forward like an old man hard of hearing.
In fact, Mr. Corey, 93, is hard of hearing, but that does not stop him from continuing to work regularly in New York and elsewhere.
“He comes to me and says, ‘You got any jobs? I want to work,’ ” said Mr. Arthur, who has represented Mr. Corey for some 50 years.
Over his eight-decade career, Mr. Corey, who is known as Professor Irwin Corey on the comedy circuit, has been billed as “The World’s Foremost Authority,” a reference to his trademark style of highfalutin double talk and long, nonsensical observations that typically start with “However ...”
He established his “professor” character — wearing black tails, a string tie, sneakers and a scarecrow hairdo — back in the 1940s and used it on television and in comedy clubs, nightclubs and concert halls worldwide. He was a talk show and sitcom staple and a skilled actor who said he began on Broadway in 1943 and whose film career includes work with Jackie Gleason and Woody Allen.
“I feel like I’ve been watching Irwin Corey forever,” said Dick Cavett, who has performed in traveling comedy shows with him. “I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.”
Born in 1914 in Brooklyn, Mr. Corey said his struggling parents placed him in the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum when he was a young child.
He began doing comedy to cheer the other children, he said, and at age 15 rode west in boxcars and enrolled himself in the prestigious Belmont High School in Los Angeles. He later returned to New York, and in 1938, he said, he helped write for “Pins and Needles,” a musical comedy about a union organizer.
It was an early example of what became a lifetime of left-wing activism and an outspokenness that he said hobbled his career as an entertainer, getting him blacklisted from TV networks. Even the communists thought him too radical.
“When I tried to join the Communist Party, they called me an anarchist,” Mr. Corey said in an interview in his home, an 1840 carriage house on East 36th Street.
A staple of his routine is describing how he procured from the federal government a copy of the Declaration of Independence through the Freedom of Information Act. He pulls out the document, most of which is blacked out with marker.
Mr. Corey said he was discharged from the Army during World War II after claiming to be gay. He campaigned for president during the 1960 election on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy ticket. On “The Tonight Show” and other talk shows, he would ignore time limits, so stagehands began chasing him into the audience as part of the routine.
On one wall of the comedian’s home hangs a letter from Lenny Bruce, along with a photograph of Mr. Corey hugging Fidel Castro, during a visit to Cuba to donate medicine for children. Various books, including “The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies,” sit on a table.
The day Mr. Corey was having lunch at the Friars Club, the comedian Stewie Stone stopped by his table and recalled his first sight of Mr. Corey, arriving to perform at the Playboy Club, elegantly carrying his tattered tailcoat on a hanger in a clear plastic dry-cleaning bag.
“He’s one of the great trailblazers in comedy,” Mr. Stone said.
Waiting for his coffee, Mr. Corey explained the meaning of life, at least as he and probably no one else understood it.
“One of the things that you’ve got to understand is that we’ve got to develop a continuity in order to relate to exacerbate those whose curiosity has not been defended, yet the information given can no longer be used as allegoric because the defendant does not use the evidence which can be substantiated by,” he said before finally asking, “What was the question?”
The coffee arrived. Then Mr. Corey got up and walked over to a table of five men and began telling jokes. He said that someone had recently told him, “I haven’t seen you in 30 years and you haven’t changed a bit.” Mr. Corey said he cursed the man and said, “You mean to say I looked like this 30 years ago?”
His son, Richard Corey, attributes his father’s comedic style to a lack of vision in his right eye: something about making the world look flatter and two-dimensional, and making disparities clearer.
“His style is a deep philosophical statement: No one in fact is any more important than another,” said Richard Corey, who lives in Manhattan. “He is constantly digressing from his own tangent, so he’s digressing from a digression.”
Mr. Corey said about his son: “I was very strict with him. When he went out at night, I used to tell him, ‘If you’re not in bed by midnight, come home.’ ”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 17 April 2008 19:36 (sixteen years ago) link
Professor Irwin Corey: However…I accept this financial stipulation – ah – stipend in behalf of Richard Python for the great contribution which to quote from some of the missiles which he has contributed… Today we must all be aware that protocol takes precedence over procedure. However you say – WHAT THE – what does this mean… in relation to the tabulation whereby we must once again realize that the great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the Nixon administration…indicating that only an American writer can receive…the award for fiction, unlike Solzinitski whose fiction does not hold water. Comrades – friends, we are gathered here not only to accept in behalf of one recluse – one who has found that the world in itself which seems to be a time not of the toad – to quote Studs TurKAL. And many people ask “Who are Studs TurKAL?” It’s not “Who are Studs TurKAL?” it’s “Who AM Studs TurKAL?” This in itself is an edifice of the great glory that has gone beyond, and the intuitive feeling of the American people, based on the assumption that the intelligence not only as Mencken once said, “He who underestimates the American pubic – public, will not go broke.” This is merely a small indication of this vast throng gathered here to once again behold and to perceive that which has gone behind and to that which might go forward into the future…we’ve got to hurdle these obstacles. This is the MAIN deterrent upon which we have gathered our strength and all the others who say, “What the hell did that get?” – WE DON’T KNOW. We’ve got to perforce with all the loving boy… And as Miller once said in one of his great novels – what did the … that language is only necessary when communication is endangered. And you sit there bewildered, and Pinter who went further said “It is not the lack of communication but fear of communication.” THAT’S WHAT THE GODDAMN THING IS that we fear – communication. Oh – fortunately the prize has only been given to authors – unlike the Academy Award which is given to a female and a male, indicating the derision of the human specie – God damn it! But we have no paranoia, and Mr. Pynchon has attained, and has created for himself serenity, and it is only the insanity that has kept him alive in his paranoia. We speak of the organ…of the orgasm…WHO THE HELL WROTE THIS? And the jury has determined to divide the prize between two writers – to Thomas Pynchon for his Gravity’s Rainbow. Now Gravity’s Rainbow is a token of this man’s genius…he told me so himself…that he could…in other words, have been more specific, but rather than to allude the mundane, he has come to the conclusion that brevity is the importance of our shallow existence. God damn. Ladies and Gentlemen. To the distinguished panel on the dais and to the other winners, for poetry and religion and science. The time will come when religion will outlive its usefulness. Marx, Groucho Marx, once said that religion is the opiate of the people. I say that when religion outlives its usefulness, then opium…will be human… All right…However, I want to thank Mr. Guinzburg, Tom Guinzburg of the Viking Press, who has made it possible for you people to be here this evening to enjoy the Friction Citation – the Fiction Citation. Gravity’s Rainbow – a small contribution to a certain degree, since there are over three and a half billion people in the world today. 218 million of them live in the United States which is a very, very small amount compared to those that are dying elsewhere…Well, I say that you will be on the road to new horizons, for we who live in a society where sex is a commodity and a politician can become a TV personality, it’s not easy to conform if you have any morality…I said that myself many years ago…But I do want to thank the bureau…I mean the committee, the organization for the $10,000 they’ve given out…tonight they made over $400,000 and I think that I have another appointment. I would like to stay here, but for the sake of brevity I must leave. I do want to thank you, I want to thank Studs TurKAL. I want to thank Mr. Knopf who just ran through the auditorium and I want to thank Breshnev, Kissinger – acting President of the Unites States – and also want to thank Truman Capote and thank you.
― Mr. Que, Thursday, 17 April 2008 19:39 (sixteen years ago) link
one year passes...
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