Florida Condo Circuit : Old Jokes Never Die, Just Retire

The piano player wants to know, does he have to stay for Sonny’s act? The time before last, another old comic made him hang around 45 minutes just to play a little hut-tut-tut to close the show.

“No offense,” the musician says. “I’ll play for the girl singer, then give you your intro, then head out.”

“Go, go,” the comic answers, flipping his hand at the wrist. “Bob Hope, this isn’t. I’m a hit with music. I’m a hit without.”

Forty years in the business, Sonny Sands doesn’t need a piano. He could use a few pounds since he had the surgery, and it would be nice if they paid him more than peanuts. But laughs he can still get without a piano, knock wood.

Audience Older

A half-hour later, slight as a pixie, he walks on stage. He is 69, and many in the audience have blown out more candles than that. He puts a cup of coffee by the piano for when his throat gets dry. Then he opens his palms and shrugs his shoulders.

“I can see you didn’t expect such a big, good-looking guy out here,” he tells them--and off he goes, into his lifeblood, into his shtick.

This is the South Florida condominium circuit, and Sonny Sands is a condo comic, playing out the last laughs in the recreation halls of an American retirement capital. Sonny will tell you that at this stage of the game all he wants to do is to get on, get off, get the money and go home.

But that’s a fib. Stay around a bit and he talks about what it is to be wanted, to be loved--to make people forget their aches and pains and to make him forget his own. The thing is to keep going.

‘Like Newark’

“Life is like a composition,” Sonny Sands says. “There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. At first, everything is new and exciting. Then, in the middle, it all begins to look like Newark. Finally, life can become a little disappointing if you let it.”

The condo crowd understands this. Like Sonny, they never made it big, never became a name or a millionaire. They had some ups, some downs, some near-misses. Now the years have rocked their dreams to sleep, and there are more memories to remember than memories to be made.

Not that anyone should take up a collection. After all, these people have a place in Florida, a few bucks in the bank and white shoes to go with the new golf bag. Their hip may forecast the weather, but the weather is usually good. They like a good kibitz.

“I enjoy the condominiums,” Sonny tells them, a blue pin-stripe suit not quite camouflaging the skinniness of his 110 pounds. “I’m on by 8; the audience is asleep by 8:30; I’m home by 9:15.

“Recently, I worked a convention of doctors. I think they booked me because I looked like a patient.”

The delivery is slow, with a rhythm that massages the room like ointment. What goes over are jokes about a visit from the grandchildren, the widows who want to dance with the widowers, a trip to the eye doctor:

“I told him my right eye is blurry. He said, I’m sorry, I’m only a left eye doctor. In the next building is a right eye doctor.”

Dirty No Good

Mention a street in Brooklyn and applause fizzes up like seltzer. The birds and bees make good material, but never the pollinating. Dirty is no good here.

“She was wearing a V-neck dress. So I asked her, is that V for victory? No, it’s V for virgin, she said. You’re a virgin? I asked. No, she said, it’s an old dress.”

God bless, Sonny says, that there are still places to tell these jokes. After all, for a comic, live entertainment is not so alive these days.

Las Vegas and Atlantic City are for the big stars. Even in the Borscht Belt--the few remaining resorts in the Catskill Mountains--they mostly use names that at least ring a bell, a Red Buttons or a Henny Youngman or a Sid Caesar.

So, if not the Florida condominiums, where else could the old-timers go--guys like Sonny Sands and Lou Shor and Eddie Barton, guys who made a little noise but never so much it didn’t die down?

‘I Was Good’

“I was never that big a talent,” Sonny says, staring back across the spotlights of a thousand lounges, drinks on the tables and hookers at the bar. “I was good. I was big. But I was never that big.”

Long time ago, when Sonny was a boy in Brooklyn, and the boy’s name was Seymour Schneider, a comic could find all the work he wanted within a 5-cent subway ride. Then, in the summers, there was the Borscht Belt. Sonny started out in a tiny hotel. He was part bellboy, part chauffeur, part emcee.

After a while, he stole enough jokes to break in an act. He was lousy, but he didn’t know it. That’s a good thing. Being lousy is bad enough without getting hit in the eye with it.

In those days, everyplace needed some kind of show, and the comics worked doubles and triples, driving like madmen from job to job on the same night.

Success Stories

Some of them eventually became big hits--Buddy Hackett, Jerry Lewis and the rest. Go believe in miracles--Jack Roy dropped out to sell paint for a living, then started over as Rodney Dangerfield and is now a superstar at 64. His new movie made $80 million!

But, looking back, only one in 100 climbed up to stay. The rest just got a taste of it, enough to know what they were hungry for.

Sonny himself played Vegas. He did Jack Paar and Joey Bishop. He was on “The Jackie Gleason Show” six times in the three years up through 1968. Or was it ‘69?

“Who can remember?” he says. “I must have had 83 comebacks.”

He was always funnier than his material, a timing-and-delivery kind of comic with a knowing smile across a friendly puss.

Some years, the career seemed ready to take off. Other times, it was like a knock-knock joke: Who’s there? Sonny Sands. Sonny Sands who?

Stalked Off Stage

To be honest about it, he also liked to take a drink--and sometimes two and sometimes kaplotz. One night, warming up for Paul Anka, he gave hell to a noisy audience at the Copacabana in New York, then stalked off.

This isn’t done. The whispers start. When you’re big, the agents and owners are working for you. But till then, you’re working for them.

“You got to be a pro,” Sonny says. “You got to show up and behave yourself. You can’t be a drunk. And you have to have some business acumen.

“Bad habits, I had. Drinking and girls. And I was lazy. . . . But, what the hell, you can’t buy back yesterday. There’s no way.”

Miami Beach Action

Sonny had fallen in love with Miami Beach in the ‘50s, and he made it his home base. The town was all action back then. Gambling was wide open. The bellhops made book, and the ladies wore mink. A $50 spot melted away faster than an ice cube on Collins Avenue.

Oh, was this a Miami Beach! The Art Deco hotels looked like wedding cakes and ice-cream cones. The ocean was waiting out the back door, where they served pastrami sandwiches on tables shaded by big umbrellas.

For miles up the shore, places had fancy names--the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc and the Sherry Frontenac. The lobbies were decorated in something between brothel and chateau, one outdoing the next with circling staircases and velvet drapes and chandeliers that hung like sparkling wands.

Sinatra was always coming down back then. So were Sammy Davis Jr. and Jimmy Durante and every other name. The hotels had three shows a night, and Sonny’s phone was ringing. Every two weeks, new tourists arrived to hear the jokes the old tourists had just finished laughing at.

“It was like a party,” Sonny says. “There were girls, this and that. There were always people to talk to. The world was coming to you.”

Miami Beach had a long run, but in time those glittering fixtures and golden moldings began to look old hat. Glamorous people found other places to plop down their tanned bodies and thick billfolds.

In part, the town caved in from the weight of its own success. Many tourists decided they wanted to have their own piece of this paradise--why pay all that money on a room tab when you can buy a condo and build up equity? Even Sonny bought.

More Condos

By the late ‘60s, the hotels were crying the blues, and more and more condos were breaking ground. Much of the new money was cashed from Social Security checks, and the oceanfront strip turned into a hardening artery. Marquees began advertising early-bird specials instead of nightly entertainment.

Much of the talent hit the road. Others, like Sonny, stayed put, making a last stand. Funny thing, the condominiums started becoming their own circuit, nothing to get rich with, but a thin living. Sonny Sands, and dozens like him, became condo comics.

“Show business, it’s not, if you want to know the truth,” he says now. “Some of the places, they don’t even have a cup of coffee, they should drop dead. . . .

Sonny enjoys the complaining. But he worries about giving the wrong idea. He’s too old to hit the road now, anyway, he says. So what could be better than working these condos in his own backyard?

Laughter Is Reward

When he had an operation a few years ago the possibility of death made him realize something: You do the best you can with life, and you don’t hurt nobody. That’s what it’s all about.

“The biggest reward is the laughter, the acceptance,” he says. “I understand these people and they understand me. How much time you think you got in this world? I love this.”

There are hundreds of condos, Miami Beach to Palm Beach. Some of them are high-rises near the ocean, with the brawny look of refrigerators or of giant ice-cube trays that stand straight up.

Others burst out of the swamps to the west, sprawling cities of 5,000 or 10,000 with names like Century Village and King’s Point and Lauderdale Oaks.

The bigger ones have auditoriums, huge as university theaters, with cushy seats and professional lighting. They have dressing rooms in back, where Sonny combs his hair with the palm of his hand:

Admission Subsidized

“Something is wrong with this mirror,” he likes to say. “I’ve got wrinkles in this mirror.”

The audience usually pays $1 each to get in, the entertainment subsidized by condo maintenance fees, same as cleaning the pool and spraying for bugs.

Performing for this crowd can have its quirks. Frankie Man, the impressionist, was ready to go on when the emcee announced, “We’re really sorry to report that Mr. Saperstein did pass away at 2 o’clock this afternoon, and we’d like a moment of silence before we bring on the comic.”

But, mostly, it’s easy work. This is a pushover audience--a lot of them Northeasterners, primarily Jewish, the same people who laughed at the jokes in Brooklyn and the Catskills. So they know a few of the punch lines already. They think it’s a joy to hear them again.

‘Don’t Get Me Lost’

On a recent Wednesday night, Sonny drove west past the last street lights to where they’ve built yet another Century Village. He sometimes gets confused amid the clusters of white concrete slabs and moonlit artificial lakes.

“I’m the show,” he tells the security guard at the perimeter gate. “Don’t get me lost.”

In through the stage door, he recognizes the lighting man. Then he pokes his head around, room to room. They have coffee.

“Thank God,” he says.

There are plenty of mirrors to look at, and the comic has a joke for each one. “I’m going bald! How can this be?” he wants to know. “I’m 23 years old!”

He moves his bony face close to the glass. His eyes have settled deep into the sockets. His hair is thin and bleached.

The emcee sees him. A college student, he is just 25. He wants to be a court reporter. Emcee is his part-time job. To him, being with Sonny is like time-traveling and ending up in vaudeville.

Talk With Young Emcee

“You can never retire, can you?” he says pleasantly, trying to start conversation.

“No, why should I?” the comic answers. “When people retire, what do they do, sit and play cards? I enjoy this more than they do.”

The singer is already on. Her voice carries backstage, beyond the curtains. She’s not too bad, Sonny says. At least, she doesn’t talk too much between numbers. Some of them, they make it sound like they were with Rodgers and Hammerstein when they wrote it.

The comic looks at his watch and then pulls at the loose skin on his neck. It’s almost time.

He asks the emcee, “How much you charging, $1 or $2?”

“One dollar tonight,” the younger man answers. “We get $2 for some acts. One dollar tonight.”

Sonny sips coffee between tugs at a cigarette.

“How do I look compared to the last time you saw me?” he asks.

“You look thinner,” the emcee reports.

“Really, is it bad?”

“Oh, no, no,” the younger man lies.

It’s Show Time

One more time, Sonny gets up to confront the mirror. He adjusts the lavender handkerchief in his coat pocket. Then he studies his face again, the lips and the eyes and the chin. It’s both Sonny and what has become of Sonny.

“You’d think they’d fix these mirrors,” he says.

Then, in a minute, the condo comic is on stage. He opens his palms and hunches up his shoulders.

He tells them, “I can see you didn’t expect such a big, good-looking guy out here.”