SOUP’S STILL ON : Don’t Expect Pie-Throwing, but There’ll Be Plenty Else That’s Vintage Soupy Sales

“It’s cold and raining,” Soupy Sales was saying by phone from his home in Manhattan. He paused, then added: “Oh good, I just saw a Dalmatian with thermal spots. . . . I drove past the zoo this morning and the polar bear was wearing a grizzly.”

For those who plan to catch his show at the Coach House on Sunday night, be assured: He’s still Soupy after all these years.

During the peak of his popularity in the 1960s, Soupy Sales boasted a nationwide television audience in the millions. And there were as many adults as there were pubescent and pre-pubescent baby boomers who loyally tuned into his dinner-hour show to feast on the corny jokes, the wacky skits and the silly bits with White Fang (“the world’s biggest and meanest dog”), Black Tooth (“the world’s biggest and sweetest dog”) and Pookie, the puppet lion who showed up at Soupy’s window every day to sing and exchange barbs.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games on the show’s patently cheap set: There was the blackboard on which were written the daily Words of Wisdom (“Be true to your teeth and they won’t be false to you”).

Life magazine chronicled the Soupy phenomenon. So did Look and Time. Sales turned out a series of hit comedy albums. He did the Ed Sullivan show. And at the height of the Watusi, the Jerk and the Swim, he even created his own silly song/dance called the Mouse.

“The Soupy Sales Show” was, as the Soupmeister himself puts it, “a monstrous hit.”

Even Frank Sinatra asked to be invited on so he could be creamed with one of Sales’ trademark pies.

Doing a guest shot on the show quickly became the “in” thing in Hollywood as other stars followed Sinatra’s lead. On came Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, Mickey Rooney, Burt Lancaster--and Robert Cummings, who was, Sales said, “the only guy to send me a bill for 75 cents to get his clothes cleaned.” And it wasn’t a joke, he added. “The man was furious.”

The Coach House show is the first in a series of Southern California dates that Sales has lined up this week: He’ll be at the Strand in Redondo Beach on Tuesday, the Belly Up Tavern in Solano Beach on Wednesday and the Palomino in North Hollywood on Thursday, April 30. The Sunday night appearance marks the first time Sales has performed live in Southern California since he was on stage at the Comedy Store in Hollywood in 1976.

That’s not to say he hasn’t been performing. During the past 15 years he has been doing shows at comedy clubs all over the East Coast as well as at the Dunes in Las Vegas and Harrah’s in Atlantic City. He even occasionally fills in for morning radio-show hosts.

It’s not hard to guess who shows up for a Soupy Sales show.

“My biggest audiences come from people who grew up watching me,” said the ever-ebullient comedian, who, when asked to define his appeal said, “I’m very approachable.”

Sales, 66, was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, N.C., because, he joked, “I wanted to be near my mother.” He earned a degree in journalism from Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va., and began his career in radio in 1946. But he’s no stranger to Orange County. He was stationed near San Diego while in the Navy in the ‘40s, and he remembers driving through Laguna Beach and seeing the red-bearded Eiler Larsen, Laguna’s unofficial greeter, on Coast Highway.

During the heyday of his TV show in 1963 when he was broadcasting live from Los Angeles, he even performed at the Orange County Fair. (“The Orange County Fair was really something; I mean big crowds.”)

Sales, who bemoans the lack of comedy variety shows on television these says, said he enjoys working in comedy clubs.

“It’s the only creative outlet I’ve got now to perform,” he said. “To perform stand-up comedy in a club, that’s the most exciting profession in the world. You’re like Spartacus going into battle because every show is a different audience. And you’re not hiding behind anything; you’re yourself out there and being judged on your own merits.”

Although Sales said there are no pies in his fast-paced, high-energy stage show, he does talk about his old TV show.

“I do a segment on what a typical show would be, with the Words of Wisdom and the Soupy Shuffle,” he said. “People like it, and it takes them back to it.”

The rest of the act, he said, is “a potpourri of different things. There’s music in it and some parodies. There are some good stories and I talk about some current stuff.”

He has, for example, been following reports of the recent search for Amelia Earhart’s airplane.

“They found part of her shoe and part of the plane in the South Pacific,” he said. “Unfortunately her luggage turned up in Cleveland.”

Laughing, Sales added: “And I have Words of Wisdom for ya. My Words of Wisdom for today are, ‘Never buy a TV set from a man on the street who’s out of breath.’ ”

Sales is not sure how to explain the popularity of his old TV show. Maybe, he said, it was because he worked so close to the camera.

“It was an honest show--what you saw was what you got. I was the little guy. I was beaten by the guy at the door, the puppets beat me, the dogs beat me. It was very physical, and you never knew what was going to happen.”

Sales denies ever doing a bit on the show that ended with him making an obscene hand gesture, as was rumored at one time. “I’m not an idiot; I wasn’t about to go on and do something like that,” he said, adding that he also never told the many off-color jokes that have been attributed to him.

But he did get suspended by TV station WNEW for an ad-libbed routine in 1965.

It was the end of the show on New Year’s Day and he had a minute to fill, so he walked up to the camera and proceeded to instruct his younger viewers to tiptoe into their parents’ bedrooms and find their wallets. He then told them to “get all the green pieces of paper with the pictures of guys in beards” and mail them to Soupy Sales at the TV station.

He ended the bit by saying, “And you know what I’m going to send you? A postcard from Puerto Rico.”

It was vintage Soupy Sales.

But, he said, the station received thousands of dollars in the mail, and he was suspended for two weeks.

As Sales sees it, “That’s the most brilliant minute of ad-lib in television history because it proved how powerful the medium is.”

But it’s the pies in the face for which Soupy Sales is best known.

Although he had always been a big fan of pie-throwing in the movies, he said, he wasn’t able to use pies until after he moved to Cleveland in 1950 to do a TV record-pantomime show that included sketches.

He received his first pie in the face while playing an Indian in a brief spoof of the 1950 James Stewart Western “Broken Arrow.” The station’s cooking show host baked that first gooey missile. Although Sales would later use a shaving cream filling, the secret has always the crust.

“A pie has to hit you and explode into a thousand pieces so you see the person’s face and see it take away his dignity,” said the master, who claims to have been hit in the face with more than 20,000 pies.

“I used to look like Cary Grant,” he said, “and look how I look now.”

Who: Soupy Sales.

When: Sunday, April 26, at 8 p.m.

Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

Wherewithal: $17.50.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.