O.C. COMEDY REVIEW : No More Kid Stuff for Sales : Soupy’s stand-up act is full of vulgar one-liners and off-color stories, unlike the humor of his television days a generation ago.

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO — Some 30 years ago, Chuck Harrell remembers, hardly an afternoon passed without his mother summoning him for the highlight of the day: “The Soupy Sales Show.”

“No matter what we were doing,” Harrell recalled Sunday, “we had to see Soupy Sales.” Some things have changed for Harrell since then. He’s now 45, sports a bushy beard and runs his own bar in Laguna Beach. But on Sunday night, it was just like old times: There was his mother, Jeana, sitting him down to watch Soupy Sales.

“He always loved Soupy,” Jeana said, with her son at a table at the Coach House, where Sales was doing a one-night stand on a swing through Southern California. “It didn’t matter whether Chuck was playing basketball or riding his bike or whatever, when Soupy was on, I made him come in to watch.”

Not everyone at the Coach House had come because of a mother’s suggestions, however.

“Howard Stern really likes Soupy,” explained Susan Rodriguez, a 44-year-old hairdresser from Garden Grove. For Rodriguez, the droop-faced comic who took a reported 19,000 pies in the face has a lot in common with Stern, the radio shock-jock with the heavy-metal hairdo. “They both,” she said, “tell it like it is.”

And some in Sales’ audience came for reasons that bordered on the mystical.

Jim Curtis, a marketing executive from Brea, brought one of Sales’ old LPs for the comedian to grace with his autograph. “For anyone who is about 40 years old,” said the 38-year-old Curtis, an audience with the co-star of such puppet-characters as Pookie, Hippie, Black Tooth and White Fang “is nothing less than a cultural pilgrimage.”

The culture that Sales brought, however, began far afield from the slapstick that endeared him to children a generation ago.

He opened his act with a rapid-fire series of vulgar one-liners, demonstrating that the 66-year-old veteran could be as crude as the up-and-coming comics on cable TV.

And for the next 80 minutes, Sales sailed through several familiar stand-up subjects. There were marriage jokes that might have served Henny Youngman well, Polish jokes, lesbian jokes and, disproportionately, breast jokes.

Taking a stab at topical humor, Sales whipped out a harmonica and, to the theme from “The Beverly Hillbillies,” sang a song about the alleged adventures of Ted Kennedy and his nephew, William Kennedy Smith. Oprah, Julio Iglesias and Madonna’s unshaven armpits filled out the contemporary portion of the show.

The audience enthused through the old-timer’s energetic performance, laughing at lines they would scold their children for delivering, chuckling knowingly as one fan yelled out time and again, “You got it, Soup!”

But the house really lit up when, nearing the end of his act, the comedian did talk about his old TV show.

He recalled his “Words of Wisdom” feature, his attempt to create a dance craze (the Mouse, modeled after Chubby Checker’s Twist) and his notorious request that viewers unload their parents’ wallets and send him “the green pieces of paper with the pictures of guys in beards” (“That’s where Jim Bakker got the idea,” Sales explained).

Tying up the two themes of his performance, Sales ended with a shaggy dog story. The subject, his old TV puppet White Fang, may have kindled childhood memories, but the off-color ending involving the pooch’s tryst with a French poodle was as adult as anything else in today’s comedy clubs.

After the show, Sales signed autographs, posed for pictures and repeatedly denied that he ever used naughty jokes or obscene hand gestures on his TV show, despite rumors that they were what caused his broadcast career to fizzle. (Sales commented uncharitably when a more recent kiddie TV host ran into similar problems: when Pee-wee Herman had his run-in with Sarasato, Fla., authorities, Sales said, he deserved to lose his show.)

Indeed, Sales blamed his own blue reputation on children.

“Their parents would catch ‘em telling dirty jokes they learned in the schoolyard and ask them, ‘Where did you learn that,’ ” Sales speculated. “Well, they just falsely said they heard it on ‘The Soupy Sales Show’ ” the comedian said, in all seriousness.