COMEDY : The Soup’s Still On : At 66, madcap pie thrower Soupy Sales still simmers on the national stand-up circuit. His audience has been loyal for three decades.

Soupy Sales is glad to be here, folks.

“I just spent three weeks in the Riviera,” he says, “and now I need to get new tires on the Riviera.”

No, old age has not muted this slinger of puns, this hurler of pies. His hair has grayed but it remains floppy and his smile is still toothy. You can take the man off television, but you can’t make him stop.

“I’m going to be 66 for the next 14 years,” he says. “What I tell everybody is that I take good care of myself and I have the body of a 20-year-old . . . waiting for me in the next room.”

Oh, please.

Denied his place in America’s living rooms--”My show was funny,” he says of his daily series that aired intermittently from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. “It was some great comedy”--Sales has spent the past 13 years doing stand-up in nightclubs and at conventions, working two weeks each month, staying busy.

Tonight, he takes the stage at the Palomino in North Hollywood, an appearance that was originally scheduled for April but was canceled because of the Los Angeles riots.

His stay in Los Angeles will be brief. Next week, he appears at the third annual Peanut Butter Festival in Scottsdale, Ariz.

“You know, there are a lot of great peanut butters in different areas of the country,” he says. “All the peanut butter dealers go there for their annual meeting.”

After that, it’s a club in Dearborn, Mich.

“Hey,” he says, “I’m having a great time.”

“The Soupy Sales Show” was concocted of corny jokes, slapstick and skits. It began in 1953 as a local program in Detroit but soon went nationwide on ABC.

This was supposed to be a children’s program. After all, it had songs and puppets: White Fang (“the world’s biggest and meanest dog”), Black Tooth (“the world’s biggest and sweetest dog”) and Pookie the Lion, who performed high drama from a windowsill.

But adults watched, too, and by the millions. They tuned in to watch Sales. He jittered across the living-room set, ad-libbing, mugging, doing the Soupy Shuffle and the Mouse, rarely straying far from the camera.

“Nobody ever worked as close to the TV screen as I did,” he says. “I was in their living rooms. I was their friend. It’s nice to be a part of somebody’s life.”

Nearly everything he did, every word he uttered, was directed at the audience. “They talk about Garry Shandling. Baloney. I broke that fourth wall.”

And there were the pies. Thousands of pies. He got hit by pies in the face--20,000, he boasts--and he threw his share.

It became the in thing to get “pied” on “The Soupy Sales Show.” Frank Sinatra got it. So did Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster.

Sales converted this popularity into a string of hit comedy records. He also gained a reputation for high jinks.

The most famous of his antics came at the end of the New Year’s Day show in 1965. Pushing up close to the camera, he told his younger viewers to tiptoe into their parents’ bedroom and find their wallets. He 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 television station.

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

A New York television station, WNEW, reportedly received thousands of dollars and suspended Sales’ show for two weeks.

There were other alleged improprieties. Rumors abounded that he’d ended a show with an obscene hand gesture. And that one of the many people who came to his door--you never saw anything but their hands--was a naked woman.

Sales denies having done anything obscene on the air, but adds: “I did everything I could do with that show.”

By the mid-1960s, the program’s ratings had fallen and it slipped back to regional television on WNEW. Sales appeared as a celebrity guest on game shows for some time. He attempted a national comeback in 1978, mounting a syndicated series that almost exactly mimicked the original Detroit show. It lasted only a year.

The people who come to see Soupy Sales in nightclubs are, predominantly, the ones who grew up watching him. Perhaps they are surprised by what they find.

His act ranges “far afield from the slapstick that endeared him to children a generation ago,” Times reviewer Jess Bravin wrote in April about a performance in San Juan Capistrano. “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.”

During a telephone interview from his home in Manhattan, Sales rails against this criticism. “It’s not a vulgar show. It’s a funny show,” he says. Sure, he says, there are lesbian jokes and breast jokes. But, “you don’t do the same stuff in a club that you do on television.”

Some of the act, however, is devoted to the old days. He talks about his “Words of Wisdom” skit and his attempt to turn the Mouse into a dance craze. He does a bit about White Fang.

This is, after all, what his fans yearn to hear. Two videotapes of highlights from “The Soupy Sales Show,” released by Rhino Home Video, have sold so well that the company is negotiating for a third. So, though he doesn’t toss any pies, Sales knows it would be wrong to leave Pookie and the others out of his act.

“The people in my audiences are people who never go to comedy clubs. They’ve grown up with me. They come out to see me,” Sales says.

“I miss being on television. As a writer, I need a creative outlet and that’s why I do stand-up,” he says. “At this stage of my life, it’s nice that people pay money to see me. It’s like a love-in. I love the attention.”

Where and When Event: Soupy Sales at the Palomino, 6907 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Hour: 9 tonight Price: $12.50 Call: (818) 764-4010