Joey Faye; Comic Ranged From Vaudeville to TV Ads

Joey Faye, the veteran vaudeville comedian who amused a whole new generation as a dancing bunch of green grapes in Fruit of the Loom underwear commercials, has died. He was 87.

Faye, born Joseph Anthony Palladino on New York’s Lower East Side, died Saturday at the Actors’ Home in Englewood, N.J.

Over a 65-year career, he moved from vaudeville to Broadway to motion pictures and television. He took dramatic as well as comedic roles, but nobody questioned which was his favorite.

Playing second banana to such comic greats as Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers and Jack Albertson, Faye amassed a library of more than 18,000 jokes. While other comics needed teams of writers to stay current with audiences that saw their routines on television, Faye could browse and come up with different jokes that he had used over the years.

Faye grew up wanting to be a comedian, he told The Times in 1986, and spent so much time skipping school to memorize lines at the Palace Theater that he was expelled from four high schools.

His career started in Manhattan movie houses where, by his own tally, he won 200 of 290 amateur night contests. He next became a social director for hotels in the Catskills, and turned that into a spot on the card at Minsky’s burlesque in New York.

Beginning in 1937, Faye delighted Broadway theater audiences in about 30 plays, including “Room Service,” “Top Banana,” “High Button Shoes,” “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “The Man of La Mancha.”

In Hollywood, Faye made such films as “North to Alaska,” “That Touch of Mink,” “The Tender Trap” and “Ten North Frederick.”

He also joined the entourage of Marlene Dietrich and Gypsy Rose Lee for USO tours overseas.

But commercials paid the bills. As television developed, Faye worried that it was killing his beloved vaudeville. So he found a whole new popularity working in television commercials.

For Marcal paper products, he was the cowboy known as “the fastest sneeze in the West”; for Kellogg’s cereal, he was a raisin, and to advertise underwear, he worked as a bunch of grapes for 15 years.

His grape costume, he told The Times, was copied by children all over the country at Halloween.

Faye is survived by his wife of 28 years, actress Judy Faye of Los Angeles, and two sisters, Bertha Falacara and Sylvia Palladino.