Irwin Corey - WikiHQ

Irwin Corey (July 29, 1914 – February 6, 2017) was an American stand-up comic, film actor and activist, often billed as "The World's Foremost Authority". He introduced his unscripted, improvisational style of stand-up comedy at the San Francisco club the hungry i. Lenny Bruce described Corey as "one of the most brilliant comedians of all time."

Background

Corey was born Irwin Eli Cohen to a Jewish family on , in Brooklyn, New York. Poverty-stricken after his father deserted the family, his mother was forced to place him and his five siblings in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York, where Corey remained until his early teens. He then rode in boxcars out to California, and enrolled himself at Belmont High School in Los Angeles.

Corey supported Communist/Socialist left-wing politics. During the 1960 election, Corey campaigned for president on Hugh Hefner's Playboy ticket. During the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Corey endorsed Vermont United States Senator Bernie Sanders for the nomination and presidency. Corey was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show hosted by Johnny Carson during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The New York Times described the resulting speech as "... a series of bad jokes and mangled syntax which left some people roaring with laughter and others perplexed."</blockquote>

Career

Comedy

In 1938 Corey returned to New York, where he got a job writing and performing in Pins and Needles, a musical comedy revue about a union organizer in the "garment district".

From the late 1940s Corey cultivated his "Professor" character. Dressed in seedy formal wear and sneakers, with his bushy hair sprouting in all directions, Corey would amble on stage in a preoccupied manner, then begin his monologue with "However …" He created a new style of double-talk comedy; instead of making up nonsense words like "krelman" and "trilloweg", like double-talker Al Kelly, the Professor would season his speech with many long and florid, but authentic, words. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of the Professor in The New Yorker, "Corey is a cultural clown, a parody of literacy, a travesty of all that our civilization holds dear, and one of the funniest grotesques in America. He is Chaplin's tramp with a college education". Corey frequently appeared at the hungry i nightclub in the 1950s and '60s, and remained the favorite comedian of club owner Enrico Banducci. In 1980, Corey appeared with Banducci, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, Jackie Vernon, and Maya Angelou in a tribute to the hungry i entitled hungry i Reunion, televised in 1981 on PBS.

In 1975, Corey gave a typically long-winded, nonsensical performance in New York City for journalists waiting for The Rolling Stones to announce the band's 1975 tour of the Americas. The press was still listening to Corey ramble on when they finally noticed that the Stones were playing "Brown Sugar" on a flatbed truck driving down Fifth Avenue.

Broadway

In 1951, Corey appeared as "Abou Ben Atom", the Genie, in the cult flop Broadway musical Flahooley along with Yma Sumac, the Bil and Cora Baird Marionettes, and Barbara Cook (in her Broadway debut). Corey's performance of "Springtime Cometh" can be heard on the show's original cast album. The Professor was a frequent guest comic on variety shows and a guest panelist on game shows during the 1960s and 1970s.

Corey became so synonymous with comic erudition that in June 1977, when a Providence, Rhode Island television station, WJAR, wanted a spokesman to explain changes in network affiliations, Corey got the job. Lecturing with pointer in hand, Corey manipulated magnetic signs to demonstrate how television schedules would be disrupted. By the end of the commercial, the professor had wandered from his original point, and the magnetic field holding the visual aids in place was turned off, causing the set to collapse around Corey. He would do the same promos for WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee that same year, when rival stations WITI and WISN-TV switched affiliations. Corey appeared in various Broadway productions, including as a gravedigger in a production of Hamlet. Political activist and fellow stand-up comedian Dick Gregory shared some in-depth and provocative memories and Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon narrated in a very personal tone. Irwin Corey turned 100 in July 2014.

For an interview in October 2011, the 97-year-old Corey invited a New York Times reporter to visit his 1840 carriage house on East 36th Street. Corey estimated its resale value at $3.5 million. He said that, when not performing, he panhandled for change from motorists exiting the Queens–Midtown Tunnel, in exchange for cleaning their windshields with a squeegee. Every few months, he told the interviewer, he donated the money to a group that purchased medical supplies for Cuban children. He said of the drivers who supplied the cash, "I don't tell them where the money's going, and I'm sure they don't care."

Corey died at the age of 102 on February 6, 2017, at his apartment in Manhattan with his son, Richard, at his side.

Filmography

How to Commit Marriage (1969) – The Baba Ziba
Fore Play (1975) – Professor Irwin Corey