Soupy Sales: Fang's Talent Agency

Since his death late last year I've been watching clips from the Soupy Sales Show.  The picture quality is not great, and the sets are homemade, but you could make a pretty funny video with a single stationary camera and a fellow in front of it who had a lot of personality.  In a way his are the forebears for Saturday Night Live's videos.

I like "Fang's Talent Agency," a still from which below, but there loads of others.

These days with a laptop and a two hundred dollar Flip video camera, most everyone has better tools than he and his cohorts had.

Watch Soupy and Fang HERE.

Comedy is Hard...

... and perhaps undervalued? Julian Gough makes an argument in Prospect magazine that this is why contemporary novels are less fun. The Greeks thought comedy (the gods' view of life) was superior to tragedy (the merely human). As for me, I'll throw my lot in with us humans.

April Fools' Days

...so much less fun when it falls on a Sunday. Long ago my old boss George Plimpton used to present me, come spring, with a new surprising bit of news... about the Japanese marathoner who'd misunderstood and thinking the race was twenty-four DAYS rather than miles, had gone missing from the Boston marathon, later spotted somewhere in northern Massachusetts. And so forth.

It was some years before I knew to watch out for him come April 1st. Once, having learned a few lessons from the master, I had some fun in turning the tables, about which another time. On such a day as today I miss such leg-pulling.