======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
On 5/11/11 6:14 PM, Tom Cod wrote:
Is Professor Irwin Corey part of this outfit?
Let's not sell the 97 year old Professor Corey short.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irwin_Corey
Irwin Corey was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, New York. Poverty stricken,
his parents were forced to place him and his five siblings in the Hebrew
Orphan Asylum of New York, where Corey remained until the age of 13,
when he rode the rails out to California. During the Great Depression,
he worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and while working his way
back East, became a featherweight Golden Gloves boxing champion.
Corey has always supported left-wing politics. "When I tried to join the
Communist Party, they called me an anarchist."[3] He has appeared in
support of Cuban children, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the American Communist
Party, which resulted in his eventual Hollywood blacklisting in the
1950s, the effects of which he says still linger on to this day. (Corey
never returned to Late Night with David Letterman after his first
appearance in 1982, which he claimed was a result of the blacklist still
being in effect.[4]) During the 1960 election, Corey campaigned for
president on Hugh Hefner's Playboy ticket.[3]
He accepted the National Book Award Fiction Citation on behalf of Thomas
Pynchon for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974. He is also briefly mentioned in
Chapter 22 of the Robert A. Heinlein novel Friday, but as "the World's
Greatest Authority."
Irwin Corey resides in the Murray Hill neighborhood of New York City.
In 1938, Corey was back in 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 trade in New York. He was fired from this job
(he has said) for his union organizing activities, the irony of which
was not lost on him. Five years later, he was working on another revue,
New Faces of 1943 and appearing at the Village Vanguard, doing his
stand-up comedy routine. He was drafted during World War II, but was
discharged after six months, after (according to Corey) convincing an
Army psychiatrist that he was a homosexual.
From the late 1940s he 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
doublespeak 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. The
professor would then launch into nonsensical observations about anything
under the sun, but seldom actually making sense. Changing topics
suddenly, he would wander around the stage, pontificating all the while.
His very quick wit allowed him to hold his own against the most stubborn
straight man, heckler or interviewer.
One notable fan of Corey's comedy was Ayn Rand,[5] and influential
theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once 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".[6]
In 1951, Corey appeared as Abou Ben Atom the Genie in the cult classic
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.
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
