Irwin Corey, king of comedic confusion . By T. Rees Shapiro Washington
Post . WASHINGTON - Irwin Corey, the comic maestro who endeared himself
to generations of audiences as the World's Foremost Authority, whose
nonsensical monologues aped blowhard pundits, pompous academics, and
other know-it-alls, died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 102.
His son, painter, songwriter, singer, and comedian Richard Corey,
quipped that his father died "peacefully, at home, surrounded by his
son. Under the moniker Professor Corey, the self-described rebel
comedian spent eight decades perfecting a mock-intellectual routine
laced with malapropisms and non-sequiturs. "Protocol takes precedence
over procedure," he quipped in a typical self-satisfied insight. Such
fractured wisdom earned him requests to perform his act on radio and
television news shows. On a morning show's weather report, he explained
that the day's temperature could be attributed to "a weather mass
coming from Canada, a country we don't own yet" clashing with "a
hot-air mass coming from Washington. Mr. Corey debuted on Broadway in
1943 and became a staple of nightclubs, with a monologue that usually
commenced with "However . . . He was instantly recognizable for his
disheveled appearance, frazzled hair sprouting in all directions. His
signature outfit was a black tuxedo with tails, a string tie, and a
ratty pair of high-tops. He was a household name to generations of
Americans through his appearances on late-night television talk shows
from the 1950s onward and on the college circuit starting in the
counterculture 1960s. Onscreen, he usually played street-smart hokum
artists in comedies such as "How to Commit Marriage" (1969) with Jackie
Gleason, "Car Wash" (1976) with Richard Pryor, and Woody Allen's "The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion" (2001). Theater critic Kenneth Tynan once
described Mr. Corey as "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 clown with a college
education. Irwin Corey grew up mostly in an orphanage and did not have
a college education. In an act tinged with politics, his were squarely
on the far left, although he claimed he was disallowed from membership
in the Communist Party USA for being an "anarchist. He was best known
for a rambling, absurdist routine that satirized pontificating
bar-stool philosophers. "Why do you wear tennis shoes? he was once
asked. "Well, that's a two-part question," he began. "First you ask
why. Well, why has been plaguing man since time immemorial. "Statesman,
philosophers, educators, teachers, scientists have been asking the
ultimate why. And in these few moments allocated me, it would be
ludicrous on my part - for the sake of brevity - to delve into the
ultimate why. "Do I wear sneakers? Yes. Irwin Eli Corey was born in
Brooklyn. His father was a waiter, his mother was a dressmaker, and at
times the family was desperately poor. The six Corey children - Irwin
was the youngest - spent much of their early lives at the Brooklyn
Hebrew Orphan Asylum. They gradually returned to their parents' care.
During the Depression, Mr. Corey was a button maker for the
International Ladies Garment Union before launching a stage career with
Borscht Belt and left-wing theater groups. He once auditioned for a
play by reciting the soliloquy from "Hamlet" only to have the casting
director doubled over in laughter. His advice: "You should be a
comedian. He launched a short-lived presidential campaign in the 1960
election on Hugh Hefner's Playboy ticket with the slogan: "Professor
Corey will run for any party and bring his own bottle. "That was a lot
of fun," he told the Cincinnati Post in 2004. "We had parades. They put
my campaign manager in jail for disturbing the peace. His career
reached its peak of absurdity in 1974 when he was called upon to accept
the National Book Award on behalf of the reclusive author Thomas
Pynchon for the novel "Gravity's Rainbow. Mr. Corey gave a wandering
acceptance speech on behalf of Pynchon, offering thanks to Communist
Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger - whom
he called the "acting president of the United States" - and author
Truman Capote. His wife, Frances Berman Corey, died in 2011. In
addition to his son, Mr. Corey leaves two grandchildren and two
great-grandchildren. In his later years, he found a way to combine
politics with performance art. The New York Times reported in 2011 that
Mr. Corey, dressed like the street philosopher he played onstage, had
been panhandling for 17 years in midtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, he lived
in an 1840 carriage house on Manhattan's East Side that he estimated
would sell for $3.5 million. He told the Times he had collected
hundreds of thousands of dollars in spare change while begging and he
had donated the money to a charity providing aid to Cuban children. Mr.
Corey was sharp-tongued about fellow comics who he felt did not rise to
his standard of iconoclasm. Only close friends such as Lenny Bruce,
Mort Sahl, and Jonathan Winters made the cut as comic artists. "The
role of the artist is to be a rebel," he said in 1970. "That's what the
great ones have always been.
