[Marxism] Irwin Corey

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, April 14, 2008
A Distinguished Professor With a Ph.D. in Nonsense
By COREY KILGANNON

The first thing Irwin Corey ordered when he sat down to lunch recently 
at the Friars Club was a tube of denture cream. Unfazed, the waiter 
returned five minutes later and placed it in front of him like an appetizer.

“I always bring my dentist with me,” Mr. Corey said, putting in his 
teeth amid the usual raucous lunchtime scene at the legendary comedians’ 
club on East 55th Street in Manhattan.

“The Friars doesn’t have denture cream on the menu,” said Mr. Corey’s 
longtime agent, Irvin Arthur, 81. “It probably should.”

Mr. Corey nodded and said, “The median age at the Friars is: deceased.”

“And the word you hear mostly here at the Friars is: ‘Ehh?’ ” he said, 
cupping his ear and leaning forward like an old man hard of hearing.

In fact, Mr. Corey, 93, is hard of hearing, but that does not stop him 
from continuing to work regularly in New York and elsewhere.

“He comes to me and says, ‘You got any jobs? I want to work,’ ” said Mr. 
Arthur, who has represented Mr. Corey for some 50 years.

Over his eight-decade career, Mr. Corey, who is known as Professor Irwin 
Corey on the comedy circuit, has been billed as “The World’s Foremost 
Authority,” a reference to his trademark style of highfalutin double 
talk and long, nonsensical observations that typically start with 
“However ...”

He established his “professor” character — wearing black tails, a string 
tie, sneakers and a scarecrow hairdo — back in the 1940s and used it on 
television and in comedy clubs, nightclubs and concert halls worldwide. 
He was a talk show and sitcom staple and a skilled actor who said he 
began on Broadway in 1943 and whose film career includes work with 
Jackie Gleason and Woody Allen.

“I feel like I’ve been watching Irwin Corey forever,” said Dick Cavett, 
who has performed in traveling comedy shows with him. “I saw him in the 
1950s, and I thought he was old then.”

Born in 1914 in Brooklyn, Mr. Corey said his struggling parents placed 
him in the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum when he was a young child.

He began doing comedy to cheer the other children, he said, and at age 
15 rode west in boxcars and enrolled himself in the prestigious Belmont 
High School in Los Angeles. He later returned to New York, and in 1938, 
he said, he helped write for “Pins and Needles,” a musical comedy about 
a union organizer.

It was an early example of what became a lifetime of left-wing activism 
and an outspokenness that he said hobbled his career as an entertainer, 
getting him blacklisted from TV networks. Even the communists thought 
him too radical.

“When I tried to join the Communist Party, they called me an anarchist,” 
Mr. Corey said in an interview in his home, an 1840 carriage house on 
East 36th Street.

A staple of his routine is describing how he procured from the federal 
government a copy of the Declaration of Independence through the Freedom 
of Information Act. He pulls out the document, most of which is blacked 
out with marker.

Mr. Corey said he was discharged from the Army during World War II after 
claiming to be gay. He campaigned for president during the 1960 election 
on Hugh Hefner’s Playboy ticket. On “The Tonight Show” and other talk 
shows, he would ignore time limits, so stagehands began chasing him into 
the audience as part of the routine.

On one wall of the comedian’s home hangs a letter from Lenny Bruce, 
along with a photograph of Mr. Corey hugging Fidel Castro, during a 
visit to Cuba to donate medicine for children. Various books, including 
“The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies,” sit on a table.

The day Mr. Corey was having lunch at the Friars Club, the comedian 
Stewie Stone stopped by his table and recalled his first sight of Mr. 
Corey, arriving to perform at the Playboy Club, elegantly carrying his 
tattered tailcoat on a hanger in a clear plastic dry-cleaning bag.

“He’s one of the great trailblazers in comedy,” Mr. Stone said.

Waiting for his coffee, Mr. Corey explained the meaning of life, at 
least as he and probably no one else understood it.

“One of the things that you’ve got to understand is that we’ve got to 
develop a continuity in order to relate to exacerbate those whose 
curiosity has not been defended, yet the information given can no longer 
be used as allegoric because the defendant does not use the evidence 
which can be substantiated by,” he said before finally asking, “What was 
the question?”

The coffee arrived. Then Mr. Corey got up and walked over to a table of 
five men and began telling jokes. He said that someone had recently told 
him, “I haven’t seen you in 30 years and you haven’t changed a bit.” Mr. 
Corey said he cursed the man and said, “You mean to say I looked like 
this 30 years ago?”

His son, Richard Corey, attributes his father’s comedic style to a lack 
of vision in his right eye: something about making the world look 
flatter and two-dimensional, and making disparities clearer.

“His style is a deep philosophical statement: No one in fact is any more 
important than another,” said Richard Corey, who lives in Manhattan. “He 
is constantly digressing from his own tangent, so he’s digressing from a 
digression.”

Mr. Corey said about his son: “I was very strict with him. When he went 
out at night, I used to tell him, ‘If you’re not in bed by midnight, 
come home.’ ”



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