I’m not ashamed to say that Soupy Sales was one of the formative influences on my sense of humor as a preteen and adolescent, along with “Rocky & Bullwinkle” and the early years of Mad magazine. So I was sad to hear of his death yesterday (10.22.09).

As a youth living in suburban Minneapolis in the early 1960s, I found myself drawn to anarchic and form-busting humor, but there wasn’t much to be had. The early ’60s were, in a sense, still the 1950s – watch an episode of “Mad Men” if you don’t believe it. The ’60s as a time of mass cultural upheaval didn’t really kick in until the end of 1963-early 1964, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the arrival of the Beatles.

But, beginning in 1961, when he moved his “Lunch with Soupy Sales” from Detroit to Los Angeles – at least in terms of when it started showing up on TV in Minneapolis – there was Soupy Sales and his weekly kids’ show. It was the hippest, most subversive kids’ show on TV – barely controlled silliness and anarchy that inevitably ended with him getting a pie in the face.

Later on, the pies would become almost a raison d’etre – the trademark bit of craziness that became a hip thing for celebrities to participate in. Eventually, even Frank Sinatra – who, at a certain point in that era was the definition of both mainstream and hipster cool – made an appearance and got hit with a pie.

But the pies were, you should pardon the expression, the dessert at the end of the show. The best of Soupy Sales – what made me take notice as a kid – was that sense that I was getting a peek into an adult world that I may not have understood, except that I knew it was funny.

Soupy was really doing two shows at once. He was doing shtick for the camera and the kids at home – vaudeville riffs involving slapstick, music, filmed excerpts from silent movies (with sound effects), incredibly silly puns and bits with puppets. But he was also playing to the crew behind the camera, who could always be heard laughing when he’d ad lib something aimed at them, rather than the kids.

For example, look at this extended clip from YouTube, which offers a little bit of everything – including Sales’ hit song, “Do the Mouse.” Here’s the word play, here’s the interplay with the crew, the jokes to both the audience and the folks in the studio.

Or look at this one, in which he does shtick with White Fang (“the meanest dog in America”). Friends and I would routinely mimic the guttural sounds of White Fang – or the falsetto nonsense of his companion, Black Tooth. Or the “Hey, bubbie” of the puppet lion Pookie.

I didn’t hear the phrase “playing to the band” until years later, but that’s what Soupy Sales often did – and that’s what gave the show its frisson of seditious naughtiness, like the cracks my parents would make to each other that I didn’t understand, but knew were funny by the way they made each other laugh.

Watching Soupy Sales was an introduction both to old forms – those creaky vaudeville skits, though I had no idea what vaudeville was at that age – and to new ones: gags that worked on levels that kids found funny and that made adults laugh for a different reason. Like “Rocky & Bullwinkle,” Soupy also seemed to be commenting on the show he was doing even as he was doing it, which seemed breathtakingly daring at the time.

I bought a couple of “Soupy Sales’ Greatest Hits” tapes a few years ago for one of my sons, as a way to introduce him to the humor that shaped me at his age. We watched them together – with me laughing uproariously and him alternately looking at me and the TV and shaking his head, as though he thought I was crazy.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing. But Soupy Sales shaped that generation and deserves credit for doing so.

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