Photo by Lloyd H. Solmanson

Professor Irwin Corey celebrated his 95th birthday at the Players Club.

Professor Irwin Corey: Life Lessons

By JERRY TALLMER

On the other hand with regard to … Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattman of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athamia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell …

— Start of Lucky’s outburst in Waiting for Godot

In the Village Vanguard in the early 1940s a short maniacal man in long-tailed formal coat and sneakers – the coattails dragging out behind him on the floor – circles the room balefully, then stands for endless moments, maybe five whole minutes, gathering up his thoughts until he finally explodes with one single word: “However!”

This is followed by another sustained silence and then, at last, a burst, a torrent, a flood of unstoppable surreal interlingual jabberwocky that makes no sense at all and yet makes perfect sense in each rapid-fire contemptuous interlocking reference to people and events of the day and of many other days in the recent or ancient history of mankind. Not to mention womankind.

“‘However,’” Irwin Corey will say musingly some 65 years later. “I used to start any program with ‘However.’ A word my wife invented.”

In the Murray Hill townhouse where he and his wife Fran have lived for going on four decades now, Professor Irwin Corey – in the week he will enter his own 95th year -- drags out a couple of king-sized scrapbooks cum photo albums. A large canvas on one wall – a dreamlike bird’s-eye view of the painter’s studio – is by Mr. Corey’s son Richard, who is now 62. On the opposite wall, a small still life by Frances Berman Corey that, her husband lets you know, once won a prize at the City Center Gallery. “And my grandson, Amadeo. He’s 11. I’ll show you his drawings.”

To the albums:

“Y’ever see this?” Professor Corey says, pointing to a photograph of two grown men in a bear hug. “That’s Fidel and me. In 1993 I gave $40,000 to buy medicine for Cubans – vitamins, antibiotics, and asthma medicine.” The whole shipment came to $325,000 worth of medicine, he says. Or maybe $375,000. “Page Six called me [sneeringly] ‘an angel of mercy.’ On arriving in Havana I said the United States is acting criminally.” Another photo: “Cuba’s the only country that has a memorial to the Rosenbergs,” and here in a photo it is.

Next page: “Me and Castro and my son. Did you know Castro speaks very good English? Because he went to Columbia. A scout for the Boston Red Sox once asked if Fidel wanted to play for them. Did you know Fidel was Jewish? He’s Fidel Castro Ruz, R-U-Z [more exactly, Ruiz] and that’s his mother’s name and that’s Sephardic.”

He turns the pages back and forth.

“Here I am as the gravedigger in Hamlet at Stratford, Connecticut [1958], directed by Zoe Caldwell. Here I am with Jackie Gleason in Sly Fox on Broadway. Here with Bernard [Barnard] Hughes in Da.” Next page: “Know this guy? That’s Dick Gregory. I gave him his first job, at the Playboy Club in Chicago. I refused to work on Sundays, so they hired him. No, it wasn’t a religious thing.” Immediately followed by: “Listen, God only worked six days.”

A clipping from the Chicago Tribune: “Irwin Corey steals the scene.” A clipping from The New York Times: “Irwin Corey makes theatrical art out of being addled.” To which Professor Corey now appends: “The purpose of the artist is to be a rebel. That’s what Beethoven did. That’s what Jonathan Swift did.” And what Irwin Corey certainly did on the old Steve Allen show and the Vanguard and everywhere else.

So where did all that come from – the Corey-patented free-flow free-wheeling free-association ceaseless river-run of genius-touched pertinent gobbledygook?

“Nobody knows,” the Professor says gravely, and then, man to man: “Tell you something. I’m sure when you start a sentence you do not know where it will end.”

He’s been in a half-dozen or more motion pictures but is proudest of a line of his that was spoken, he says, by four different actors in four different films. “ ‘You can get more with a kind word and a gun that with just a kind word.’ Rod Steiger said it. Al Pacino said it. Marcia Mason said it. And Robert De Niro said it. Did you know Robert De Niro was a Jew?”

Yes, Professor, as a matter of fact, I did. Half Jewish. His mother.

Pages, pages, Photos, photos. “My mother. My father. My sister. My daughter Margaret Beth. My brother. Another brother. “Dead … dead … dead … dead,” he says – King Lear with a scrapbook. “My daughter was murdered by her husband” [on August 9, 1997].

His own youth, to age 13, was mostly in orphanages. “Corey” derives from the Polish original – he spells it out – C-h-i-q-u-o-r. “Abraham Chiquor, my father, a waiter. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps. My mother’s name was Jennie. Ouch, I forget her maiden name.”

A still from Pins and Needles, the nose-thumbing ILGWU musical of 1938. “Ever heard of that?”

Yes, Professor, I saw it. You played nine roles, didn’t you?

“More, more. Maybe 12. They kicked me out. Said I was a Communist. I was never a Communist.” Pause. “At Ossie Davis’s funeral, I said: ‘Long live Ossie Davis and Malcolm X’ and five ushers kicked me out – escorted me out – of Riverside Church.’

Several pages later: photostat of a check for $1,000; “I give $1,000 to the Communist Party [USA] every year. But I was never a Communist. Tried to join the Communist Party, but they blackballed me. Said I was an anarchist.”

So why do you give, Professor?

“Because they’re the only ones doing anything for the people.”

More pages, more photos. “Here’s Ernest Truex, ever hear of him? The Clancy Brothers, ever hear of them? Ever hear of Paul Petkoff, the guy who did the [old, long lost] murals in the Village Vanguard? He was standing one night next to Max Gordon [the owner] when I was doing my stuff, and Max turned to him and said: ‘Do you think he’s funny?’ Petkoff said: ‘How much are you paying him?’ Max said: ‘Forty bucks a week.’ Petkoff said: ‘Keep him! Keep him!’ So I opened at the Vanguard on October 20, 1942 …”

[Paul Petkoff is the name of a character in Shaw’s "Arms and the Man." The name of the Vanguard muralist was Paul Petroff. An understandable error, even for someone not 95.]

A page given over to Irwin Corey’s appearances at the London Palladium in the 1940s. A telegram from Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. A telegram from Sir Michael Redgrave.

That would have been long before rebel British drama critic Kenneth Tynan caught up with the Professor in a London nightclub in 1963, and wrote: “Irwin Corey is a cultural clown, a parody of literacy, a travesty of all our civilization holds dear, and one of the funniest grotesques in America. He is Chaplin’s tramp with a college education … ”

But it might not have been before Samuel Beckett, who worshipped vaudeville, just possibly caught Irwin Corey in action at the Palladium or elsewhere in the late 1940s or early 1950s, and incorporated him – some parts of him – into Lucky, the arcane, irrepressibly babbling slave at the far end of tyrant Pozzo’s rope in Waiting for Godot.

Anyway, I like to think so.

Somehow we are now talking – he is talking – about Israel and Palestine. Irwin Corey is certainly not mouthing the Communist Party line when he says: “God gave the Jews this shitty little piece of land, and gave the Chinese a whole continent. The Jews had a lousy real-estate agent. Do you know there’s no such thing as anti-Semitism.” He’s off and running now. “The Jordanians are Semites. The Syrians are Semites. The Saudi Arabians are Semites. The Iraquis are Semites …” And so on and so on, a half-dozen other tribal states. “It’s anti-Hebrew! It’s anti-Jewish, but they’re afraid to say the word ‘Jewish.’ This Baraka Obama,” he says, getting the name almost right. “he goes to Chermany?!”– and you can almost see the mass of 200,000 Germans at Berlin’s Victory Column as Professor Corey spits this out.

Kennedy went to Germany, I throw in when the Professor pauses for breath.

“Oh, Kennedy was a shit too. You know the best president we ever had? Millard Fillmore. There’s nothing in the Constitution says the president has to be alive.”

A white Scottish terrier named LuLu is nuzzling my knee. I do not know, though I should have known – should have guessed – that in the Israel/Palestine real-estate gag and the run-on about anti-Jewishness the Professor is rehearsing some of what he will say three nights from now when, as he enters his 95th year, on the evening of Tuesday, July 29, 2008 – he was born July 29, 1914, in dire poverty, in Brooklyn, New York -- the Players Club, on Gramercy Park South, will throw him a birthday party sparked by Dick Capri, Mickey Freeman, Larry Storch, and other of Irwin Corey’s comedic peers.

“We have a great theatrical history,” Players Club manager John Martello will say to the assemblage on the birthday night. “Unfortunately, the funniest guy we’ve had here all year is Edward Albee.” Then Mr. Martello turned the proceedings over to the professional funny guys, first asking the birthday boy if he had anything to say. From the Corey family table, the Professor – sneakers, frock coat, engineer’s cap, scrubby beard, and all – simply proclaimed: “Nepotism is not necessary to be loved,” and then, surveying the huge birthday cake sporting a forest of candles, murmured, just loud enough to be heard: “A blow job.”

Not much that followed could be as sportive as that, and when, after what really became a roast, full of Jewish jokes and old-age jokes and guys doing their own schticks, the microphone was handed over to the birthday boy, he dangled it as would a priest or the pope and blessed the room. Then he stood stock still for a while, and when he opened his mouth it was to say: “However …” followed by the real-estate gag and much else about the world and Hitler (“Time magazine’s Man of the Year, 1937”) and the Jews that he’d already said in the privacy of his living room.

It turns out that LuLu, the white Scottish terrier, is male. What kind of name is that for a male canine, Professor?

“Didja ever hear of Ted Lewis?” he answers, an Irwin Coreyism to the bone. “Didja ever hear of Leo Durocher?”

Back to one of the albums. On two successive pages: the notorious photograph of a Vietcong officer being shot point-blank in the side of his head, and the even more horrendous image of that little napalm-seared girl running naked and screaming along a road in Vietnam.

“Isn’t that marvelous?” Professor Corey declares with scorn. “American soldiers killing naked children.”

He himself was once, briefly, an American soldier, but bluffed his way out on, we are told, on make-believe sexual grounds. Before that, he was a kid in the CCCs [the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps] and then a hobo riding the rails to California, and then a featherweight Golden Gloves boxer all across the State of Colorado.

How’d you make out, Mr. Corey?

“I was the champ. Never lost a fight.”

And you know what? Blacklist and all – and there was plenty of blacklist for Irwin Corey -- they still haven’t laid a finger on him.