With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
October 27, 2009 - 2:46 p.m.
As soon as I finished my entry I went to make my breakfast. I should have mentioned that my Crohn's attack is over and I'm feeling great. I got to the kitchen and started washing the dishes from last night and within a minute I remembered What I really wanted to write about here. Instead of saving it for tomorrow I'm writing it while I remember. Of course I could just save it and not post it till tomorrow but then I'd have to remember to do that and somehow it strikes me as cheating. It would help my ratings if I waited a while to post this but that also strikes me as cheating. I'm going to strike while the iron is hot and post this as soon as I'm finished. It's bad enough that I've been saving most of this since Friday; that's when I found out that Soupy Sales died.
I'm guessing that most of you never heard of him. He hosted a local children's show in New York and before that in Detroit. It was syndicated so if you were a child in the sixties you might have seen him. If you were lucky enough to have grown up with him you're mourning his death. Soupy was one of the great anarchic entertainers of children that I wrote about in my review of Where the Wild Things Are. For the half hour his show was on the rules of society were suspended and replaced with his own rules which resembled mayhem and usually ended with somebody getting a pie in his face. Soupy received thousands but so did so others as diverse as Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr., and Alice Cooper. Nobody was too cool to appear on his show. It was an honor to be pied. I saw the video of Alice Cooper everywhere, here's Frank and Sammy getting theirs.
It isn't subtle, it isn't clever, it's just funny. We usually think of humor coming from surprise but this demonstrates that just the opposite is true. The minute they walked through the door we knew that they were going to get a pie in the kisser and the anticipation is what makes it work.
What gets lost in the physical humor is what was always my favorite part, the dissection of language. When Frank asks for Italian dressing he gets an Italian man putting his clothes on. That's not just funny, it's educational and subversive. It makes you think about how artificial language is. How it is nothing but conventions. If a simple thing like salad dressing can be ambiguous what else is? The fact that I love this kind of humor changed who I am. It's no coincidence that I'm a skeptic, an atheist, and liberal. I see the difference between social convention and natural law. It lets me see that legislating gender preference is as silly as a pie in the face. I would love a study to see if adults who grew up watching Soupy were more likely to be socially liberal and less religious. Notice I said less likely. I'm sure the effect is small. Who we are depends on the sum total of all the events in our lives. Still, I would like to think it was measurable.
I wish I had a brain. I was about to write something, watched a video of Soupy, and totally forgot what I was about to say. Maybe he's responsible for my fried brains too, it certainly wasn't drugs. I'll give him credit for preparing me to appreciate the insanity of Monty Python. I see them as kindred spirits, do you?
It's a fact that he was a huge influence on Uncle Floyd. Floyd had a show that was ostensibly a children's show that was primarily watched by adults. One of the times I went to see Uncle Floyd live Soupy was in the audience, not that far from me. It's one of my favorite celebrity sightings. Soupy's health wasn't the best then and my first reaction when I heard he died was surprise that he lasted this long.
One thing that I feel bad for today's kids is that they don't get to watch TV shows hosted by live individuals as showcases for their idiosyncratic talents. Today's shows are written by committee and homogenized for mass consumption. They are often designed by educators but they don't teach as much as you can learn by watching an inspired madmen like Soupy, Sandy Becker, and Chuck McCann.
I can't resist. Here's Alice Cooper submitting to the inevitable.
A Met Fan's Halloween - November 01, 2009
Northeastern Comfort - October 31, 2009
Colbert Report Report - October 30, 2009
Lift Up Your Hands - October 29, 2009
57 Varieties - October 28, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile October 27, 2009
