Sunday, July 06, 2003 6:24:42 PM Joe Coluccio

I don't expectorate that you'll concede me.

When I first starting writing comedy bits for Lackzoom, I turned to all the early sources of comedy that had afflicted me so as a youngster. I created a character called Julius Waspstinger who opined mightily like Groucho. I turned years of Steve Allen over in my mind, thought about all those guy in street interviews. One of whom was Gabe Dell, a little more about that a little later. I tried writing with the sang froid of SJ Perelman and the shear intellectual mummery of Robert Benchley. Alas, I make this confession here, I was never much of a Stooge Fan. It is only recently that I have appreciated the pure poetic humor of WC Fields, with the sole shining exception of It's A Gift. My mind runs frequently over the blind Mr. Muckles, honey, exploding a table piled high with incandescent light bulbs, pop pop pop while another customer questions ceaselessly "What about my kumquats?" What ever did happen to Capital C small a small r small l Laphong? That movie I always considered great.

As I started writing I did not have to consider the one comic who most affected my writing style. I just accepted that James Joyce of caramelized comedy, that slipped stream of stratified consciousness, that model of modern malapropriate malediction, Leo Gorcey, as my mentor. I think I channeled him.

The Dead End Kids became the East Side Kids became the Bowery Boys. (For about nine features and three serials there were the Little Tough Guys, with Huntz Hall, sans Leo Gorcey).

When I was a kid I lived on Carver Street in the Larimar Avenue section of East Liberty. My family migrated to the Penn Hills suburbs (called only Penn Township in those days) when I reached the third grade. I lived in that small ethnic Italian section of Pittsburgh, that sent more men to fight in World War II than any other part of the country at the end of an era. Larimar Avenue read like a bildungsroman out of the 1930's or 1940's. My parents would take me there vicariously in almost everything we did. Sunday mornings my father would drive down to the Italian Pastry and grab a most satisfying selection of Sfogliatelle, Pasticciotti Canoli, Napoleons Eclairs Ricotta Tarts and Nut Horns. It was truly the stuff that they eat in heaven when there having a treat. Today you can still get yourself to Monroeville and buy the same quality pastries, but you may have to remortgage your house to afford them. My parent’s friends would drop in frequently and I would hear, embellished, of course, stories about the "old" neighborhood. I can still remember the parades of men dressed in red uniform slowly marching and playing brass insturments and the carnival that was held in the lot across from the Larimar School. I went to catechism at Help A Christian Church and I remember the gang of kids that hung out around Carver Street.

There was, I believe still is, an institution in that section of town called The Kingsley House. Summer evenings, the neighborhood would gather, sit as best we could in the stone playground and watch movies that started at the dark end of twilight.

More often than not they would be films of the Bowery Boys.(Or the East End Kids) The strangeness of all this cultural clash is that I felt more like I grew up in 1940 than I grew up in the "Happy Days" of the fifties and sixties. (Make no mistake about it I love Rock n Roll from Bill Haley on and still shiver when Mr. Dadier enters the classroom.)

It wasn't the dupe, the comic heart of the group, Horace Debussy "Sach" Jones (Glimpy, Dippy or just plain Goofy) played by Huntz Hall but the leader, the intellectual of the group, Terrence Aloysius "Slip" Mahoney (aka Ethelbert Muggs McGinnis and an assorted few others), played by Leo, that I adored. And the words that came out of his mouth!

Here is the rest of the Bowery line-up: Bobby Jordan as Bobby, Billy Benedict as Whitey, David Gorcey as Chuck, Bennie Bartlett as Butch, Gabriel Dell in many roles and we can never forget Bernard Gorcey as Louie Dumbrowski, proprietor of Louie's Sweet Shop (honorable mention for Billy Halop and Bernard Punsley in the original Dead End Kids)

It wasn't until years later that I discovered that the Dead End Kids had started in a series of Warner Brother’s socio serious crime films, starring with the likes of Bogart, Cagney, Pat O'Brien and John Garfield. Yikes, I thought, how appropriate, considering that all humor comes from a very deep well. Well?

So it is without a climatic bit of fondue that I represent to you a paradactyl or two from the armadilla of Slipper, mainly me, the Mahoney.

Leities and Genitalnuns,
Never have the clamatious events of the past antidiluvial pituitary given a rise to the post migrational thespis of temporal periodicals. It is with a certain post toastiness that I plot a gyration of normative congloteration that will, I think, sink to the heart of the custard. To my many fantods, I give a rotational shake of the chateau and wish you all a crepuscular crenellated crack on the a postiori.

Say g'night, Slip!