Irwin Corey (July 29, 1914 – February 6, 2017) was an American stand-up comic, film actor and activist, often billed as "The World's Foremost Authority".
He introduced his unscripted, improvisational style of stand-up comedy at the San Francisco club the hungry i. Lenny Bruce described Corey as "one of the most brilliant comedians of all time.
[2][3] Poverty-stricken after his father deserted the family, his mother was forced to place him and his five siblings in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York,[4] where Corey remained until his early teens.
[5] When the publicity-shy Thomas Pynchon won the National Book Award Fiction Citation for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974, he asked Corey to accept it on his behalf.
[10]In 1938, Corey returned to New York, where he got a job writing and performing in Pins and Needles, a musical comedy revue about a union organizer in the "garment district".
Dressed in seedy formal wear and sneakers, with his bushy hair sprouting in all directions, Corey would amble on stage in a preoccupied manner, then begin his monologue with "However …" He created a new style of double-talk comedy; instead of making up nonsense words like "krelman" and "trilloweg", like double-talker Al Kelly, the Professor would season his speech with many long and florid, but authentic, words.
[11] This parliamentary point of order based on the state of inertia of developing a centrifugal force issued as a catalyst rather than as a catalytic agent, and hastens a change reaction and remains an indigenous brier to its inception.
[13] Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of the Professor in The New Yorker, "Corey is a cultural clown, a parody of literacy, a travesty of all that our civilization holds dear, and one of the funniest grotesques in America.
In 1975, Corey gave a typically long-winded, nonsensical performance in New York City for journalists waiting for The Rolling Stones to announce the band's 1975 tour of the Americas.
The press was still listening to Corey ramble on when they finally noticed that the Stones were playing "Brown Sugar" on a flatbed truck driving down Fifth Avenue.
He appeared in an episode of The Phil Silvers Show titled "Bilko's Grand Hotel", in which Corey plays an unkempt Bowery bum being passed off as a hotelier by Sgt.
By the end of the commercial, the professor had wandered from his original point, and the magnetic field holding the visual aids in place was turned off, causing the set to collapse around Corey.
[17] Political activist and fellow stand-up comedian Dick Gregory shared some in-depth and provocative memories and Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon narrated in a very personal tone.
"[3] In his memoir, Phoning Home, Jacob M. Appel cites a personal encounter with Corey on a street in New York City as the basis for his novel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up.