Milton Supman (January 8, 1926 – October 22, 2009), known professionally as Soupy Sales, was an American comedian, actor, radio-television personality, and jazz aficionado.

His was the only Jewish family in town; Sales joked that local Ku Klux Klan members bought the sheets used for their robes from his father's store.

He enlisted in the United States Navy and served on USS Randall in the South Pacific during the latter part of World War II.

After graduating from Marshall, Sales began working as a scriptwriter and disc jockey at radio station WHTN (now WVHU) in Huntington.

[5] Improvised and slapstick in nature, it was a rapid-fire stream of comedy sketches, gags and puns, almost all of which resulted in Sales receiving a pie in the face, which became his trademark.

[1] He recounted a time when a young fan mistakenly threw a frozen pie at his neck and he "dropped like a pile of bricks".

Beginning no later than July 4, 1955, a Saturday version of Sales' lunch show was broadcast nationally on the ABC television network.

In many of his shows, he appeared in costume, performed his dance, the Soupy Shuffle, introduced many characters such as Nicky Nooney, the Mississippi Gambler, etc., and took "zillions" of pies in the face.

It briefly went back on the ABC network as a late night fill-in for The Steve Allen Show in 1962, but was canceled after three months.

All of the puppets on the show during its Los Angeles run were also operated by Clyde Adler, whom a 1962 TV Guide listing describes as "West Coast disk jockey and comedian".

Sales' fame was significant enough that he was hired as a Tonight Show guest host in the period between Jack Paar and Johnny Carson.

It featured guest appearances by stars such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis,[1] Judy Garland and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as musical groups like the Shangri-Las, The Supremes and The Temptations.

[citation needed] The puppets were: On January 1, 1965, miffed at having to work on the holiday, Sales ended his live broadcast by encouraging his young viewers to tiptoe into their still-sleeping parents' bedrooms and remove those "funny green pieces of paper with pictures of U.S. presidents" from their pants and pocketbooks.

Soupy and Frank Nastasi also cut and recorded a comedy and song story disk, "Spy with a Pie", for ABC-Paramount.

Other game show appearances included over a dozen episodes of the original Match Game from 1966 to 1969 as well as one week of the revived version in 1976; a week of shows on the 1970s edition of The Gong Show; a couple of guest spots on Hollywood Squares (December 12, 1977, and April 4, 1978) and a few appearances on the combined version (Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour) in 1983–84; and a recurring role in all versions of Pyramid from 1973 to 1988 and 1991 (in one famous episode of which he repeatedly uttered the word "bacon", trying to get a confused contestant to say "greasy things").

His program was between the drive time shifts of Don Imus (morning) and Howard Stern (afternoon), with whom Sales had an acrimonious relationship.

On December 21, 2007, Stern revealed this was a stunt staged for "theater of the mind" and to torture Sales; in truth, the piano was never harmed.

Sales' on-air crew included his producer, Ray D'Ariano, newscaster Judy DeAngelis, and pianist Paul Dver.

The brothers were the rhythm section for Todd Rundgren in the early '70s, then for Iggy Pop starting in the mid-'70s, and later were half the band Tin Machine with David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels, from 1988 to 1992.