Irwin Corey

Irwin Eli Cohen, known professionally as Irwin Corey, was born on July 29, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family. After his father abandoned the family, his mother placed him and his five siblings in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York, where he lived until his early teens. He subsequently traveled by boxcar to California and enrolled himself at Belmont High School in Los Angeles. During the Great Depression, Corey worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps and earned recognition as a featherweight Golden Gloves boxing champion while making his way back east.

Corey built a career as a stand-up comic, film actor, and activist, becoming widely known under the billing "The World's Foremost Authority." His stage persona, developed from the late 1940s onward, featured seedy formal wear, sneakers, and unkempt hair. He would open his monologue with the word "However" and proceed through elaborate, syntactically complex but ultimately nonsensical observations, employing authentic polysyllabic words rather than invented ones. He introduced this improvisational style at the San Francisco nightclub the hungry i, where club owner Enrico Banducci counted him as a favorite, and Corey appeared there regularly through the 1950s and 1960s. Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan described the Professor character in The New Yorker as "a cultural clown, a parody of literacy, a travesty of all that our civilization holds dear."

In 1938, Corey returned to New York and worked on Pins and Needles, a musical comedy revue about a union organizer in the garment district, writing and performing in the production before claiming he was dismissed for union organizing activities. By 1943 he was performing in New Faces of 1943, one of his Broadway credits, while also appearing at the Village Vanguard. He was drafted during World War II but discharged after six months.

Corey's Broadway career spanned from 1942 to 2004 and included several productions. In 1951 he played "Abou Ben Atom," the Genie, in the musical Flahooley, a production that also featured Yma Sumac, the Bil and Cora Baird Marionettes, and Barbara Cook in her Broadway debut. His performance of "Springtime Cometh" was recorded on the show's original cast album. The following year, in 1952, he appeared in the Broadway play Mrs. McThing alongside Helen Hayes, Jules Munshin, and Brandon deWilde. His additional Broadway credits include the play Sly Fox, the play Thieves, and a role as a gravedigger in a production of Hamlet.

Beyond Broadway, Corey was a frequent presence on television variety and game shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including regular appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and The Steve Allen Show from 1962 to 1964, where stagehands would chase him offstage with a giant butterfly net. He also appeared in an episode of The Phil Silvers Show and guest starred on The Donald O'Connor Show in 1968. In 1980 he participated in hungry i Reunion, a tribute to the nightclub that was televised on PBS in 1981, alongside Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, Jackie Vernon, and Maya Angelou.

In 1974, when author Thomas Pynchon won the National Book Award Fiction Citation for Gravity's Rainbow and declined to appear publicly, he asked Corey to accept the award on his behalf. The New York Times characterized the resulting speech as a series of bad jokes and mangled syntax. In June 1975, Corey performed a characteristically rambling routine for journalists assembled in New York City to hear The Rolling Stones announce their 1975 tour of the Americas, holding the press's attention until the band appeared on a flatbed truck driving down Fifth Avenue playing "Brown Sugar."

Corey held left-wing political views throughout his life, supporting Communist and Socialist causes, and was blacklisted in the 1950s, an experience he stated affected his career for decades. During the 1960 election he campaigned for president on Hugh Hefner's Playboy ticket, and in 2016 he endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. In 2009, filmmaker Jordan Stone began production on a documentary about Corey titled Irwin & Fran, narrated by Susan Sarandon and featuring commentary from Dick Gregory; the film won The People's Film Festival Best Film Award in 2013.

Corey was married for 70 years to Frances Berman Corey, who died in May 2011. The couple had two children, Margaret Davis and Richard Corey, and two grandsons, Amadeo Corey and Corey Meister. Corey turned 100 in July 2014 and died on February 6, 2017.