Snap it, pal

Two disparate anniversaries that occurred in early January, unfortunately and unexpectedly, converged with Floyd Vivino’s death on January 22.

January 8 marked Soupy Sales’ 100^th birthday. His daily show seen on WNEW Channel 5 in New York City was a quirky inside joke of comedy bits that often ran way too long, double entendres that went over kids’ heads, puppets lip-synching novelty songs and cheap sets – a format that Vivino would evolve, build on and turn into The Uncle Floyd Show.

The ten-year anniversary of David Bowie’s death was January 10. While performing in The Elephant Man on Broadway in the early 1980s, he watched The Uncle Floyd Show while in make-up, something that another fan of show, John Lennon, turned him on to. In 2002, Bowie wrote Slip Away, a nostalgic, almost melancholy homage to the New York City of the early 1980s, with Floyd and his puppets Oogie and Bones Boy as avatars.

From 1974 to 1998, The Uncle Floyd Show could be found, if you knew where to look, on cable, UHF, regional syndication or New Jersey public TV. All told, something like 7,000 shows total and always with Floyd’s bomb squad supporting cast of aspiring comedians and nutjobs.

The immortal Oogie and Uncle Floyd

Go snap!

And his puppets. Bratty yet endearing Oogie, whom Floyd always introduced as his partner, was an off-the-shelf factory model named “Walter” produced by a British puppeteer. Bones Boy, an irritable and ill-tempered skeleton in a suit that looked as if he’d been a prize in a claw machine on a boardwalk arcade. His trademark phrase, “Snap it, pal,” captured Jersey attitude (or at least how the rest of the country perceives it). If Bones Boy stopped for breakfast at a diner, he would order black coffee and a hard roll.

Floyd’s career seemed to always be on the verge of something bigger than New Jersey. An Uncle Floyd Show album on Mercury Records was left to die in cutout bins. He had small parts in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Crazy People (1990), but a role in Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony (1980) was cut. When The Uncle Floyd Show went into syndication, it was shown in New York City on NBC, but at 1:30 a.m.

But he persevered and never became one of those stuffed monuments to lower tier show business that used to populate Joe Franklin’s couch. He made seemingly thousands of personal appearances around New Jersey, acting as MC, playing Tin Pan Alley piano in restaurants; he played piano at a record show I attended in the 1990s.

We lost Bruce Springsteen to international stardom, but Floyd stayed and represented the uniqueness that once flourished in this state, although it’s slowly being squeezed: wooded acres losing ground to yet another townhouse development, dead zone shopping malls that all offer the same stores, CVS pharmacies every hundred feet. The Star-Ledger, Bergen Record and Jersey Journal all gone. Boarded up storefronts along Broad Street, Newark.

Somewhere in the cosmos, Bones Boy is taking names. Snap it, pal.