'Professor' Irwin Corey was 102

American comedian ‘Professor’ Irwin Corey has died at the age of 102.

Often billed as ‘The World's Foremost Authority’, he was known for improvising long streams of important-sounding oratorial nonsense.

Lenny Bruce once described him as ‘one of the most brilliant comedians of all time’.

He was also a prominent left-wing activist, blacklisted in the 1950s for supporting the Communist Party, and in a 2011 interview, he said he begged for change for motorists, not for himself, as the drivers would have thought, but for medical supplies for Cuban children.

And when the famously publicity-shy Thomas Pynchon won a book award in 1974, he asked Corey to accept it on his behalf.  The New York Times described the resulting speech as ‘a series of bad jokes and mangled syntax which left some people roaring with laughter and others perplexed’

He was born in poverty in New York, working in conservation during the Depression and becoming a boxing champion. Before the Second World War, he  got a job writing and performing in a musical comedy revue about a union organiser in the garment trade, Ironically, he claims he was fired from this job for organising union activities. 

He was drafted during the Second World War II, but was discharged after six months, after he convinced an Army psychiatrist that he was a homosexual, though in fact he was as married for 70 years to Fran, who died in 2011

From the late 1940s he cultivated his Professor character, who would use long and bombastic, but authentic, words, unlike Britain’s Stanley Unwin, but his observations were nonsensical.

Theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote : ‘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. He is Chaplin's tramp with a college education’

Corey died on Monday evening, his son told the Washington Post.

Here he is performing in New York when he was a mere 94 years old:

Published: 7 Feb 2017