01/08/2026
Happy heavenly birthday, Soupy!
Soupy Sales (January 8, 1926 – October 22, 2009) was born 100 years ago today. A beloved comedian and television pioneer, Soupy Sales became a household name through his anarchic, fast-paced children’s TV series Lunch with Soupy Sales (originally 12 O’Clock Comics, later The Soupy Sales Show). The program was built around improvisation, slapstick, wordplay, and chaotic sketches—almost always ending with Soupy taking a pie in the face, a gag he turned into a genuine art form. Straight-on pies, double-ear pies, overhead pies, moving pies—by his own count, Soupy and his guests endured more than 20,000 pies over the course of his career.
One of the show’s most memorable features was a mysterious door on the set, where Soupy would answer knocks and interact with visitors seen only as an arm. Occasionally, the “visitor” was a surprise celebrity, including Burt Lancaster and Fess Parker. The door also led to legendary behind-the-scenes pranks—most famously a Detroit broadcast in which Soupy unknowingly opened the door to reveal a topless dancer partially concealed by a balloon. The uncensored prank footage later resurfaced and became part of Soupy lore.
Soupy’s career wasn’t without controversy. On January 1, 1965, during a live broadcast, he jokingly told children to sneak into their sleeping parents’ rooms and mail him the “funny green pieces of paper with pictures of U.S. Presidents.” While most of what arrived was Monopoly money, parental outrage followed, and Soupy was suspended for two weeks by WNEW-TV. Ironically, kids picketed Channel 5 in protest, and the incident only boosted his popularity. Soupy later detailed the episode in his 2001 autobiography, Soupy Sez! My Life and Zany Times.
Beyond children’s television, Sales enjoyed a long and varied career. From 1968 to 1975, he was a regular panelist on the syndicated revival of What’s My Line? and appeared frequently on other game shows. In the 1980s, he hosted a midday radio program on WNBC-AM in New York, airing between Don Imus and Howard Stern—whose on-air “feud” with Soupy included an infamous (and later admitted fake) piano-destruction stunt.
Soupy Sales was married twice: first to Barbara Fox (1950–1979), with whom he had two sons, Tony Sales (bassist) and Hunt Sales (drummer), both successful rock musicians. In 1980, he married dancer Trudy Carson, who survived him.
Soupy Sales passed away on October 22, 2009, at age 83, from cancer, at Calvary Hospice in the Bronx. He was laid to rest at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
