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Festival Preview: Pat Cooper, a comedian for all ages
Friday, September 03, 1999 By Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Editor
These are the good new days for Pat Cooper. Back in the good old ones, if you were a comic, you did Sullivan, you did Mike and Merv, you played a nice supper show at the Holiday House. You did the Borscht Belt with the Buddy Hacketts and the Shecky Greens. Fuggedaboutit.
Now, he's holding his own on "The Howard Stern Show," where he's become a semi-regular foil, and he's playing guys named Salvatore in mob films like "Analyze This."
Pat Cooper will appear at Festa Italiana this weekend at the I.C. Light Amphitheater at 9:30 tomorrow night. Other festival performers are the Four Lads tonight; the Jaggerz Sunday night and Wee Jams Monday night. Call 412-323-1919 for more information
But, while Cooper is working full-time these days embracing the current culture, in some ways he's still representin' the old one. He's a guy who will offer all varieties of rants, solicited and otherwise. For instance, you don't even have to ask him about the state of comedy for him to go off like Joe Pesci's uncle after a double espresso.
"Listen to me," he says -- he starts a lot of his rants with "listen to me" -- "Show business as I knew it, you had to be funny, right. Now, they've got the earring in the nose and the thing through the tongue. Young comics today, it's all about the sex and the drugs. They can't do anything else. They don't have the range, you understand."
To his good fortune, he's managed to reach the kids through bad-boy Stern, who takes an occasional break from discussing breast implants to liven up the proceedings with an old crank like Cooper.
"It opened a whole new audience for me and I'm thankful for that," he says of Stern. "But let me tell you something. A lot of people who liked me started listening to him. So we actually helped each other.
"When I go on and he deals with me, that's one thing," Cooper says, obviously feeling the need to defend his biggest platform. "I don't tell him how to run his family. And I don't tell him how to run his show. I respect his right to do that, this is America. Again, I don't agree with everything he says, but I agree with many things. He's very honest. And very up front, and I think that's what we need more of. That [T&A] thing has to stop. That's getting boring. The lesbian dating and all that crap, that's about beaten to death. And I think he's going to end up quitting and going into movies, and I thought his movie was pretty good. And I think his second one will be even better. That's about it."
Although he's usually talking a mile a minute -- when not watching "Tweety Bird," he's a big fan -- Cooper is much more subdued in his small role as one of De Niro's made guys in "Analyze This." It's a rare film part in Cooper's long career in show business. Why movies, why now?
"They asked me to come in and read, and I read and got the part. That's it," he says. "I never liked to do movies. It makes you old. I don't want to sit around in a trailer or a cabana all day waiting for the lights and the this and the that. I got better things to do."
And yet, Cooper will follow that with another role in another mob movie, "Jimmy Whispers Goes Back to Mulberry Street," this one about a Chinese gang that tries to take over an Italian neighborhood.
"The Italians are hot this year," he explains. "Anything to do about the Italians you make money. The Sopranos, the Bonnano family, the Godfather, the Godmother, the son of the Mafia, mother of Mafia, your uncle Mafia. That's hot this year. Then it will die and it will be something else."
Although Italian-American groups are calling for HBO to drop the heavily acclaimed and Emmy-nominated "The Sopranos" because of the stereotypes it portrays, Cooper isn't buying it.
"I don't get offended by it. There's a lot of truth in that stuff. There were Italian gangsters, and there was the Mafia. So what? That's maybe a half of a percent of the 30 million Italians in this country. I'll tell you one thing people don't remember: In World War II, Italian men served the Army and Navy more than any other ethnic group on the planet. So I'm proud of my culture, and if they talk about [mobsters] turning around and shooting the guns, it happened. But they did that to their own. Those that double-crossed their own, they killed. They didn't go out and kill children, they didn't go out and kill a guy just for no reason. They killed their own people . . . You can't be sensitive to movies. Give me a break."
In his mission to keep up with the news and consume the whole of pop culture -- he wants to be ready if a talk-show host asks for an opinion -- Cooper wandered into "The Blair Witch Project," a film he found a lot more offensive.
"What a complete piece of crap," he barks. "How dare they drag people into that movie. They run around in the woods for an hour and a half -- we're lost, we can't find our way -- and there's not one bird. And if you go, bring Visine, because the thing's going to give you a headache."
Tomorrow, Cooper ventures into the great outdoors for the 12th annual Festa Italiana, the type of gig he doesn't play all that often.
"I don't like to work outside that much," Cooper says. "I just got booked at a festival where I worked on a beach with the ocean behind me. You're fighting seagulls, you're fighting the ocean noise, the noise of the boats. And you're also fighting airplanes flying overhead. Not only that, it was raining. But the people sat out there, and they listened, so hey, I can't complain."
Just wait till he sees the trains . . .
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