uncle floyd and scott gordon: new jersey duo still yucking it up after all these years

Scott Gordon and Uncle Floyd perform live at UCPAC in 2017

“Who is Uncle Floyd?” sound engineer Scott Gordon asks beloved entertainer Uncle Floyd on an episode of their new podcast.

“Nobody knows; he’s a mystery man,” New Jersey legend Floyd Vivino responds. “I came from the circus and carnival world, and I’m happy to be here with Scott Gordon now almost fifty years.”

To put that in perspective, comedy duos Martin and Lewis were together for ten years, Abbott and Costello twenty-two, Laurel and Hardy twenty-eight, and Burns and Allen thirty-six (as comic partners — they were married for thirty-eight).

Shortly before the Covid-19 crisis, my wife and I were doing a major purge of old books, CDs, DVDs, cassettes, and VHS tapes when I came upon a six-hour video recording I had made consisting of half-hour episodes of the long-lamented pseudo-children’s variety program called The Uncle Floyd Show. I distinctly remembered making the tape in the 1980s; I had watched the wild and wacky sketch comedy series first on UHF channel 68 and Wometco Home Theater (WHT), an early pay service, and then on NBC after Saturday Night Live and on New Jersey Network.

The DIY show was constantly changing stations, churning out 6,399 episodes over twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1998, featuring the motley crew of Craig “Mugsy” Calame, Richard “Netto” Cornetto, Looney Skip Rooney, Karen “Weenie” Weiner, David “Artie Delmar” Burd, Charlie Stoddard, Michael Townsend Wright, and Gordon and Floyd, in addition to such puppets as Oogie, Hugo, Bones Boy, and Mr. Jones. I also caught a live performance of the show at the Bottom Line, where they played often; my friends Tom and Jake and I hung out at the bar for a while with Stoddard, who was a relatively new cast member at the time.

Netto, Michael Townshend Wright, Charlie Stoddard, Scott Gordon, David Burd, and Mugsy have Uncle Floyd and Oogie’s back in 1998

I decided to throw out the VHS tape, figuring I could find old episodes online.

Sadly, I was mistaken.

But during the pandemic lockdown, I discovered that Uncle Floyd and his right-hand man, Gordon, were hosting the weekly streaming presentation This WAS the Uncle Floyd Show on the StageIt platform. Every Tuesday night at eight, up to one hundred fans tune in to the program, consisting of sketches and musical performances culled from the more than twelve hundred hours of footage Gordon has preserved. Uncle Floyd introduced the clips, shared behind-the-scenes stories, answered viewer questions, and thanked those who had tipped. (It costs a mere five dollars to watch, but dozens of fans add tips via StageIt from one to twenty bucks and more.)

Scott Gordon takes orders from Uncle Floyd and Soupy Sales veteran Frank Nastasi in comic sketch (screengrab courtesy Scott Gordon)

In an audio interview, I asked Floyd what his initial expectations were when he started the original Uncle Floyd Show back in 1974.

uncle floyd: To give Scott Gordon a job.

scott gordon: You didn’t meet me until 1976.

uf: I’m making a joke here.

sg: I know, I know that, but I’m coming back at you, that’s all. What were your expectations? What did you expect to do with it?

uf: When Scott asked to be paid, I was flabbergasted.

twi-ny: Did you ever think you would be on the air for twenty-five years?

uf: Never. I thought the audience would be tired of me after four or five years.

twi-ny: In that same vein, when you started This Was the Uncle Floyd Show in early 2021, did you ever think it would still be going strong more than three and a half years later?

uf: Nope. I thought they’d be tired of it too.

sg: We figured about ten or fifteen episodes at the time.

uf: Yeah, that’s all.

***

The 189th episode is scheduled for October 15 at 8:00.

An active and often fascinating live chat runs alongside the fifty-minute StageIt video stream, where dedicated fans and people who worked on the show have built a fun community, coming together to yuck it up — Weenie and her husband, director Jeff Friedman, Fred, Margaret, Lee, Gloria, Dennis, RT, Susie, JoeyDee, JG, Melvin Pootwaddle, Dian, Ed, Maggie, Matthew, Sal, and many others. (DDL refers to us as Floydvillians.) The chat is anchored by Burd, who appeared in more than one thousand episodes of the show and is Floyd’s agent; he has saved a mountain of memorabilia that he posts on Facebook.

“Being on The Uncle Floyd Show was the best time of my life. It was the most creatively fulfilling experience I’ve ever had, and I challenge anyone to describe a better one,” Burd explained in an email interview. “We had complete freedom (within FCC guidelines), and I did everything that was in my power to do: writing, acting, drawing, puppeteering, costuming, makeup, prop-building, and so on. The only thing I didn’t do was music; I have no musical ability whatsoever.” Ironically, one of Burd’s most endearing characterizations is folksinger extraordinaire Marty Baxter.

“There was no criticism of what we did. If I came up with a character, created a costume, wrote a gag, and performed it (essentially) live, I never heard Floyd say, ‘That wasn’t very funny’ or ‘Don’t do that again.’ The gag succeeded or failed on its own merits. Very satisfying, creatively. As far as working with Floyd and Scott, the experience was probably very similar to being a musician in an orchestra or a player on a baseball team. We had each other’s backs. For example, when I performed as Mr. Sponge, the gag was that Floyd would get hit with a barrage of kitchen sponges every time I tricked him into saying the word ‘sponge.’ I would say to Scott, ‘Mr. Sponge, third show.’ That was all I needed to say. I knew I could count on Scott to throw the sponges from off-camera and fire his starter’s pistol if he had it with him.”

Floyd and Scott share a moment at Collectors World in Bergenfield, NJ (fan photo)

Because of various rights issues, complete episodes of The Uncle Floyd Show will never be available on DVD or any streaming service; StageIt is the only place you can check it out, and each clip is allowed to be aired only once. Among the favorite skits that fans clamor for are “The Dull Family,” “Eddie Slobbo,” “A Day in the Life of a Food,” “Ken-Do,” “Intellectual Digress,” “Cowboy Charlie,” “Joe Frankfurter,“ “Julia Step-Child,“ “Senza Parole,” and “Mr. Grouch.” The unscripted sketches, which specifically avoid politics and religion, are still hilarious and over the top, constantly pushing the envelope on what was considered good taste back then.

Vivino, whose brothers, Jimmy and Jerry, are successful musicians, is a master piano player and singer of old songs — he once played seven hundred tunes, all by heart, in a twenty-four-hour period for charity, and he owns about a million recordings — so every show contains at least one vaudeville-style turn at the keyboards by Floyd, and the lineup of musical guests who rocked out on the series — usually lip-synching but not always — ranged from David Johansen, Cyndi Lauper, Jon Bon Jovi, Phoebe Snow, Eddie Money, the Ramones, the Blasters, the Smothers Brothers, Squeeze, Paul Simon (who appeared in a terrific sketch too), Blotto, Misfits, Bananarama, and Rupert Holmes to Peter Tork, Tiny Tim, Chubby Checker, Marshall Crenshaw, Gary U.S. Bonds, NRBQ, and Benny Bell (of “Shaving Cream” fame). Meanwhile, Mugsy did musical parodies as Neil Yuck, Bruce Stringbean, Tom Waste, and more.

Floyd and Scott regularly pay tribute to comedy giants, most directly in their popular “Haurel and Lardy” skits, in which Floyd is Stan and Scott is Ollie. Other important influences are Ernie Kovacs, Chuck McCann, Bob Clampett, Charlie Chaplin, and Soupy Sales, who was a fan of the show (as were John Lennon, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie; Bowie, who watched episodes while getting his heavy makeup applied when he was starring on Broadway in The Elephant Man, wrote a song about Floyd, Oogie, and Bones Boy called “Slip Away”).

Then, at the height of this online resurgence, in July 2023, Vivino, who was born in Paterson in 1951, suffered a debilitating stroke. While a full recovery is expected, he has been in a rehab facility since he left the hospital, and Gordon, his ever-faithful best friend, has been keeping the Tuesday-night show going despite his own recent health issues, which include injuries from a few dangerous tumbles; Scott hitting the floor was a running gag on The Uncle Floyd Show, so all those pratfalls might finally be catching up with him. The money raised during the broadcast, after StageIt costs, goes to Floyd, who has been unable to work, either on his Sunday radio show, currently on hiatus, or at the countless public appearances he schedules every year.

Uncle Floyd and Scott Gordon perform at the Anchor Tavern in Garfield, NJ, in 1978 (fan photo)

I asked Floyd what his favorite thing about Scott is.

uf: When he says, Good night, everybody.

sg: No, come on.

uf: He defies description. I can get serious here, and I will: His loyalty to me has been unbeatable. Unequaled by anybody.

twi-ny: And what’s your least favorite thing?

uf: He’s a fusspot like my father. Everything has to be perfect. I want to thank Scott personally. Not many entertainers work long enough to be appreciated as long as I have, and that’s the truth. And one of the big reasons is the loyalty Scott Gordon has shown this show.

There’s a joke in my family called “Get Scott. Where’s Scott?” My mother started that. “What would you do without Scott Gordon?” And that’s it.

[ed.note: You can listen to this audio clip below.]

twi-ny: Scott, what’s your favorite thing about Uncle Floyd?

sg: It’s his mind and his friendship. His comedy mind is so quick that you can’t believe how fast he will come up with a line that you did not ever expect, whenever he says it. We have one of those friendships where you walk into the room and see each other and the conversation starts exactly where it left off. We could be halfway through a sentence and, boom, right into the next day we meet again and start with that same sentence. I don’t know if you understand that, but it’s the way it is.

He is also the greatest person in the world to work with. We get onstage, it’s like we know exactly what the other guy’s going to do. We know what we’re going to say. For instance, when we were doing the “Foreign Language Program” on the show, we did double-talk Eastern European kind of flavored language, and we would actually sit there and understand what the other guy was saying, even though we were making up these nonsense syllables.

There’s nothing he can’t do: music, comedy, drama, he can do it all.

uf: And I have.

twi-ny: What’s your least favorite thing about Floyd?

sg: Wow. The fact that he will accept something that is not exactly the way it should be. I know he dislikes me for being a perfectionist, but that’s the way I am.

I have the technical ability that he doesn’t have. For instance, I’ll tell you a quick story. He and I were going to write something for the TV show and I called him up on the phone and he sounded grumpy. I said, “What’s wrong? You sound terrible.” He says, “I’m stuck in the house for three days now.” I said, “Three days. How can you be stuck in the house for three days?” He said, “The garage door won’t open.” I said, “That’s simple. You just go down to the breaker box and find the breaker that’s kicked off and turn it back on.” He says, “What’s a breaker box?” I said, “That’s the gray box with all the switches in it in the basement.” He says, “Oh, I don’t touch that. Ralph is coming over tomorrow. I’ll have him look at it.”

Ralph was his father-in-law at the time. And I said, “Well, it still doesn’t mean you’re stuck in the house. What you have to do is go and pull the emergency rope and that’ll let you open up the garage door manually.” He says, “What’s an emergency rope?” I said, “The white rope with the red handle on it that hangs down from the garage door opener.” He says, “Oh, is that what that was?” I said, “What do you mean ‘was?’” He said, “It’s, well, Lisa [Vitale, one of Vivino’s ex-wives and the mother of three of his six children], the other day, pushed the button, the thing opened, it hit me in the head, so I cut it off.” I think that explains just about everything about that.

Burd adds, “Likewise, Floyd supported me in whatever character I was doing, despite having no rehearsal or even a basic conversation about what I was going to do. When we arrived at the studio, Floyd would ask us what we had. I would respond with ‘Artie Delmar, Bob the Mechanic, the Viking, Ralph Katz, and Warren Plegming.’ Floyd would say, ‘Okay, the Viking on Monday, Bob on Tuesday, Ralph Katz Wednesday, Warren Thursday, and Artie Friday.’ That was the extent of the planning. When it came time to shoot that show, I would tell Floyd the ‘out,’ that is, how the gag ends. Then I would trust him completely to get through the bit, ad-libbing our lines until it reached the conclusion. That feeling of trust is what I remember most.”

Gordon now meets with Floyd weekly, sometimes recording messages from Vivino at the rehab center and playing them on Tuesday nights. That has led to The Uncle Floyd Podcast, a fifteen-minute conversation between the two men in which they talk about their long careers outside of the TV show; it also further exposes that Floyd isn’t just low-tech — he’s no-tech.

The podcast goes beyond the series, delving into what they did away from the program; I’m particularly looking forward to tales about when they would hang out at the Factory and in the hottest New York City clubs, getting ushered in right past the velvet ropes.

twi-ny: You now have a podcast. Have you ever listened to one?

uf: No, I never heard one before.

twi-ny: Do you like doing it?

uf: I like pot roast.

sg: Do you enjoy doing the podcast?

uf: I love doing it. Anything for an audience.

twi-ny: That audience has been with you for more than half a century, regardless of the medium. What does that mean to you?

uf: It means I work cheap. Scott, you want me to be serious, right?

sg: Yeah.

uf: Well, this is all comedy stuff.

sg: I know.

uf: They want me to be cheap.

sg: We’ll go through the questions one more time and be serious.

uf: No, I think you should leave it like this. It’s the truth.

sg: Leave it with the comedy answers.

uf: Yeah.

sg: Okay. If that’s what you want to do with it.

uf: That’s what they know us for.

The Uncle Floyd Show Album is now a collectors item

Later, Scott gave an example of what kind of topics will be covered on the podcast.

“We did a lot of stuff outside The Uncle Floyd Show. We knew a lot of people. We met a lot of really great people through the show. And we also both have separate histories,” Gordon said. “When I was fourteen years old, growing up in Mahwah, New Jersey, I used to ride my bicycle through the woods to Les Paul’s house, knock on the door, and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Paul. Hi, it’s Scott from the neighborhood. Do you mind if I come in and sweep your studio? Do you need any help?’ And Les Paul let me in. He was a great mentor, a great friend. Everything I know about recording, everything I know about electronics, I learned next to him. He was amazing.” (Gordon wrote a personal piece for the Bergen Record the week after Les passed away in 2009 at the age of ninety-four.)

The StageIt streams are more than just blasts from the past; they reveal how innovative — and low budget — The Uncle Floyd Show was.

Artie Delmar (David Burd) with his catchphrase pin and sock puppet Lambie (photo © David Burd)

“Watching the old shows is full of mixed emotions,” Burd noted. “Sometimes I’m frustrated to see how bad camerawork ruined a good bit. Sometimes I’m sad to see Mugsy, who was my best friend at the time and passed away far too young at age fifty-six [in October 2005]. Sometimes I’m delighted to see a segment I had never seen before. (Aside from the Channel 68 and NJN years, I never lived in the areas where the show aired.) Sometimes I’m embarrassed by our sloppiness and unprofessionalism. Sometimes I’m proud of a good gag that’s well executed, whether I had anything to do with it or not. Sometimes I laugh out loud at some bit of silliness I don’t recall. Although it brings back fond memories, it’s also fraught with sadness and disappointment over the ultimate failure of the show to be as successful as we hoped and the fact that those glory days are gone and never coming back.”

If you ask the rabid fan base, we are all getting at least a little taste of those glory days, although Floyd himself is likely never to see or hear any of it. Email, texting, livestreams, et al. are foreign to him, as pointed out in the old boilerplate response Scott used to use when someone thought they were emailing Uncle Floyd:

“Please understand that Floyd, himself, is not on the internet in any way. He does not own a computer, cell phone (the only phone he has hangs on his wall and is attached to an old-school answering machine), or television other than one hooked to a DVD player to watch old John Wayne movies.”

Now, that’s some true grit.

[You can follow Mark Rifkin, aka murray_hill_riff, and This Week in New York every day here.]