Pat Cooper
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Pat Cooper, the brash Brooklyn-based Italian-American stand-up whose wrath, real and imagined, fueled a long career as a comedian, has died. He was 93.
Cooper died Tuesday night at his Las Vegas home, his wife Emily Conner announced.
A fixture in nightclubs from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, Cooper opened for Ginger Rogers at the Desert Inn and Frank Sinatra at the Sands. He said he once refused to make a joke about an upside-down statue of St. Anthony that Sinatra wanted cut out and never worked with the singer again.
Cooper, also known for his nonstop, fast-paced performance, appeared as himself in the 1996 Seinfeld episode “The Friars Club” — he attended many roasts at this famed midtown Manhattan comedy establishment — and joined regularly Late night talks on shows for Ed Sullivan and on Howard Stern’s radio program from the 1980s.
The bespectacled comedian played consigliere Salvatore Masiello in ‘Analyze This’ (1999) and its 2002 follow-up ‘Analyze That’ (2002) but says he turned down Martin Scorsese’s invitation to appear in Casino (1995) on the grounds that he was “a name actor” who deserved more than three lines of dialogue.
In his 2011 memoir How Dare You Say How Dare Me!: An Autobiography of a Life in Comedy, Cooper wrote that he never appeared on The Tonight Show again after a drunk Johnny Carson accidentally walked into the bathroom of a New York nightclub had urinated on him in the early 1970s. This story was told in the chapter “I’d rather be mad than mad”.
“I’m a half name,” he told the New York Observer in 1999. “I’m not Rodney Dangerfield. I’m not Bob Hope. I’m a consistent performer. I pack my rooms. But I’m happier than Rodney will ever be.”
He was born Pasquale Caputo on July 31, 1929 and grew up in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father was a bricklayer, and for a time Cooper was one too. He also worked as a docker.
As a youngster, he competed on the Fox Amateur Hour radio show, making impressions and winning first prize, but his parents weren’t impressed.
“I came from a family that didn’t understand [show business]he told Kliph Nesteroff in a 2011 interview for the Classic Television Showbiz blog. “If you didn’t sing the opera, you were nothing. If you sang wrong, you were another Caruso. If you said something funny at the table, you were messy, you were out of order, and your old man [would want to] throw yourself out the window.”
After his draft and service in the US Army, Cooper was performing in nightclubs when he was spotted by an agent, Willie Webber. He vowed to get Cooper on Jackie Gleason’s TV show, and sure enough, he did it a few months later.
That was in 1963. Almost overnight, Cooper was playing Vegas, Reno, and top-notch clubs like New York’s Copacabana.
In 1965, Cooper found success with the comedy album Our Hero — (Billboard said it “does for the Italian-American community what Jackie Mason did for the Jewish-American community”) — followed a year later by Spaghetti Sauce and Other Delights”. The first LP cover showed him lying in a big sandwich, on the second he was covered in red sauce.
He toured frequently with Italian-born tenor Sergio Franchi before the singer died of a brain tumor in 1990.
Cooper frequently complained that table attendants like Jerry Vale, Joe DiMaggio, Rocky Marciano, and Mickey Mantle never accepted a check. “It used to annoy me,” he told Nesteroff. How dare you think that I have to turn around and buy your food! You are millionaires! You are bigger stars and they would come to the Copa and never pay!”
Cooper was married and divorced his first wife, Dolores. In 1964 he married singer Patti Prince. He adopted their daughter Patti Jo before Prince died in 2005 at the age of 69. He married Conner in 2018.
Cooper was estranged from the two children from his first marriage for years. His daughter Louise and his ex-wife once called Stern’s radio show to lie to him, and his son Michael published a book called Dear Pat Cooper in 2009 about his bad relationship with his father.
Michael wrote: “He hated us with every fiber of his being and I could never understand why. What did either of us do to get my father to walk away from the whole family and find a new one?”
In addition to his three children and wife, survivors include his sisters Grace, Carol and Marie, and five grandchildren. Donations on his behalf can be made to Shriners Hospitals for Children or the Neon Museum Las Vegas.