Remembering Coyle and Sharpe, groundbreaking comedy duo

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

This week, we're doing something a little different: looking back on the work of Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe. Two brilliant comedians, decades ahead of their time. The comedy duo recorded a series of hilarious and bizarre man-on-the-street records in the 1960s. They'd approach people with usually an absurd proposition: let's rob a bank together. Let's give a stranger a child. Let's become one person – all all three of us. Deeply weird and deeply funny questions. Jim Coyle died in 1993. Mal Sharpe died this past March. He was 83. We're taking time to remember the comedy duo by revisiting a couple conversations with Mal Sharpe. The conversations are some of the first celebrity interviews on the show, back when it was called The Sound of Young America. We'll also listen to some classic Coyle and Sharpe vox populi interviews.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Coming to you from my house in Los Angeles, it's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thornt.
0:12.1	So they call it a man on the street interview. Vox Pop. Vox Pop you're like you've seen it a hundred times.
0:18.6	A reporter goes out onto a busy sidewalk.
0:21.4	Ask passers by what they think of the president or the economy or address somebody war on an awards show.
0:28.6	And then voila, they have a news package.
0:31.6	And maybe a hundred more times you've seen that idea used for comedy, maybe on the daily show or J. Leno doing J. Walking or Eric Andre, I could obviously go on.
0:42.6	Coil in Sharp basically invented that genre of comedy back in the early 1960s.
0:49.6	And they pretty much perfected it too.
0:53.6	These two guys Jim Coil and Mal Sharp would walk the streets of San Francisco in conservative suits with a tape recorder.
1:02.6	Sometimes it was hidden in a briefcase. Sometimes it was out in the open.
1:06.6	And they'd approach people with usually an absurd proposition like let's rob a bank together or you should rent your child to a stranger or let's become one person.
1:21.6	The three of us. I first read about Coil in Sharp many years ago in the beloved countercultural zine research.
1:29.6	They made a book about pranks and Coil in Sharp were the highlight of it.
1:34.6	They were called heroes. One of their records was reissued by Henry Rollins.
1:39.6	They were beloved on the legendary freeform radio station WFMU. But they weren't very well known outside of the folks who'd listened to them on the radio in the early 1960s.
1:51.6	It was an incredible story.
1:53.6	Mal Sharp was basically a San Francisco bohemian.
1:57.6	Jim Coil was maybe an actual con man. Even Mal didn't seem to be entirely sure what his story was.
2:06.6	They were predated the 60s as we think of the 60s now. I mean they weren't hippies. They were...
2:15.6	I mean, you could see Mal around town in a beret from time to time if you're wondering what kind of guy he was.
2:21.6	But it was a world before people were on the lookout for someone acting crazy and tricking them.
2:29.6	And so these really straight people would get roped into these insane schemes. I mean truly mad schemes.
	...

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