COYLE AND SHARPE: These 2 Men Are Impostors-Box Set

Coyle And Sharpe

These 2 Men Are Impostors-Box Set

© 2006 Sharpeworld (837101180856)

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Historic Pranks from the early 1960s recorded on the streets of San Francisco, often with a hidden tape recorder.

tracks

1 KGO Show Open
2 Grevenz
3 Welcome to New Years Eve 1964
4 Burn Your Bag
5 Run Over Hand
6 King of the Sun
7 Renting Children
8 The Droner
9 Ingotal Matter
10 Seven Channel Seven
11 Traffic Patrol
12 Record Your Stomach
13 Seatbelts
14 Mailman Give Us Your Mail
15 Elongated Head
16 Sheet Sale
17 He Slipped Away
18 Human sugar Bowl
19 Dringitis
20 Wolverine Football
21 Stamps
22 Yo Quierro Fumar Cigarros
23 Underground Death Ritual
24 Weather Tree
25 Good Night and Happy New Year
26 Daring but Dead
27 Human Leach
28 Mr. Rodent
29 Crawfish Boat Shirt
30 Aquamaniac
31 Druggist
32 Feast of Patience
33 Musical Animals
34 Merchandise Peddlers
35 Werewolf
36 Brain Piggy Bank
37 Sandor 21
38 Polylingua
39 Footapples
40 Vocal Projection
41 Armored Attack
42 114 Noises
43 Live in Elevator
44 Yiddish Reindeer
45 C&S Get Arrested Part 1
46 C&S Get Arrested Part 2
47 Not a Time Bomb
48 We Never Burn Anything Around Here
49 Insects in a Clothing Store
50 Up

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notes

3 CDs-1 DVD The collection Coyle and Sharpe fans have been waiting for.

Disc 1. The Best of ‘63
Recorded off a radio in Mal’s Telegraph Hill apartment, New Year’s Eve 1963

Disc 2. Coyle and Sharpe on the Loose Reissue
Originally produced by Henry Rollins and Jennifer Sharpe 1995

Disc 3. The Arrest Plus Odds ‘n Ends
Recently discovered unedited, experimental recordings from 1962 plus Coyle and Sharpe Get Arrested. Perhaps for collectors only. Sound is sometimes marginal.

Disc 4. DVD, The Impostors TV Pilot 1965 with host George Fenneman (Groucho Marx’s sidekick on YOU BET YOUR LIFE.)

COYLE AND SHARPE BIO
Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe met in a boarding house in San Francisco in
1959. Coyle was a benign con man who had talked his way into 119 jobs
by the age of 25. Sharpe had just graduated college and had drifted
out to the West Coast to check out the Beatnik scene. The pair found
they had a mutually sick sense of humor and decided to if the to see
if they could avoid real jobs and see if they could make a living
pulling Pranks or "Terrorizations," as they then called them. Using
one of the first miniature tape recorders, The Mohawk, which they hid
in a brief case, they roamed the streets of San Francisco capturing
their bizarre encounters with unsuspecting citizens. After surviving
for two years on peanut butter sandwiches, they released an LP on
Warner Brothers Records and then were hired by KGO radio to do a
nightly show. Most of the audio on this release was recorded during
this period. In 1964 they went to Hollywood to hit the jackpot .They
did a television pilot , THE IMPOSTORS, which didn't sell. Perhaps 40
years ahead of their time, they were never hired again and their
partnership ended. In 1967 Coyle left California to pursue a career in
tunneling. He died in 1993 while burrowing under the City of
Barcelona. Sharpe continued to work in media and ultimately moved back
to San Francisco where he did hundreds of man-on-the-street interviews
for radio and television. Despite their brief partnership, Coyle and
Sharpe continued to flourish in the underground media thanks to the
dedication of Mal's daughter Jennifer Sharpe who, along with Henry
Rollins, produced a CD of their material in 1995. It is reissued in
this package. In the year 2000, The Whitney Museum hosted a
centennial exhibit THE AMERICAN CENTURY. Coyle and Sharpe were
featured in the Soundworks Exhibit.

This package, edited and compiled by Mal Sharpe, contains most of
their best work including some long lost tapes from their early
ramblings through the nighborhoods of San Francisco. Were they ever
arrested? Listen ...

reviews

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  • Coyle & Sharpe: These 2 Men are Imposters
    author: Robert Emmons Wilkins

    This album represents a type of humor that is little seen these days, and that's too bad. In the late fifties/early 60s, an off-the-wall subset of humor appeared on the San Francisco scene, following closely on the heels of the great eruption of talent which sprung form the Purple Onion and Hungry i in that city. And before that there was Allen Funt's "Candid Camera" and, if you're really old, Candid Microphone on the radio. Now in the early '60s come two crazy geniuses (?) -Jim Coyle & Mal Sharpe, strolling the streets of San Francisco and outlying villages like Sausalito. You need to buy the CD/DVD set to see man-in-the street humor at it's finest. The bits are funny in concept, and the "victims" are never treated without respect. But neither can they escape the full-court presses for answers to questions that are so absurd there can be no rational answer. Coyle is a glib maniac with a straight-face interview style, whilst Sharpe plays off the theme with further absurdity and dead pan. The DVD--a pilot for a never-aired show with Groucho's announcer George Fenniman a shost, is in the same vane as the audio bits, and you will have tears in your eyes at least 3 times as you watch the hapless unsuspecting targets. It's TV and hence less inwardly visual, but it's funny stuff. This set is a rare piece of San Francisco humor during it's golden age of radio, and is as important as air checks of Jean Shepherd in New York, Regis Cordic in Pittsburgh, and Don Sherwood in San Francisco.

  • Funniest routines I've heard in years!
    author: Jules

    The three CD's I listened to were so side-splittingly hilarious that I had to pull my car over to the side of the road several times to avoid an accident! The wild discrepancy between the lunatic inquiries of Coyle and Sharpe and the innocent responses of their "victims" achieves a level of FUNNY that is off any Humor Gauge! These guys are comic geniuses!

  • Classic Comedy History
    author: Kathe HAskell

    For all you would-be comedians Learn from the masters! You don't need sex or bathroom jokes to make it. These two create from the comedy of Life - of just getting through the day. Bravo!!!!

  • Offbeat creative hilarity runs wild in the Jarryesque streets
    author: P

    It came as a relief that SharpeWorld didn't use up space duplicating contents of the Audio Visionaries CD on Thirsty Ear. This one's fresh as a laugh-packed tsunami! The uproarious premises behind the "bits" suggest Alfred Jarry's pataphysical ploys, as Coyle and Sharpe posit and defend one absurd proposition after another with implacable logic and streetsmart cool. My only quibble: The DVD disappointed as I feared. A pilot for a network TV show that didn't make the cut, it's hampered by mainstreaming compromises: The interruptive set-ups, recaps, and lame-o framing devices devised to ensure that audiences would "get it." The DVD is revelatory nonetheless, a boon given the bargain-basement price of admission, and documentation that we fans needed to see.

  • Outstanding Pioneers of Situationist Comedy
    author: Jonathan Ball

    This is a great collection of some of Coyle & Sharpe's man-on-the-street interviews and pranks. If you enjoy Borat and/or other forms of latter-day Situationist and Absurdist comedy, you'll want to listen to Coyle and Sharpe. I was shocked at not only how funny and clever the sketches were, but how they are still bizarre by today's hyperreal standards --- the sketches hold up incredibly well, and the pair have a real knack for pacing and continuing to up the ante. The only disappointment with this collection is that at the end of some sketches they defuse the situation by letting the person know that it was all just a joke. Perhaps this needed to be done for legal reasons, or because they were about to be beaten up, but it's a real shame that they didn't cut these confessions off of the tracks because it completely defuses the comedy and ruins the ending of the sketch.

  • Hilarious, and pretty impressive, really...
    author: Manny Wagnitz

    My only complaint was that some of my favorites were not include. However, on the plus side, i added another four or five favorites thanks to this box set "Up!" and "Sandor 21" are classic!

  • Fantastic compilation
    author: K. Gawlik

    This is a definitive collection of the work of Coyle and Sharpe, two comedic geniuses ahead of their time. The audio quality is excellent considering the original recording methods and media age. The collection includes finished pieces and a few that sound like recordings before editing or works in progress. There is also the unplanned arrest. A real gem is the TV pilot included with the set. I highly recommend it for those familiar with C&S and those who may not be, but enjoy absurd comedy.

  • “ I don’t know you gentlemen at all; though you look perfectly reputable.”
    author: Hussalonia

    Looking and sounding reputable was Coyle and Sharpe’s comedic secret weapon. Two well-groomed, articulate, white men in suits playing the devil’s advocate for absurd causes. Teaching wolves how to play football. Selling germs as pets. Feeding a parasitic human being through a tube worn on your forehead. Never cracking a smile. Their humor presented a dark, hostile place to the unsuspecting San Franciscan. Not wanting to seem out of touch, offended or prudent, many feign indifference to this dark, hostile world. Until then they were asked, “Would you, yourself, now be willing to participate?” You could say that they were ahead of their time, but their hidden-microphone recordings could not have happened any later in history. The early 1960s gave Coyle and Sharpe a world that would be just hostile enough to accommodate their absurd propositions, with enough post-war innocence left over from a previous generation to make it funny. The average man is still polite. They take the time to consider operations (performed in a nearby station wagon), to elongate their heads, to manufacture coins in, or (my personal favorite) to store granulated sugar in. They consider mounting machine guns to a car, housing forty reindeer in their shop, renting orphan children for profit, eating people at a death ritual. After all, these men look perfectly reputable. It’s Candid Camera, but darker. It’s the Jerky Boys, but sophisticated. It’s Kafka, but without the suffering. If you enjoy subversive humor, buy this. It’s nonsensically smart. They’re logistical maniacs: pushing people’s buttons by challenging their sense of progress, their open minds. But exercise caution in your portable devices. I found myself bursting out into laughter, in public places, while listening to my Coyle and Sharpe box set. Perhaps it’s the best way to experience their humor: out on the streets, surrounded by the unsuspecting humorless.

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