Cozy Morley, comedian

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on August 27th, 2013

Comedy fans of a certain age in the Philadelphia/South Jersey area know Cozy Morley, who died last week at age 87.  Morley was, “an iconic part of the South Jersey entertainment scene, a jokester who could pack his 1,200-seat Club Avalon in North Wildwood every night and became a hit in the Atlantic City casinos,” according to the obit in the Philadelphia Daily News.

Cozy Morley didn’t bother about being politically correct. He learned jokes on the streets of South Philadelphia, where neighbors were Jewish, Polish, Italian and African-American.

“I suppose none of my jokes are politically correct now,” he once told the New York Times. “But when I learned them, that was what was politically correct, to make fun of yourself and everyone else.”

In America, we give our “politically incorrect” comedians a loving send-off. (In England, they take the death of an older comic to say classy things like “Good riddance,” and then the readers take to the comments to try to prove who is the most compassionate, most politically correct and most intelligent. Which is better? Allowing that a comic– and his audience– were from a different era then moving on? Or kicking the dead corpse in order to make you and your contemporaries feel superior? We’ll take the former.)

For our posting on Morley’s statue in Wildwood, click here.

H/T to SHECKYmagazine.com reader Terrance Reilly!

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