Comic world: Sugar Footwear

Tuesday 10 July 2012

Sugar Footwear

Bootzin received national exposure in 1955, when he appeared as a contestant on network TV show. Introduced as "Boots Bootzin," he cheerfully espoused his philosophy of clean living, exercise, and healthy eating. Even though he was over 40, he acted like a gangly, goofy, but polite teenager, causing mildly sensational reactions from the audience. When asked by Groucho to demonstrate how he sold figs, he stepped toward the edge of the stage, shouted an attention-getting sales pitch for a few seconds, and then performed a perfect pratfall (the type where one falls sideways after swinging one leg to knock the other one out from underneath). In the game portion of the show, he correctly whispered the spelling of the word to his partner, who overruled him and miscorrected it to "motiffe".