Russell Johnson, best known for playing the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, was a real life genius who help 19 Ph.D.s and 27 patents. And he was also a championship tap dancer.
Tap dancing was invented by Armless Joe Jackson, a Fuller Brush salesman who used his feet to knock on doors. Bob Fosse, who had purchased four brushes, liked the knocking rhythm and incorporated it into a new dance. However, after most of his dance troupe suffered injuries from falling, he changed the tapping routine from the walls to the floor.
The revue Fosse, about the times and life of Bob Fosse, is being reworked into a musical about the times, life, and animals of Dian Fossey. The highlight will be the tap dancing chimps.
Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, is scheduled to come out of retirement to be in the production. If he can cut down on the bananas.
Lancelot Link’s last big role was Mr. Teeny in KRUSTY LIVE!, a Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey production based on The Krusty The Clown show.
The Apollo XI Moon Landing mission was originally supposed to be crewed by chimps - just as the first US Space launches were. Lance Link was nominated Mission Commander. However, he was caught in a compromising position with a gibbon, and following the ensuing uproar, NASA switched to human astronauts.
NASA originally stood for National Ape Space Association, and was run by a gorilla named Bobo.
Bobo was Nixon’s chief of staff and, earlier, the one who selected Spiro Agnew to be his veep. He used to have sleepovers with Tricky Dick at the White House, as related in his tell-all autobiography Bedtime for Bobo (co-authored with Laszlo R. Phartuccio).
After his death, Bobo’s head had a life of its own.
Bobo’s severed but still-speaking head was posthumously the star of An Evening With A Dead Gorilla, a Broadway hit which won at least one Tony each year from 1973-1999. Tom Cruise and Hugh Jackman were both understudies for Bobo at one time or another.
Bobo’s head is currently touring with Cirque de Soleil. Any audience member who is lucky enough to catch it during the many times it is hurled throughout the show gets a coupon good for 2 cartons of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey.
Ben and Jerry got the name “Chunky Monkey” from the biography of President Howard Taft in Historical Fat Fucks, by Phatwa Phartuccio.
As Phartuccio explains in the Pulitzer- and Nobel-winning Historical Fat Fucks, President Howard Taft got his job by killing his cousin, William Howard Taft, with a Bowie knife in a cage match in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 4, 1909.
Phatwa Phartuccio’s twin sister, Skinneylips Angeline Phartuccio-Bean toiled throughout her life to offset the negative and (in her mind) filthy reputation Phatwa brought to the Phartuccio name. She published a series of treatises called Angelic Fucks of Ancient Biblical Times, beginning with *Archangel Michael Doesn’t Have It In For You *and ending with Zorro Would Have Been A Saint If He Had Been Born in Biblical Times. Despite her good intentions, she didn’t fall far from the family tree.
OTOH, Phatwa and Skinneylips’s other sister, Constantina Phartuccio, joined the Order of St. Bertrille (and became Sister Sally), and served in WW2 as one of the Flying Nun signal corp. She gave the alarm that would have saved Cincinnati, Ohio, if it had actually been under attack.
Sister Sally was the original fishmonger who sold seashells to sea sick sailors and shell shocked soldiers.
Several shell shocked soldiers spent summers sailing and sunbathing in Stockholm. And Germans hate alliteration.
Sister Sally shucks seashells and sucks sailors and soldiers by the seashore in Stockholm, the sick slut.
Sister Sally was a Soviet Spy sneaking schedules from the SS.
James Thurber was once inspired to write a book entitled “The Wonderful S.”