Cookiepuss Revisited

If you're like me, and happened to spend a good portion of your childhood in Philadelphia, you're likely to remember a certain voice, a voice that sounded to me like an emphysemic mobster and that comedian Patton Oswalt once likened to "Tom Waits gurgling hot asphalt." The voice would say things that didn't make much sense like, "Tuesday is Sunday at Carvel," always accompanying grainy, home-grown commercials for ice-cream cakes with absurd-sounding names like "Fudgie the Whale" and "Cookiepuss."

Yes, Cookiepuss. There are certain words that are able to conjure an entire sensory encyclopedia from my childhood, like a Northeast suburban version of "Remembrance of Things Past," and Cookiepuss is one them.

Cookiepuss was one of a handful of pre-fab ice-cream cakes that were a staple of birthdays for my friends and I until I was about 8, and we moved away. I had forgotten -- perhaps repressed -- Cookiepuss until several years ago, when Doug Bowles, a castmate in "Assassins", recalled Fudgie the Whale. It wasn't long before my friend Stephen Gregory Smith, who also grew up in PA, and I began reciting the absurd commercials. Tom Carvel was no doubt a kind and gentle old man, but in my mind, I always pictured him as the black sheep of a Mafia family, like Fredo from "The Godfather," with the voice of Krusty the Clown: "Come to Carvel...Tuesday is Sunday....We've got Fudgie the Whale...We've got Cookiepuss..."

Recently, during the production of "Kiss of the Spider Woman," Stephen and I were backstage, and he asked me, "Whatever happened to Cookiepuss?" This evoked the phenomenon once again, and I discovered, not for the first time, that, with or without the voice of Krusty, "Cookiepuss" is just funny. Maybe it's because I have the sense of humor of an 8-year-old, but when castmate Danny Binstock opened a conversation by saying, "I googled Cookiepuss the other day...," I started giggling like a girl. I could be wrong, but I think we may have accidentally stumbled upon one of those rare comedy rules, like the Rule of 3 or the Rule of 7: If you start a sentence with, "I googled Cookiepuss...," it's going to be hilarious -- no matter what follows.

Stephen actually googled Cookiepuss and discovered that the cake, like seemingly everything else in the universe, has it's own Wikipedia entry. Here's what we learned: Cookiepuss is actually a space alien. His original name was "Celestial Person," "C.P." for short, which later came to stand for Cookiepuss. Cookiepuss was born on the planet Birthday. He can fly, but requires a flying saucer for interplanetary travel. This is never explained. I also learned that there were special versions of the cake for St. Patrick's Day ("Cookie O'Puss) and Valentine's Day ("Cupie Puss").

Once again, google is my way of finding out that I'm not alone in my obsessions. Cookiepuss, as it turns out, has been mentioned in episodes of The Family Guy and The Critic. It's also lent its name to a somewhat raunchy, prank-call centered rap by the Beastie Boys, and to a clothing and cosmetic line.

That is what I learned from googling cookiepuss. And I'm still giggling.