The Dying Pan

His style of comedy would, on someone else, be labeled deadpan. But Jackie Vernon's pan is not dead; it is dying, painfully, by degrees.

For a long while the pain was real; persistent obscurity, cancellations when his act bombed, endless bouncing from cellar to dive in search of a sympathetic audience. At last he found one. Its name was Steve Allen, who caught Vernon's act in Canada and booked him for his TV show. After Allen came Jack Paar, Ed Sullivan, Hootenanny--and success. Last week Vernon fans gathered at Manhattan's Hotel Plaza to pay homage to their anti-hero--the first stand-up comic to play the staid Persian Room in 41 years.

Vernon, now 36, is the classic loser. His act, always in the same minor key, begins with an apology: "I'm only doing this because I couldn't get a job in my regular line of work. I'm a Viking." He lugubriously narrates his biography: "My grandfather was an old Yugoslavian guerrilla fighter. My grandmother was an old Yugoslavian guerrilla. My family was so underprivileged we used to get food from Europe. Finally I was adopted by a Korean family."

Things got no better with age. Whatever he did offended somebody. On breadlines he asked for toast. When President Johnson declared war on poverty, he went out and threw a hand grenade at a beggar. To lose weight he started eating saccharin--and got artificial diabetes. He fell in love with a promiscuous girl, so promiscuous she became a hostess in an alley.

At last, perking up enough to look defeated, he recites his efforts to Strike Back: "I wrote Rx on windows of Christian Science Reading Rooms, sent calendars to lifers, scrawled the Star of David on Volkswagens. I carried placards, BAN THE BOMB, BRING BACK

MUSTARD GAS." Nothing helped. At last, lonely and morose, he sought the companionship of a watermelon. "I figured if things didn't work out I could always eat it." But the watermelon died. And he was left alienated once again. Vernon's miseries will be worth $100,000 this year. And future bookings are pouring in. Still, Vernon is taking no chances, planning no new routines. "I've been a real loser too long," he says. "I'm sticking with failure. It's been good to me."

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