One of the members of The Far East Playboys was a stand-up comic named Elmer. We called him “Uncle Elmer”, which was his stage name.
Elmer was from the back-woods of South Carolina. The way he used the English language was quite hilarious to this yankee from Ohio. When he saw the picture in a magazine of a pretty “round-eyed” American girl, he would sometimes become overwhelmed. “Look at them dad-blamed ahhs! (eyes)”, he would exclaim. I will concede that those “ahhs” were quite different from the ones we usually saw in Korea.
One morning Elmer tried to open the door of our tent and could only open it part way. He peered out the small opening and exclaimed, “My Land”, over and over.
“What’s wrong?”, I asked. Elmer responded,
“MY LAND, I BELIEVE IT DONE COME ONE!”.
It had “done come one” alright. During the night four feet of snow had fallen preventing him from opening the door. It was quite a shock for a guy from southern U.S. who had never seen that much snow before.
Snow Storms
Besides doing stand-up comedy, Elmer was also a magician and slight-of hand expert. During the day in our tent he would be constantly honing his craft – juggling cigar boxes and tennis balls, doing slight-of-hand with cards, making golf balls disappear, and trying out his tricks on us. He could hold maybe 12 lit cigarettes in one hand and they would not be noticed by the audience because he was using that hand to point at something else. He could spit out a cigarette and immediately another one would magically pop into his mouth, already lit. He could hold a lit cigarette inside his mouth under his tongue for several minutes and pop it out later without getting burned.
He would wear some outlandish hillbilly clown costume to do his comic routine, then change into a tux and white jacket to do the magic act. He was then “Mandrake The Magician”. The band members were sitting behind him during his act so they could see how he did some of his tricks. When he bent forward, I could see golf balls on springs, rubber bands, scarves, and other paraphernalia hanging out from under his jacket.
Uncle Elmer
Sometimes a heckler would interrupt Uncle Elmer while he was doing his monologue. What happened next to that poor guy was worth the price of admission. By the time Uncle Elmer had finished working him over, that guy was wishing his sorry ass was somewhere else!
First Elmer would invite the heckler to stand. Then he would start taking him apart with statements such as:
“Well HELLO JOHN!
Do you know why I call him John?
Because every time he opens his mouth HE REMINDS ME OF ONE!”
“He’s just mad because his mother wanted a boy”.
“This guy was so ugly as a kid that his mother didn’t know which end to put the diaper on”.
“When he was born the doctor spanked his mother”.
“Of the 7 million sperm that were there when his daddy made him, it’s too bad that one swam the fastest”.
“When the doctor circumcised this guy HE THREW AWAY THE WRONG PIECE”
etc, etc. Of course the crowd would be roaring with laughter.
By the time Elmer was finished, the heckler would turn bright red and sink quietly into his seat.
Most all of the girls in Korea that I saw were rather flat-chested.
“I saw a Korean girl this morning and she didn’t have nary-a-damn titty”, Elmer would say in his finest back-woods southern drawl.
There was a rumor going around, however, about this Korean girl who was extremely well-endowed. The GI’s called her “Bam Bam”.
One night we were coming home from playing a show for the guys in the 17th up on the DMZ. We were riding in the back of our duce-and-a-half as usual. For some reason the truck had to stop near a village. We stayed on the truck, and as soon as we stopped several girls from the village gathered around the tail gate. One of them was the notorious Bam Bam. She was wearing a white cashmere sweater, and she definitely lived up to the rumors I had heard about her.
When Elmer spotted Bam Bam, he said to her, “Meeda meeda one time (let me see)”. Bam Bam pulled the fuzzy white sweater up around her neck. There was a sudden rush of troops toward the tail gate. Then several hands went over the edge of the gate to “check out the goodies!” It was all over in a second or two because the truck started moving again.
Smitty, our driver
Elmer rotated back to the States several months before I did. Later we had other comedians, but none were as colorful as Uncle Elmer.
Elmer training his replacement
Uncle Elmer is going home!