Name: Tom Carvel on Letterman, September 2, 1982
Uploaded: 2019-07-14T18:15:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tom Carvel on Letterman, September 2, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-07-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tom Carvel on Letterman, September 2, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-07-14. Transcript available.

From New York, the city where a man who owns his own business can make his own
commercials, no matter how bad they sound, it's Late Night with David Lunderman.
Tonight, actors Mary Beth Hurt, comedian Elaine Boesler, viewers male, a visit
to Roosevelt Island, and me, Tom Carville, the ice cream peddler.
And now for the man who said bad things about Fudgy the Real, David Lunderman.
Thank you.
Awesome, thank you.
Thank you.
Awesome, that's it.
Thank you. Welcome back to the show.
Mary Beth Hurt will be joining us also.
Elaine Boesler and my first guest tonight has become a celebrity in two fields
not usually thought of as related: soft ice cream and television announcing.
His name appears on hundreds of ice cream stores here in the East, and his
distinctive voice is known to millions of TV viewers, it says here.
We're delighted he's here with us tonight. Please welcome Tom Carville.
Thank you. Nice to meet you there.
Fudgy, that's Fudgy the Whale.
This is Tom brought us, have a seat Tom, let's take a look at this.
To a whale of a character.
All right.
Can we see what, there it is.
Can we look at it?
This of course is lovable Fudgy the Whale.
It's very nice.
You know, we visited one of your stores not long ago, and we found out that
Santa and Fudgy were the same guy.
Mm-hmm.
That in December, you just put a little Santa hat on the tail of Fudgy the Whale,
and it's the same guy.
And I understand he's gonna be a bunny rabbit now.
Oh, is that right?
I knew his design.
Doing all these wonderful characters, eh?
Well, you see, you can always get a round cake.
Uh-huh.
You know, anyway.
Yeah.
What do we do?
We take a character or a cake.
This was Fudgy the Whale.
You do a tremendous business with that.
We really do.
Now, it says to a whale of a dad, to a whale of a friend, to a whale of a
family.
In fact, one store made a mistake.
The daughter was kind of heavy.
Mm-hmm.
And he'll kill me when he hears about it.
I can't take his name again.
But, and the one who wrote on it said, it was supposed to say, to a whale of a
family, see?
Yeah.
said to the whale of the family. The whale of the family. My, how touching.
What a lovely
sentiment for Tubby. Well, we'll hang on to this. That's very nice of you, Tom.
Just say
buy one, get one free for me. Buy one, get one free. We have a few customers.
Yeah, you
do. Now, you're not, you don't go nationwide, do you? Yes, we do. You do. In
fact, we're
international. But are you in all 48, 50 states? No. Some years ago, we were
expanded into about
36 states. We got involved in antitrust suits. And it took us about nine years
to come out
of the courts. We finally won. We lost 73% of our chain. Oh, so. And we were
privileged
to start all over again. Oh. But so, for people who may not be familiar with.
Now, we're in
about 18 states. We recently opened Africa, Greece, you know. Africa and Greece?
Yeah. You
mean it's possible. We opened Africa. It's possible to get a fudgy the whale in
Africa? Yeah. That's
right. There's about six stores in Johannesburg. Now, for people who may not
be near one of your franchises. Yes. It's a, it's a soft ice cream. Is it a, it's
not a
fast food place? No. All ice cream, all ice cream is soft, basically. Yeah. No.
Hold
on. Hold on. Hold on. All ice cream is made soft when it comes out of the
freezer. It's
hardened quiescently in a box. Quiescently hardened. Okay. At 30 or 40 below.
Right? Now, then,
the difference between Carvel and, you know, commercial ice cream that you call
hard ice cream,
we make and harden it within 24 hours. Oh. Right? And the customer gets it, let's
say,
within a day or two. Mm-hmm. The average commercial ice cream is 10 weeks old.
10 weeks old.
So, yeah. So, we harden it. That was hardened before it got here. Yeah. It
starts a soft ice cream,
harden it. Yeah. And you shape it. Now, you, uh, you've become a real, uh, uh,
uh, uh, popular figure in,
Oh, yeah. By, uh, by...
But it, it all started because you were doing your own, your own television
commercials, right? Your
own radio and TV commercials. Well, no, really, David. Some years ago, we, uh,
we, uh, we were buying,
we were buying radio time, see? We were buying like $12, and we had a grand
opening on 58th Street
and Broadway. Uh-huh. And the whole idea, when a family buys an ice cream store,
they've saved,
the average person is 50 years of age. They've saved for 20 years, an average
of $20 a week. Now,
they've taken all of that nest egg, and they bought a store. When they have
that grand opening,
we have to, you know, move it up. And we were saturating to $100 worth. In
those days,
I think CBS cost $12 a spot. And it was a talk show. And we were opening at 85th
Street and
Broadway. And the tagline... No, it was, is it 54th or 85th?
85th, 84th or 85th, 85th. You're trying to screw me up here. No, sir, this is
1958. Yeah.
Now, you're too young to remember that. No, I wasn't, I wasn't in the area for
the opening.
Yeah, I know you were. But anyhow, they missed the tagline. There's a Broadway
in
every borough of the city of New York. And the tagline said, like, 2787
Broadway, 85th
Manhattan. And they missed the tagline three times in a row. They forgot to say
85th Street,
they forgot to say Manhattan. So I called the station manager, and he was very
apologetic,
was very sorry. I said, okay, so we'll give you makeup. He'll give us makeup on
Monday.
Now, here's people who got 20 years of their life savings in the store. They're
so depressed
that you can't give them makeup on Monday. So do me a favor.
They missed the grand opening, right? That's right. Go and tell the people,
because I'm
sorry, I can't do that. Right. So I thought then, I was riding up the parkway,
and I thought
then, how hard does this screw up a commercial? Anybody can do it. Any dummy.
Now, why am
I doing commercials? Yeah. There's nobody who works cheaper. Right. They don't
pay me.
Yeah. The store owners say, why don't we get somebody else on television? Great.
Get enough
money, we'll pay them. Yeah. And you've been doing them ever since. Yeah. And
they're
working pretty good, David. Yeah, I think so. It's so bad, they're doing good.
Uh, we'll be right back with more. Tom Carvalho and, of course, Fudgy the rare.
And, of course, Fudgy the rare. Thank you very much. Paul Safer. Welcome back.
Tom Carvalho.
Tom Carvalho is here. Mary Beth Hurt is also going to be joining us later, and
Elaine Boosler. Now,
when you do these commercials, do you do them over and over again until you get
them right,
or just anything? No, David. We deliberately do them as the people would do
them themselves. When
we flub it, we leave it in. Yeah. Ever had anything really embarrassing along
those lines?
A little bit. Yeah.
A little bitty girl. I can't tell you what she said. A little kid, she was an
area winner.
An area? Now, what does that mean? An area winner? She was Little Miss Halfpint.
We have Little Miss Halfpint.
Little Miss Halfpint.
Now, there's a little girl about three and a half years of age. Absolutely
gorgeous. She's live on television. She's an area winner. All right?
And the announcer says to her, "Do you have any pets?" She says, "Yes." Uh, Frizzy
and Bertie Salt-Saw. He says, "Who's Frizzy? Frizzy's my dog."
Now, you have to see the kid. The kid's an absolute wax dog. Gorgeous child.
The area winner, wasn't she?
Yeah. She's an area winner. And she's live. And he says to her, "Who's Frizzy?"
She says, "My dog." I say, "A big dog or a little dog?"
She says, "It's a puppy." She says, "Is it a good puppy or a bad puppy? Or does
he need a spanking once in a while?"
The child does this. She looks around as though she's looking for her mother.
And he repeats the question.
And she says, "Yes," when he's on the floor. And he says, "You mean when you
put the papers on the floor?" She says, "No," when he's on the floor.
There's no question about what she meant. I can't use a word because they use
worse words than that. But a little kid said that.
Oh, sure. Yeah. You know. How do you stop a little kid? Yeah.
There's another little one live at Waldo. She's about three years old. The
announcer, the lady questioner, says, "Do you like Carvel ice cream?"
She says, "I don't like that kind."
What are you going to do with a kid? You're going to kill a kid? How do you
write this kind of copy?
Now you, in addition to the ice cream business, you at one time had a chance to
get involved with another franchise that did pretty well, didn't you?
With McDonald's? Yeah. Well, you know, Ray Kroc. Basically, I was a musician
years ago. I was a Dixieland musician. Ray Kroc was a Dixieland musician out of
Chicago. And Ray was with Prince Castle. He sold multi-mixers. Those are the
spindles you make thick shakes on.
Oh, yes. All right. And he sold on multi-mixers in 1964. We were at a Dairy
industry convention. This guy's breaking me up.
No, no. I'm sorry. I just love a good multi-mixer story.
Particularly the bartender tied to it, right? Yeah.
Right now. And Ray came to me at the show in 1964, Dairy industry show in
Atlantic City.
He said, "Tom, you've got to take a ride with me out to McDonald's brothers in
Los Angeles."
Yeah. And we were running red hot. We were running red hot. We were jammed up.
And I said, "Ray," I said, "I can't. Tom, you've got to come look at McDonald's
brothers, right?"
You know who McDonald's are, right? Yeah.
Now, Ray Kroc is the president of McDonald's, right? So you're looking at a
real brilliant guy here.
I said to him, "No, Ray. We're too busy." And you know what that dummy did?
He went out on a national average of like $31,000 for a hamburger store.
And that dummy went out and put in over 2,000 hamburger shops with an average
of $900,000.
All right? And I was too smart to go with him.
In other words, you could have gotten in on the ground floor with your multi-mixers,
right?
No, they were his multi-mixers. No, his multi-mixers.
He wound up with our building, basically, the original building and the
franchise contract.
I tell you what, we're up against a station break here.
Good.
But we'll come back and continue talking with Tom Carvel and Mary Betzer and
Elaine Beesley.
Thank you very much.
Tom Carvel is here, Mary Betzer will be here, and Elaine Beesley.
Now, you're going to do something for us which I find surprising, only because
it's different than what you would expect.
You're going to sing, right?
Well, yeah.
You want me to sing?
Well, before you go over there, you mentioned earlier about the big anti--what
was the suit you mentioned?
Antitrust.
Now, can you briefly tell us what that was, and it's all okay now?
Well, the government charges were discriminated.
And it's all okay now.
Well, the government charges were discriminated against, and it's all okay now.
Well, the government charges were discriminated against, and it's all okay now.
Well, the government charges were discriminated against, and it's all okay now.
The government charges were discriminatory trade practices, and then you're
privileged to spend the rest of your life defending it without recourse, even
when you win.
But to make a long story short, everything came out all right.
We won.
Well, we lost 73% of our change.
Right.
But it was--everything's okay now, though?
It's okay now, yes.
Okay.
If you're able to go out and borrow again, it's all over again.
Okay, well, I hope--
You know, it's a very lopsided--
Oh, I know.
But I just--I did want to mention that, because we alluded to it earlier, and
then people tuning in might not know what we're talking about.
That's a very short spot with me.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't know.
No, no, no.
You have nothing to do with it.
No, I just thought--
I merely tell you that, because, you know, you're running a business, and all
of a sudden, you're attacked for something that never happened.
But everything's great now.
Sure is.
Okay.
We're doing nothing but business.
Okay.
Well, thank you, Tom.
Now, and now, tell me about the song.
What are we going to hear here?
Well, there's a lot of kids, some kids are musicians, right?
So they wrote a song, "The Ice Cream Man," and Walter, you know, Walter Dietz,
he's here.
He came to me and said, "These kids have got a rock..."
What?
No, it's not rock.
What is it?
Rap.
Rap.
Rap.
Okay.
Now, hold it.
Now, you know, when I do this number, so I did the number, and I have a little
trouble with the lyrics, because the music is, you know, it's rap.
It's a different kind of music than I've been using.
Right, sure.
So now, the request was that I wear a black leather jacket.
No, you don't.
You're going to get a hair toupee.
No, you don't.
Leave the jacket off.
No?
That's silly.
And the kids that did it, they're real great musicians, and they think it's
going to go somewhere.
Okay.
If it's depending on my voice, you know where it's going, don't you?
Now, and you're going to work with Paul and the gentlemen of the band?
Yeah, yeah.
All right, Tom, do whatever you need to do there.
Ladies and gentlemen, here now, this is Tom Tarzan.
I've got a hundred flavors for everyone to choose.
Something for everyone.
There's no way you can lose.
I've got chocolate.
Chocolate.
Banana.
Banana.
It's going fast, so don't be late.
Get up here and participate.
I've got cherry.
Cherry.
Vanilla.
Vanilla.
And strawberry, too.
And if you're good, I've got a treat.
Especially for you.
Yeah, yeah.
Great, fellas.
Great.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
Thank you, ladies.
Thank you.
Good luck.
Thanks for such a little while.
Tom Tarzan.
We'll be back tomorrow.
We'll be back tomorrow.
We'll be back tomorrow.
Thank you.

Tom Carvel on Letterman, September 2, 1982

From New York, the city where a man who owns his own business can make his own
commercials, no matter how bad they sound, it's Late Night with David Lunderman.
Tonight, actors Mary Beth Hurt, comedian Elaine Boesler, viewers male, a visit
to Roosevelt Island, and me, Tom Carville, the ice cream peddler.
And now for the man who said bad things about Fudgy the Real, David Lunderman.
Thank you.
Awesome, thank you.
Thank you.
Awesome, that's it.
Thank you. Welcome back to the show.
Mary Beth Hurt will be joining us also.
Elaine Boesler and my first guest tonight has become a celebrity in two fields
not usually thought of as related: soft ice cream and television announcing.
His name appears on hundreds of ice cream stores here in the East, and his
distinctive voice is known to millions of TV viewers, it says here.
We're delighted he's here with us tonight. Please welcome Tom Carville.
Thank you. Nice to meet you there.
Fudgy, that's Fudgy the Whale.
This is Tom brought us, have a seat Tom, let's take a look at this.
To a whale of a character.
All right.
Can we see what, there it is.
Can we look at it?
This of course is lovable Fudgy the Whale.
It's very nice.
You know, we visited one of your stores not long ago, and we found out that
Santa and Fudgy were the same guy.
Mm-hmm.
That in December, you just put a little Santa hat on the tail of Fudgy the Whale,
and it's the same guy.
And I understand he's gonna be a bunny rabbit now.
Oh, is that right?
I knew his design.
Doing all these wonderful characters, eh?
Well, you see, you can always get a round cake.
Uh-huh.
You know, anyway.
Yeah.
What do we do?
We take a character or a cake.
This was Fudgy the Whale.
You do a tremendous business with that.
We really do.
Now, it says to a whale of a dad, to a whale of a friend, to a whale of a
family.
In fact, one store made a mistake.
The daughter was kind of heavy.
Mm-hmm.
And he'll kill me when he hears about it.
I can't take his name again.
But, and the one who wrote on it said, it was supposed to say, to a whale of a
family, see?
Yeah.
said to the whale of the family. The whale of the family. My, how touching.
What a lovely
sentiment for Tubby. Well, we'll hang on to this. That's very nice of you, Tom.
Just say
buy one, get one free for me. Buy one, get one free. We have a few customers.
Yeah, you
do. Now, you're not, you don't go nationwide, do you? Yes, we do. You do. In
fact, we're
international. But are you in all 48, 50 states? No. Some years ago, we were
expanded into about
36 states. We got involved in antitrust suits. And it took us about nine years
to come out
of the courts. We finally won. We lost 73% of our chain. Oh, so. And we were
privileged
to start all over again. Oh. But so, for people who may not be familiar with.
Now, we're in
about 18 states. We recently opened Africa, Greece, you know. Africa and Greece?
Yeah. You
mean it's possible. We opened Africa. It's possible to get a fudgy the whale in
Africa? Yeah. That's
right. There's about six stores in Johannesburg. Now, for people who may not
be near one of your franchises. Yes. It's a, it's a soft ice cream. Is it a, it's
not a
fast food place? No. All ice cream, all ice cream is soft, basically. Yeah. No.
Hold
on. Hold on. Hold on. All ice cream is made soft when it comes out of the
freezer. It's
hardened quiescently in a box. Quiescently hardened. Okay. At 30 or 40 below.
Right? Now, then,
the difference between Carvel and, you know, commercial ice cream that you call
hard ice cream,
we make and harden it within 24 hours. Oh. Right? And the customer gets it, let's
say,
within a day or two. Mm-hmm. The average commercial ice cream is 10 weeks old.
10 weeks old.
So, yeah. So, we harden it. That was hardened before it got here. Yeah. It
starts a soft ice cream,
harden it. Yeah. And you shape it. Now, you, uh, you've become a real, uh, uh,
uh, uh, popular figure in,
Oh, yeah. By, uh, by...
But it, it all started because you were doing your own, your own television
commercials, right? Your
own radio and TV commercials. Well, no, really, David. Some years ago, we, uh,
we, uh, we were buying,
we were buying radio time, see? We were buying like $12, and we had a grand
opening on 58th Street
and Broadway. Uh-huh. And the whole idea, when a family buys an ice cream store,
they've saved,
the average person is 50 years of age. They've saved for 20 years, an average
of $20 a week. Now,
they've taken all of that nest egg, and they bought a store. When they have
that grand opening,
we have to, you know, move it up. And we were saturating to $100 worth. In
those days,
I think CBS cost $12 a spot. And it was a talk show. And we were opening at 85th
Street and
Broadway. And the tagline... No, it was, is it 54th or 85th?
85th, 84th or 85th, 85th. You're trying to screw me up here. No, sir, this is
1958. Yeah.
Now, you're too young to remember that. No, I wasn't, I wasn't in the area for
the opening.
Yeah, I know you were. But anyhow, they missed the tagline. There's a Broadway
in
every borough of the city of New York. And the tagline said, like, 2787
Broadway, 85th
Manhattan. And they missed the tagline three times in a row. They forgot to say
85th Street,
they forgot to say Manhattan. So I called the station manager, and he was very
apologetic,
was very sorry. I said, okay, so we'll give you makeup. He'll give us makeup on
Monday.
Now, here's people who got 20 years of their life savings in the store. They're
so depressed
that you can't give them makeup on Monday. So do me a favor.
They missed the grand opening, right? That's right. Go and tell the people,
because I'm
sorry, I can't do that. Right. So I thought then, I was riding up the parkway,
and I thought
then, how hard does this screw up a commercial? Anybody can do it. Any dummy.
Now, why am
I doing commercials? Yeah. There's nobody who works cheaper. Right. They don't
pay me.
Yeah. The store owners say, why don't we get somebody else on television? Great.
Get enough
money, we'll pay them. Yeah. And you've been doing them ever since. Yeah. And
they're
working pretty good, David. Yeah, I think so. It's so bad, they're doing good.
Uh, we'll be right back with more. Tom Carvalho and, of course, Fudgy the rare.
And, of course, Fudgy the rare. Thank you very much. Paul Safer. Welcome back.
Tom Carvalho.
Tom Carvalho is here. Mary Beth Hurt is also going to be joining us later, and
Elaine Boosler. Now,
when you do these commercials, do you do them over and over again until you get
them right,
or just anything? No, David. We deliberately do them as the people would do
them themselves. When
we flub it, we leave it in. Yeah. Ever had anything really embarrassing along
those lines?
A little bit. Yeah.
A little bitty girl. I can't tell you what she said. A little kid, she was an
area winner.
An area? Now, what does that mean? An area winner? She was Little Miss Halfpint.
We have Little Miss Halfpint.
Little Miss Halfpint.
Now, there's a little girl about three and a half years of age. Absolutely
gorgeous. She's live on television. She's an area winner. All right?
And the announcer says to her, "Do you have any pets?" She says, "Yes." Uh, Frizzy
and Bertie Salt-Saw. He says, "Who's Frizzy? Frizzy's my dog."
Now, you have to see the kid. The kid's an absolute wax dog. Gorgeous child.
The area winner, wasn't she?
Yeah. She's an area winner. And she's live. And he says to her, "Who's Frizzy?"
She says, "My dog." I say, "A big dog or a little dog?"
She says, "It's a puppy." She says, "Is it a good puppy or a bad puppy? Or does
he need a spanking once in a while?"
The child does this. She looks around as though she's looking for her mother.
And he repeats the question.
And she says, "Yes," when he's on the floor. And he says, "You mean when you
put the papers on the floor?" She says, "No," when he's on the floor.
There's no question about what she meant. I can't use a word because they use
worse words than that. But a little kid said that.
Oh, sure. Yeah. You know. How do you stop a little kid? Yeah.
There's another little one live at Waldo. She's about three years old. The
announcer, the lady questioner, says, "Do you like Carvel ice cream?"
She says, "I don't like that kind."
What are you going to do with a kid? You're going to kill a kid? How do you
write this kind of copy?
Now you, in addition to the ice cream business, you at one time had a chance to
get involved with another franchise that did pretty well, didn't you?
With McDonald's? Yeah. Well, you know, Ray Kroc. Basically, I was a musician
years ago. I was a Dixieland musician. Ray Kroc was a Dixieland musician out of
Chicago. And Ray was with Prince Castle. He sold multi-mixers. Those are the
spindles you make thick shakes on.
Oh, yes. All right. And he sold on multi-mixers in 1964. We were at a Dairy
industry convention. This guy's breaking me up.
No, no. I'm sorry. I just love a good multi-mixer story.
Particularly the bartender tied to it, right? Yeah.
Right now. And Ray came to me at the show in 1964, Dairy industry show in
Atlantic City.
He said, "Tom, you've got to take a ride with me out to McDonald's brothers in
Los Angeles."
Yeah. And we were running red hot. We were running red hot. We were jammed up.
And I said, "Ray," I said, "I can't. Tom, you've got to come look at McDonald's
brothers, right?"
You know who McDonald's are, right? Yeah.
Now, Ray Kroc is the president of McDonald's, right? So you're looking at a
real brilliant guy here.
I said to him, "No, Ray. We're too busy." And you know what that dummy did?
He went out on a national average of like $31,000 for a hamburger store.
And that dummy went out and put in over 2,000 hamburger shops with an average
of $900,000.
All right? And I was too smart to go with him.
In other words, you could have gotten in on the ground floor with your multi-mixers,
right?
No, they were his multi-mixers. No, his multi-mixers.
He wound up with our building, basically, the original building and the
franchise contract.
I tell you what, we're up against a station break here.
Good.
But we'll come back and continue talking with Tom Carvel and Mary Betzer and
Elaine Beesley.
Thank you very much.
Tom Carvel is here, Mary Betzer will be here, and Elaine Beesley.
Now, you're going to do something for us which I find surprising, only because
it's different than what you would expect.
You're going to sing, right?
Well, yeah.
You want me to sing?
Well, before you go over there, you mentioned earlier about the big anti--what
was the suit you mentioned?
Antitrust.
Now, can you briefly tell us what that was, and it's all okay now?
Well, the government charges were discriminated.
And it's all okay now.
Well, the government charges were discriminated against, and it's all okay now.
Well, the government charges were discriminated against, and it's all okay now.
Well, the government charges were discriminated against, and it's all okay now.
The government charges were discriminatory trade practices, and then you're
privileged to spend the rest of your life defending it without recourse, even
when you win.
But to make a long story short, everything came out all right.
We won.
Well, we lost 73% of our change.
Right.
But it was--everything's okay now, though?
It's okay now, yes.
Okay.
If you're able to go out and borrow again, it's all over again.
Okay, well, I hope--
You know, it's a very lopsided--
Oh, I know.
But I just--I did want to mention that, because we alluded to it earlier, and
then people tuning in might not know what we're talking about.
That's a very short spot with me.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't know.
No, no, no.
You have nothing to do with it.
No, I just thought--
I merely tell you that, because, you know, you're running a business, and all
of a sudden, you're attacked for something that never happened.
But everything's great now.
Sure is.
Okay.
We're doing nothing but business.
Okay.
Well, thank you, Tom.
Now, and now, tell me about the song.
What are we going to hear here?
Well, there's a l