Sketch actor, teacher helped bring S.F. comedy-capital cred
Among the performers who made San Francisco a comedy center in the 1980s, Kevin Aspell stood out because he never did stand-up. He was a sketch actor who could do any number of characters with perfect timing.
His most popular was Stu, the Pizza Dude, who would burst through an imaginary door to make his delivery in a box.
“He was a bigger draw than I was,” said Doug Ferrari, a stand-up whose set was regularly interrupted by Aspell. “Kevin Aspell was the inventor of inappropriateness.”
Aspell, who wrote jokes for everyone from Robin Williams to Rodney Dangerfield, died Feb. 8. Cause of death was heart failure, said his sister Annie Aspell of Ventura. Aspell was at home in Hayward when he was stricken. He was 67.
“Kevin was a true character almost in the Andy Kaufman tradition,” said Ferrari. “He was wacky onstage. He did drag with a beard. He did things back then that we didn’t know you could do onstage.”
Good as he was onstage, with his tall and lanky stoner hippie motif, Aspell was even better on the radio. For four years, from 1988 to 1992, he was the
studio sidekick to Paul “the Lobster” Wells on the top-rated morning drive show on KRQRFM.
From 5:30 to 10 a.m., they would go back and forth with Aspell portraying Clint Eastwood; Stu, a gravel-voice product pitchman named Tex; an impeccable Bullwinkle to Wells’ Rocky; and a veterinarian who also did taxidermy on the pets that didn’t survive.
“I got to play the straight man, and it was hard to keep from laughing out loud on the show all the time,” Wells said.
John Kevin Aspell born Oct. 5, 1950, in Akron, Ohio, where he grew up putting on puppet shows, mimicking voices.
“He’d hide behind the puppets, and he was hilarious,” said his youngest sister, Annie Aspell. “Kevin could never get up onstage as Kevin. He was always in character, even at home.”
At Archbishop Hoban High School in Akron, he was known for wearing a beret and granny glasses, and showed such promise in high school plays that he spent a summer at the La Jolla Playhouse on the UC San Diego campus.
A music fan, Aspell was proud that he’d seen two of the most famous shows in rock-concert history. The first was when Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees in a 1967 tour, and the other was watching Hendrix close Woodstock in 1969.
He eventually wound up in the drama department as a student at San Jose State University, where he met Ferrari and another future comic, Ray Hanna.
The three of them created a TV show called “Do Not Watch this Program” on a fuzzy publicaccess channel in San Jose. An hour of sketches, the show was ahead of its time, as they learned three months later when “Saturday Night Live” premiered on network TV.
Not wanting to look like an imitation act, they moved on to radio, forming the High Wire Radio Choir to perform deathdefying stunts for the listening audience on KSJO-FM in San Jose and KFAT-FM in Gilroy.
The choir also hosted the renowned KFAT “Fat Fry,” concerts held on Monday nights at the Keystone Palo Alto. They lived together in an old house called the High Wire Hotel, and on Friday nights they would pile into an AMC Pacer and drive to Mabuhay Gardens in North Beach, where the High Wire act did a two-hour comedy show before the punk bands took over.
“We went to San Francisco for the comedy scene the way bands came to San Francisco for the Summer of Love,” said Ferrari.
The High Wire Hotel relocated to a house on Potrero Hill, and they started working the Holy City Zoo, Cobb’s Comedy Club and the Punch Line.
As a writer, Aspell sold jokes for $50 apiece and helped Ferrari win the San Francisco Comedy Competition in 1984.
He wrote for a variety of comics who performed on KRQR as the Lobster Funhouse Players. They released a comedy album called “Laughercise” in 1991, and Wells and Aspell took their act to Copenhagen and Moscow.
“We just went around Moscow embarrassing Russians,” Wells recalled. “It was still the Soviet Union, and we were asking questions that they didn’t feel free to answer.”
Wells still has a show, on 97.7, “the River” in Santa Rosa, and on Sunday at noon he will do a segment about Aspell, including recorded bits of Stu, the Pizza Dude.
When the comedy and radio scenes waned, Aspell went back to school for his teaching credential. In 1999, he was hired as an English teacher at Hayward High School, where, his sister said, he resurrected a drama department that had been cut for lack of funds. He directed student productions of “West Side Story,” “Grease” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
“The best teachers in the world get you to believe in them, but the really great teachers get you to believe in yourself,” said Michael Pritchard, a San Francisco improv comic. “Kevin was a relentless pursuer of teaching kids to be good people, and using your art to unite.”
In 2007, Aspell suffered an aortic dissection, and later retired. Heart disease plagued him for the rest of his life.
Though he never married, Aspell was in a longtime relationship with Kristen Wigren. They broke up but remained close. Survivors include Wigren, of Martinez; a son, Arthur of San Jose; a daughter, Elise Rose of Sacramento; two brothers; and two sisters.
A memorial service is pending.