NIGHTCLUBS: Corn, Corn, Corn

She: Poof on Dr. Pepper. Poof on

Coca-Cola . . .

He: Why is nothing done in France? She: They’re poofed out.

The people at the expensive ringside table arched their eyebrows. Was this what they were paying for? It certainly was. The haphazard comedy of balding Clarinetist Phil Ford, 39, and his burbling, bouncy wife, Mimi Hines, 25, was the main attraction at the Empire Room of Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria last week. Next, they are heading for Los Angeles’ Coconut Grove, a stint on the BBC in London and a $3,500-a-week contract with the Tropicana in Las Vegas. Less than two years ago they were hitting the tank towns for $375 a week. Now they are one of the best-paid attractions in the business—and one of the most appallingly corny acts ever to hit the big time.

Phil plays a passable clarinet, Mimi at best has a middling voice, and their humor —which leans heavily on Mimi’s buck teeth—belongs to the Keith-Orpheum circuit of three decades ago. In a way, they are so bad that they are disarming. There is a youthful nice-kid quality about them, and an innocent gaiety that captivates audiences: Ford and Hines were an instant national hit when Jack Paar gave them a guest shot last August.

They had plenty of time to develop their style. By the time she was eleven, Mimi was a regular winner of amateur contests around Vancouver, B.C., where she grew up. At 15 she had a fulltime job singing at Vancouver’s Mandarin Gardens. “It was a real trap,” she remembers. “If you shut the front and back doors, you’d catch every hoodlum in town.” Mimi drifted down to Oregon, then headed north to the hurly-burly of Alaska. “A guy named Phil Ford had an act there. I saw him, and he saw me. Sparks flew.”

Hazel-eyed Phil Ford was no novice at the entertainment game either. When he was a kid around Alameda, Calif., his aunt ran a dancing school, and the Depression saw him doing soft-shoe routines at small theaters to help buy the family groceries. World War II dumped him into the 84th Division, where the commanding general, Alexander Boiling, used to join Sergeant Ford in little skits. Chances are they also burdened Phil with his present style of humor. Sample:

General: Sergeant Ford, why don’t you go home?

Sergeant: I can’t go home, sir. My mother and father are fighting.

General: Who’s your father?

Sergeant: That’s what they’re fighting about.

Happily for their admirers, Phil and Mimi have remained unchanged by success. Says Phil: “We learned the routine in tough clubs. Why change?” There is obviously no reason to change anything at all—not even Mimi’s teeth. Between them, Phil Ford and Mimi Hines expect to gross more than $150,000 in 1959, and, says Mimi, “without my teeth, I don’t know what I’d do for laughs.”