Apropos of nothing

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Recently, after reading a biography of Jolly Jack "King" Kirby, the late comic book penciling legend who co-invented Captain America, the entire genre of romance comic books, and most of the early superhero stable at Marvel Comics, I randomly remembered that Kirby's characters sometimes employed the epithet "liver lips" to insult an adversary. This thought cracked me up, now as it always did in my slap-happy youth, so I wondered what the hell it meant.

Happily, such mysteries are much easier to investigate today than they were 45 years ago. My first stop was Urban Dictionary, which revealed little that I would consider to be valid etymological information except that in some usages the term has a racist undertone. That interpretation made no sense to me since Kirby was known by all to be a dyed-in-the-wool (as his characters would sometimes say) New Deal liberal straight arrow. And the term was typically used by the good guys (mainly The Think, Sergeant Fury, and possibly The Hulk in his more lucid days), but never in reference to an African American. So I kept searching, thinking maybe it was a New York Yiddish bit of slang, since we sometimes hear the question "What am I, chopped liver?" in Jewish humor. My search didn't get too much farther, because I found everything I needed to know about the term on an old, obscure web page.

The post starts with the intrepid ronda54 describing a youthful brush with fame in the form of "Uncle Miltie" himself: Milton Berle. It seems that ronda54's family lived next to Berle's daughter, Vickie, and son in law, and somehow her parents were enlisted to pick Berle up from the airport and bring him to the daughter's house.

The report was that Milton was rather quite and polite…non descript just like his daughter, although he and my dad cracked a few dirty jokes which increased the respect factor in my dad's mind. I'm sure mom was trying to keep her eyes on the road instead of the freak show in his crotch and she must have managed because when she relayed the story to me the focus was on Milton's lips, not his schlong. His lips looked like two slabs of liver glued to his face. I'm afraid, Vickie had the same problem but hers were less pronounced. I thought this was hilarious and forever more he was known as "old liver lips" in our household. Dad would bellow that he had to give old liver lips a ride to the airport.

So Berle came from a Jewish New York family and was only about 10 years older than Kirby, so perhaps this term was simply used in the Jewish community in reference to big-lipped people in the neighborhood, and... wait a minute! "Hold the phone!" as Frazier Thomas used to exclaim. "Freak show in his crotch," she says? Well, I guess so:

[Berle's] moniker was "Mr. Television." I was more into Cheech and Chong so he was still sounding pretty boring until mom told me about his legendary humongous penis. Milton was getting less boring, now. I guess this thing was a killer…we are talking 14 inches long. We got a 12 inch ruler out of the drawer, added 2 inches and stood there aghast. How was this possible and who would ever marry a guy like this? He may have been a famous television personality but everyone knows that the penis -in a train wreck sort of way- was the real draw. Mom and the neighbor gals all agreed that they would pay money to stare at it.

Wikipedia connects a few more dots regarding "old liver lips" and his legendary unit with some celebrity anecdotes:

Phil Silvers once told a story about standing next to Berle at a urinal, glancing down, and quipping, "You'd better feed that thing, or it's liable to turn on you!" In the short story 'A Beautiful Child', Truman Capote wrote Marilyn Monroe as saying: "Christ! Everybody says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong in Hollywood." Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel, who had written many Friars Club jokes about Berle's penis for other comedians, described being treated to a private showing: "He just takes out this— this anaconda. He lays it on the table and I'm looking into this thing, right? I'm looking into the head of Milton Berle's dick. It was enormous. It was like a pepperoni. And he goes, 'What do you think of the boy?' And I'm looking right at it and I go, 'Oh, it's really, really nice.'"

Oh yes, I'll just bet it was. And thanks to King Kirby and ronda54, I've solved the riddle of liver lips with extreme prejudice.