They’re virtually, or one might argue, completely unknown, and yet the influence of The Onion Brothers on New American Comedy can barely be described.

Marty Scorsese paid tribute to their comic genius in several of his films, most transparently in this clip from “The King of Comedy” (1982): here “Is that cork?”

Like Lenny Bruce, whose subjective and anti-authoritarianistic comedy led to his being constrained to small venues where his truth couldn’t ignite a social revolution, likewise the Onion Brothers only performed in the Ukrainian Working Men’s Club.

It’s funny. If you take the number of people who claim to have been at the Velvet Underground’s first performance, then add the number of people who claim to have been at the Sex Pistol’s last show, you could still count on the fingers of one hand the number of people at the Onion Brothers’ show.

The climax of the show was sensational, the audience’s reaction breathless. Onion Brother Karl, whose already pendulous man-breasts would serve him better in his (her) later showbiz career, entered stage right, juggling three large onions, in lederhosen (Karl, not the onions), under a spotlight. When he got to stage center, he grabbed one in his mouth, the other two in his hands, then showed them to the audience, one by one. Written on each, in barely legible black Magic Marker, were the following: “#1: Setup”. “#2: Diversion”. “#3: Punch Line.”

The curtain closed and the audience, stunned into silence by their glimpse into the future of comedy, drifted away without clapping, most of them towards the open bar.

There’s precious little documentation of the show — no film, no audio — and the few blurry Polaroids taken from the audience were later burned by the third Onion Brother, who jokingly claimed, “we’re just trying to forget that it happened.”

And yet, their influence can hardly be ignored. It’s most obvious in the work of such cutting-edge comedians as George from “Seinfeld,” whose character tries to impress a girl with “home-baked” cookies, which he bought from a bakery, an obvious reference to the Onion Brothers most famous tagline “My girlfriend has ENORMOUS sacks of flour”, and Ellen DeGeneres, who in a cooking segment when asked to chop two onions, infamously said, “If you think I’m crying now, wait till you see what I do to his brother.”

-R