A showman, a jokester, and an icon walk into a bar ... Remembering South Philly legend Lou Capozzoli

On Saturday, the crowd spilled out from Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar — and with it, the smell of spring air, sticky beer, and stale cigarettes, and the hum of conversation, laughter, and the horns and drums of the Rage Band.

“What’s happening over here?” an onlooker asked Luann Capozzoli, who was taking a reprieve from barbacking. It was a memorial for her father, she explained.

“It seems like Ray was a great guy,” the stranger said.

This is a common misassumption: that a man named “Ray” would own Ray’s, but anyone who knows the South Philadelphia dive at East Passyunk Avenue and Federal Street knows Lou Capozzoli was at the helm.

Capozzoli, who stewarded Ray’s for decades until his death in February, was celebrated by a couple hundred of his closest friends on Saturday — what would have been his 87th birthday. At his bar, and with his band, Capozzoli was eulogized as a “one of one” showman, a jokester, and a South Philly icon who made Ray’s into an institution and who spent his life drawing laughs and soliciting smiles from strangers.

“He made people smile, he made them laugh, and he entertained them — we just want to make people smile and be entertaining,” Luann Capozzoli, 52, said. “He would love this.”

The all-afternoon party brought out people from all corners of Capozzoli’s life: celebrants stumbling in for a free shot of cake-flavored vodka, bar regulars, family friends, and Rage Band groupies. They wore the bar’s novelty tees — “Relieve your hangover,” one read — and black “Lou Capp Forever” shirts printed with his saxophone-playing silhouette, and swapped magnetic stories while the band played Neil Diamond and Louis Armstrong with a cast of tribute singers.

Lou Capozzoli grew up in the apartment above the bar and saw his father, Anthony “Ray,” wish every patron a happy birthday, even if it wasn’t. Capozzoli took over the bar from his father in 1997 and rechristened it Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar. He maintained a roster of seemingly everyone’s birthdays — from Joe Schmo to Joe Frazier.

“We’re celebrating Lou precisely how he’d want us to do it,” said veteran Ray’s bartender Kristie Pagliaro, 51. “He liked to party, he loved music, he loved comedy. … He didn’t want anyone crying.”

» READ MORE: Lou Capozzoli, steward of Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in South Philly, has died at 86

Entertaining was at Capozzoli’s core: He started performing professionally when he was 14, and his talents took him to Las Vegas casinos, the Jersey Shore, and South Philly. He had brushes with celebrity, playing for Sophia Loren as part of an Army band and opening for Diana Ross at the Riptide Club in Wildwood.

For four decades, he fronted the Rage Band, which was once a house act in Sea Isle City and now a fixture at Ray’s. He mentored aspiring musicians, even pulling some on stage to accompany the band, said sax player Rob Carroll, 63.

But, to many, Capozzoli was most known for his incessant jokes. Seldom did people remember him telling the same punchline twice, or not landing the delivery. The jokes were sometimes winding stories, like “three guys walk into a bar …,” or old-school zingers. He would discreetly whisper the most risqué material, which no one dared to repeat or imitate on Saturday.

“People fell in love with him instantly,” his daughter Dyan Capozzoli Wixted, 53, said. “He was just always a happy person — someone you want to be around.”

Granddaughter Delaney Wixted, 19, added: “His laugh was so inviting and contagious. You can’t listen to him laugh without laughing, too.”

The chance to sing sustained Capozzoli as his health declined, his longtime doctor Rene Rubin said. Capozzoli lived every day as if it was his first day of life, as opposed to worrying it was his last, she said.

Capozzoli’s zest for life is what fellow comedian Chris Morris said he’ll cherish: “Just take one day at a time, have a good time, enjoy your life.

“That’s what he did.”

Staff writer Beatrice Forman contributed to this article.