Googling doesn’t come up with anything since 1970.
Good question. I have no idea. I loved his comedy, though.
One of his bits I still think of as maybe his funniest:
Adam and Eve got to name all the animals.
The ones with the long necks they called giraffes.
The ones with the short necks they called ants.
I suspect IMDb has something to go on so I’ll do some searching for you. You have my curiosity up anyway.
According to IMDb he’s still alive but basically inactive since a 1980 movie for TV.
Exactly! So what’s he been doing for the last 25 years? Apparently he wrote a few jokes for Rodney Dangerfield, but that couldn’t have taken more than a couple of days…
With so many comics like him appearing on all those “Golden Age” comedy and variety shows and then vanishing into thin air, I suspect the fact that Stanley Myron is among the missing is more an indicator of how Comedy Central is more about introducing new folks than about keeping old ones going. I’d be willing to bet we could list 20 easily and maybe upwards of 100 who are as out of sight as SMH. But it’s your thread and I’ll avoid hijacking it.
Nah, hijack away – it was a fairly random thought. (He came up in conversation yesterday and I got curious.)
It doesn’t seem that odd to me that he hasn’t been performing – I’m just curious as to what he’s been doing instead. You’d think if he were writing, teaching, running a comedy club, etc., there would be some trace of him online somewhere. Did he just completely quit the biz? If so, is he selling refrigerators somewhere, or did he buy Microsoft stock in 1980, or what?
It’s not too hard to imagine that whatever he’s up to is enough behind the scenes, if he’s still in Show Biz, not to warrant much press coverage. I suspect there are many of the Old Gang of comics and performers who have similar fates. But your idea that he may have gotten out of comedy or gag writing might make him even harder to trace.
If it matters any, rarely a week goes by when I will try to locate some old entertainer or personality online with results like yours. It’s even worse when it’s old friends and classmates who probably have just led “ordinary lives” without accomplishing anything all that special. In fact, it’s amazing when I do locate somebody from the “good old days” online.
I’ll hold off on the proposed hijack until a few others indicate it might be a fun exercise.
Apparently you and I are the only two intrigued by this – so go ahead.
I’m just trying to remember what he looked like. Was he the guy who was kind of tall, wore big horned glasses, and kind of looked like silent screen comic Harold Lloyd? If so, I remember seeing him on a lot on TV when I was very young. For a short time in the early 70’s, he seemed to be a variety shows and talk shows as often as George Carlin. Of course, Carlin is still around but Handelman kind of dropped out of sight by the mid-70’s. Maybe it was creative burn-out.
Isn’t it great! Just to keep the thread alive, I’ll mention again a comic from that period whose main bit was to stand at a lectern, as if delivering an important speech, stick his finger in the air, look directly into the camera, and say, “Why not!” He wore thick-lensed glasses and spoke with a bit of a lisp. The few responses to the “who was he?” OP in that thread (may have been more than one) ranged from Pat Paulsen to Percy Dovetonsils with Erwin Corey among the options.
I was able to find his name later in a list of performers who had been on the Dean Martin show or maybe the Steve Allen Sunday night show. But I can’t call it offhand.
Of course, my favorite who seems to have faded with the Johnny Carson era was Charlie Callas, but Corbett Monica and Shecky Greene were also lots of fun. Remember Fred Foster?
That sounds like him. His garb was usually a vest over a T-shirt, like Ed Norton on The Honeymooners and he may have even worn the hat at times. Heavy Brooklyn or NYC accent as I recall. Sort of in the Emo Phillips vein.
You’ve probably already noticed this, then. Doesn’t give any more real info, and what it says might not even be accurate.
Another I’ve wondered about was David Frye. Impressionists are pretty much an extinct breed for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that actors/actresses nowadays are so homogenized, so it’s not like there would be a lot of opportunities for him anyway. However, IMO, and I’ve never been a big fan of impressionists, he was a lot better than the much more successful Rich Little.
BTW, there is a credit for “David Frye” as being in Woody Allen’s “Scenes from a Mall.” I’ve seen that, and I’m pretty sure it’s a different, and much younger person.
No, I didn’t see that – and it explains a reference I saw somewhere to him as the mentor of somone who appeared on some comedy special. (Whatever site it was froze my computer, so I didn’t want to try to find it again after I’d rebooted.)
For my money, David Frye’s Nixon was the best. John Byner was better than Rich Little, too. He was on one of Letterman’s “Impressionist Week” shows lately. He’s still good, but doing the same people as 30 years ago. His looks are almost unchanged.
Another reason why impressionists seem to be on the way out is that they’re just too one-note. Sure, some guy can do a voice-perfect impression of some singer, actor, or politician but you also must have some kind of creative comic spin or take on your subject if you’re going to entertain an audience for more than two minutes. The probem with most impressionists (and this was underscored during Letterman’s “Impressionist Week” shows) is that they don’t really have much of anything than beyond “here’s Jack Nicholson” or “here’s John Wayne” to their acts.
Also, rather than too many actors/actresses being too homogenized, I think a bigger problem is that the audience is more fragmented today. There are fewer celebrities who are so familiar to a wide general audience that their voices would be easily recognized. Still, that doesn’t mean a comic with a sharp ear for voices can come up with a novel impression of somebody who was thought to be impossible to impersonate. For example, up until about 10 to 15 years ago, who ever saw anybody do a Christopher Walken impression? Then Jay Mohr and Kevin Pollak start imitating him (I’m not sure who did it first) and next thing you know, you start hearing dozens of Walkens of varying quality being done by dozens of comedians and impressionists.
Nope.
Remember Burns and Schreiber?
Colin Mochrie doing Craig T. Nelson on Whose Line cracked me up every. single. time.
One other thing about Frye: I remember reading once that his real name was David Shapiro. If that’s accurate, and he’s still living in NYC, he would be pretty tough to find.
No big surprise on Foster, as I was thinking about Phil, not Fred.
But Burns and Schreiber were good, especially Burns.
I think of Stanley every so often and search for info: