Borscht Belt Loses Another Beet (Gene Baylos, 1906-2005)

[Eve]

From today’s Times:

Gene Baylos, a hard-working nightclub comic of the old school whose gags were legend among fellow comedians, died on Monday at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 98 and a Manhattan resident. Like countless comedians of his generation, Mr. Baylos began his career in the Catskills in the 1930’s and then worked the once-booming national nightclub circuit, starting in the mid-1940’s. He opened for Sammy Davis Jr. at the Copacabana in New York and appeared at Ciro’s in Los Angeles, the Chez Paree in Chicago and Mother Kelly’s in Miami. He went on to enjoy modest success on television, appearing in small roles on situation comedies like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Car 54, Where Are You?” and doing his stand-up act on variety shows like “The Hollywood Palace.” He also acted in “The Family Jewels” with Jerry Lewis in 1965. But he never got the big break that would have made him as well known as a Milton Berle, a Buddy Hackett or even a Shecky Greene.

“I’m not complaining,” he told an interviewer for The Daily News in 1981. “When I was making $10 a night at the Loew’s Pitkin in 1942 and living in the Bronx with my mother, I loved it then. When I was making $50 a week, schlepping to Hoboken for three shows a night, I loved it. I’m not bitter. I love my job. I love show business.” Mr. Baylos, while successful as a nightclub act, used material considered too risqué for television, where stand-up comedy migrated after the big nightclubs began closing. Jokes like the one about a man who finds his wife in bed with his best friend and says to him, “Sam, I have to - but you?” may seem tame today, but they were considered unfit for a family audience in the 1950’s and 60’s. Alan King once called him “the comedian in residence, the court jester of the Friars Club,” adding, “Put him in a room with 20 comedians and nobody gets laughs except Baylos.”

[Ukulele_Ike]

<<He was 98 and a Manhattan resident.>>

Dibs on his apartment!