It could be argued that Allen invented the game show Jeopardy.
Bennett Cerf had a story in one of his collections (from the late 40s/early50s, I believe) in which Allen announced a new game for kids: they were supplied the answers and asked to come up with the questions. Examples:
*A: Mount Everest, Mount McKinley, Mount Sinai
Q: Name two mountains and a hospital
A: Cleopatra, Mata Hari, Florence Nightingale
Q: Name three dead women
A: Washington Irving
Q: Who was the first president, Sam?*
There’s a grain of truth when The Simpsons jokes that everything on TV was originated by Steve Allen.
Expano, you can defend Allen all you want, that’s fine with me, but this comment is extremely arguable. [sarcasm]Oh sure, I could get on stage, drop a few F-bombs, and I would be just as funny as Eddie Murphy or Richard Prior.[/sarcasm]
Look, there are great comedians who work “blue”, and there are lousy comedians who work “blue”, just like there are great comedians who work clean, and lousy comedians who work clean. There’s room for all kinds of funny in this world, and making people laugh is comedy, regardless of what “good-ol’-days” cranks like (the older) Steve Allen had to say about it.
I’m sure there were cranks in Allen’s heyday saying “Sure, it’s easy to get cheap laughs by “interviewing” yokels in the street, but being on stage, setting up jokes and delivering punch lines, now that’s comedy.”
Steverino came onstage dressed in his Bathrobe and swimtrunks and was instructed by his producer to proceed to a large bathtub filled with Oatmeal. Two mega-hootered bikini-clad model types wearing Miss Oatmeal ribbons then put Steve in the tub and began to sensually rub wet oatmeal all over Steve so he could experience the hollistic affects of it’s medicimal powers. When all three were covered in wet Oatmeal and body parts were now used to rub body parts, Steverino tried to exit the tub only to be pulled back in. In all this, he never lost his Black-rimmed glasses. As I recall, Jayne Meadows came on-stage to catch her husband in this compromising position.
Jonathan, who had two left hands (literally) on the original LP cover, was Allen. Darlene was Jo Stafford.
The other spoof, and I am drawing heavily from memory here and may be way off – was a parody of those “discoveries” of unknown blues musicians, a phenomena called “radical chic” by Tom Wolfe, where the worst recordings of the worst musicians from the most obscure places are elevated to the must-have list for serious collectors. (Example: the brouhaha about Robert Johnson.) Allen thought such worship was absurd, and parodied the blues musician Blind Lemon Jefferson with an album purported to be “Deaf Orange Jones,” or some such. I’m sure someone will be along to correct my faulty details, but that’s the basic idea.
I have a truly obscure paperback, Breaking It Up! The Best Routines of The Stand-Up Comics, in which Ross Firestone transcribes whole routines by the best comics of the day. (It’s available cheap on BoookFinder.com. Get it, especially since it has Lord Buckley’s “The Naz” in it.)
Albert Brooks has a long routine about being an unannounced intro act for Richie Havens in San Antonio before a crowd that Really Didn’t Want an intro act. I can’t quote the whole thing, a) because that’s wrong and b) because it’s too much typing, so I’ll just have to kill the comedy by extracting a couple of lines.
It still works today. You may have grown up with it so that you don’t even notice how much a crutch these words have become, but watch the no-name comics on Premium Blend or similar shows and listen to what the audience does when a word is bleeped out at home. They howl. Doesn’t matter whether it’s meaningful or not. They build statues. Now you may say that a laugh is a laugh and it doesn’t matter how it’s obtained, but that’s shit. Good comics use language; mediocre ones work an audience. Huge difference. That’s why Chris Rock will have a career while Eddie Murphy is a has-been.
I grew up on George Carlin and Robert Klein and soon discovered Lenny Bruce, and I saw the power that four-letter words could have when used to enhance the comedy. The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television. The Golden Rule: He who has all the gold can do whatever the fuck he wants!
There’s always a difference. Sooner or later it catches up to you, and you discover that you’re 40 years old and still playing chuckle huts and don’t understand why.
OK, back to Allen.
He put out two prank albums. It helped that he co-owned a record company. The first was The Discovery of Buck Hammer, in which Buck Hammer was an unknown and dead boogie woogie piano player. The review in Down Beat said:
The next album was as by Maryanne Jackson, portrayed on the cover by Allen’s housekeeper, Mary Sears. From Bigger Than a Breadbox:
Jazz Review published a review seriously analyzing the music, as well as a follow-up letter signed by Maryanne Jackson. The hoax wasn’t revealed until the 1967 book appeared.
I played for a show that he starred in, and he did seem grouchy. He was rather stand-offish back stage. Of course, this was very near the end of his life, so I guess it’s not fair to fault someone for getting crankier as they age.
You’re absolutely right and I was mistaken, now that I think about it. I hope the other parody is at least half right.
I was a big fan of Allen in his TV heyday, but his humor and delivery didn’t seem to age well over the years. I hope he will be remembered for the “Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion & Morality” series he authored as a philosopher late in life.
The first time Foster Brooks was a guest, Steve didn’t tell Jayne…
Jayne was the first guest and then Brooks was introduced as an Anthropologist. Foster started his interview,stumbling in his inebriated way and Jayne became infuriated and tryed to signal Steve that his guest was Shitfaced! Steve was trying not to Laugh since the joke was on Jayne and us, the viewing audience.
Steve also had Professor Irwin Corey come on after Jayne,that was a killer.
Bob Einstein, made several guest appearences.The Brother of Albert Brooks and most notably Known as Super Dave Osborne.He was many different characters.
Officer Judy,an LAPD Police officer,from a serious deadpan expression,would always tell a silly experience and then become offended when Steve and the audience would laugh.Eventually, he would storm off the stage.
Ping-Pong Worlds Champion…Steve would always challenge him on the stage and clean his clock. Einstein would break all his paddles and Storm off the stage.
I always thought it a shame that almost no recordings exist of Allen’s TV “Tonight” shows. I understand that the early videotaped ones were merely erased and reused after the one broadcast. It seems odd that Allen (and to some extent, Carson) had so little foresight that they didn’t see how valuable they would become to the world, or perhaps they just assumed the shows would be archived by the network or the producer and didn’t check.
Sure, videotape was expensive, and recycling a noble cause, but how can you justify discarding something that is so irreplaceable?
NBC owned the tapes. They had them stored in a warehouse - along with every other show they had broadcast in black and white - and when they got tired of paying for storage they emptied the warehouse. This was before mass market home video existed, so they had no idea that anyone would ever be able to use the tapes other than an occasional anniversary special, which wasn’t worth the storage costs. Nobody there had any idea they were throwing out a billion dollars.
NBC? For the Tonight Show with Paar & Carson, yes, and I think the original Tonight Show that Allen started and maybe Allen’s weekly Sunday variety show in the 50’s. But Allen had a late night show opposite NBC (Paar?) in the early 60’s that was videotaped from the theatre across from the Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street. That must have been on another network (or independent?). I recall hearing (no cite, just old memory) that that particular show erased the tapes shortly after airing for economy reasons.
Hindsight is always 20-something. But doesn’t it seem a trifle short-sighted to not forsee some kind of use, historical or entertainment, for this material? And was it too big a jump from the massive, expensive studio video recorders to an affordable home-theatre system in the future? After all, the downsizing of electronics had already begun with the Sony 7-transistor radio in the 50’s.
I read somewhere the radio shows of Jack Benny, George Burns, et al were distributed on 16" transcription audio disks at one time and tossed out the back of the radio station when they were done. Preservation-wise, since I think we have copies of most of those, the advantage here was the quantity produced. It only took one DJ to save a copy. The video shows had no such luck unless a fanatic fan had a kinescope recorder turned on every night.
I’m sure this concept of “store it until we need the space” is rampant, or at least used to be. A friend of mine used to hang around the various studios in Hollywood in the 70’s and once found several dumpsters full of original, handwritten music scores from old movies, even well-known ones. He recognized the value, but both he and I had limited storage space ourselves, and he was able to rescue only a few. Again, to a music student or archivist, irreplaceable, as scanning and digital conversion was not available then. Microfilming might have been possible, but I never heard of that being done to old scores. They’re just gone.
Every single online source lists “The New Steve Allen Show” as being on ABC in 1961.
But Bigger Than a Breadbox states that it launched, syndicated by Westinghouse, in June 1962 and ran for two-and-a-half years.
So it might have been on opposite Jack Paar’s Tonight Show for a short while. (We forget today that six months passed between when Paar ended his show and Carson started his, with guest hosts filling in.) More likely, it was opposite Carson or may even have been started to compete against the guest hosts and carve out a niche for itself before NBC started dominating again.
Tapes may have been erased nightly for this show. I have no info on that.
Westinghouse! That rings a bell. The first TV set we ever had in our household arrived about then, and I watched that late-night show religiously as a big Steverino fan. Hi-ho!
Just think – a M-F nightly show would have 5 times the number of shows than a weekly one, so loss of 2.5 years’ worth is a lot of loss compared to Allen’s or Sullivan’s weekly ones.
The Steve Allen Tonight Show aired live in the pre-videotape era.
Exapno, you’re confusing Steve Allen’s short-lived ABC variety show (which lasted from September to December of 1961) with his Westinghouse talk show.
As for what survives: Not much of Allen’s “Tonight” show, but most of his NBC prime-time series of the late 1950’s and all of his aforementioned ABC series is at UCLA, which also has 17 editions of his Westinghouse series and 80 editions of his late-1960’s talk show.
Aha! That makes more sense. IMDb does not even mention the 1962 show so I just assumed that the show that was mentioned had to be that one, just with the wrong year given.
I know we have some Dopers who post info on INDb. This would be a good addition.
The late 50s prime time show was syndicated in the 1990s in half-hour chunks with Allen doing intros. I’ve seen at least one kinescope of the 1961 show available on the Net but I don’t know how much more survives.
Well! I’d like to thank everyone for the informative replies! Despite any personality traits, Mr. Allen certainly left a legacy that is worthy of deep research.
So how much is an “edition”? Is that like one hour’s worth of a one-hour show? If so, lessee, 5 times a week, 52 weeks/yr, 2.5 yrs, assuming no reruns, is 650 shows, and 17/650 means 3% is all that survives from that one.
