Not that I dispute many of the good suggestions presented thus far…
…but Jerry Lewis?
I thought of him too, and it might have fit back in the 1980’s when his movie and comedy career was mostly behind him, but he showed up on the MDA telethons and other specials. Kids like me knew him only as the MDA guy, but our parents had a lot more history with him. Now I haven’t seen him in years.
If it weren’t for certain recently-exposed behaviors, I’d say Bill Cosby was the guy for a while. He was big in the 70’s, huge in the '80’s, then not as popular or prolific the last 25 or so years, but we old people kept talking about him and he didn’t completely disappear from our minds.
The name that popped in my head immediately was Neil Patrick Harris. He kinda does it all and is still very relevant.
Right, but NPH was just on a very popular hit show, so the snot-nosed kids of today know why he’s famous…he was on HIMYM, and some other stuff.
The angle I’m going for is “Very famous person 2016 who apparently did famous things in the past, but nobody born after 1990 has ever watched those things, so even though they know he’s supposed to be famous they can’t understand why.”
This. If you lived near a big city you had plenty of changes to see old movies from the 30s-50. I saw tons of the old “Road to …” movies, and the great film-noires, and the Berkeley musicals, the Tracy-Hepburn romances, and …
The independent broadcasters were an early version of the internet – aggregators who collected old popular stuff and offering them again and again.
I don’t know if he’s important to young people today since I try to avoid young people today, but what about Bill Shatner?
That’s probably a great example. Most famous for being Captain Kirk in the 1960s and a handful of 1980s-1990s movies, and less famous for being TJ Hooker and Denny Crane.
The last thing I can think of he did was Boston Legal, and his run on there has been over with for a decade.
But William Shatner isn’t a comedian/host type. He’s not at all comparable, really.
Really, Billy Crystal is about as good a comparison as you’ll find. Both comedians, both sort of elder, repsected statesmen of comedy, and both work well in the same wheelhouse. Both had extensive careers in film. Both are very famous for hosting the Academy Awards - Hope and Crystal are 1st and 2nd, respectively, in the number of shows they’ve hosted. Both are relatively safe, affable characters.
Like Don Rickles, Crystal is probably best known to the younger generations for voicing a Pixar character. I doubt he’s identifiable by sight for those who are used to hearing his voice come from a small green monster.
To take a different approach I had a look at recent USO performers (as per Wikipedia):
Of those, the only one who might remotely qualify would be Senator Franken and he was more of a writer than a performer back in the day.
While Shatner isn’t a true comedian, he does do comedy. My comparison was that, like Hope, when Shatner makes an appearance older people seem to be a little awe-struck while younger people just scratch their heads, like they don’t get it.
Man does that upset me. I think Newhart’s comic timing is still intact, and he was hilarious on BBT. I think this is more about having someone “too old” appear on the show.
As to the OP, I nominate: Terry Bradshaw.
He’s definitely still very prominent on football related shows. But he seems to be all over the place as well. I think most of the younger generation doesn’t know of his fame other than that he was a “football player”. His “good old boy” and “have a good time, all the time” persona seems to have carried him through the years, irrespective of his start in the public eye.
No mention of Dick van Dyke?