And for us older folks, Norm Crosby died..
NY timesNorm Crosby, Comedian Who Had a (Wrong) Way With Words, Dies at 93
You might call him the Boston mangler. “I was doing everybody’s material,” he said, before discovering his own shtick and becoming the master of the malaprop.
Norm Crosby, the comedian known as the master of malaprop because he spoke from his diagram and related many funny antidotes, often to a standing ovulation, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 93.
The cause was heart failure, his daughter-in-law, Maggie Crosby said.
Mr. Crosby started telling jokes in the late 1950s, when comedians often relied on one type of gag for their acts: Don Rickles was the insult comic, Henny Youngman was the king of the one-liners. As a young comedian in New England, Mr. Crosby experimented with those forms and more.
“I was doing everybody’s material,” he said in an interview with the show business historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2010. “I took from Buddy Hackett, Jan Murray and Red Buttons. Everybody!”
Mr. Crosby developed his own shtick after he was offered a job at the popular New York City nightclub the Latin Quarter, in Times Square.
“I was taking jokes from Ed Sullivan every week,” Mr. Crosby said in an interview for this obituary in 2013. “I couldn’t go to New York and do the stuff I was doing.”
He was trying to develop new material when a club owner made an offhand comment about one of the club’s cabaret dancers. The owner, who had given the young woman a ride, “came into my dressing room, and he said to me, ‘Find out if the girl is staying over or if she communicates,’” Mr. Crosby recalled.
Because of the particulars of his Latin Quarter booking, Mr. Crosby’s routine was not an immediate breakthrough with Times Square audiences, either. He started out performing 12-minute filler sets between stage acts during his weeklong engagement, and his jokes were largely ignored. “I was on for five minutes before anybody knew I was out there,” he said.
At the end of the week, a dejected Mr. Crosby packed his bags and went to pick up his check from the manager, who apologized for the difficult assignment and promised him a better slot in the show. Once audiences had a chance to get the joke, he was a hit. He stayed at the Latin Quarter for 18 weeks, after which the prestigious William Morris Agency began representing him.
Mr. Crosby was soon opening for the singer Robert Goulet at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, and Mr. Goulet and his agent enjoyed Mr. Crosby’s act so much that they booked him as the opening act on a nationwide tour. The two worked together for the next three years. Mr. Crosby then toured with the singer Tom Jones for a time before becoming a headliner in his own right.
He appeared on the television shows of Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin and on comedy series like “The Love Boat.” From 1978 to 1981, he hosted “The Comedy Shop,” a syndicated showcase for young stand-up comedians, and essentially played himself in the 1988-89 Showtime sitcom “The Boys,” about a club that closely resembled the Friars Club in New York, where he often took part in celebrity roasts. Mr. Crosby became a regular on Dean Martin’s televised roasts, where he skewered, among others, Senator Barry Goldwater, Kirk Douglas (“a serious equestrian performer”) and Carroll O’Connor (“very deceptive about all kinds of people; as a matter of fact he has extra sensible reception”).
