Dean Martin Was The Best

[ABM]

Dang, that dude had EVERYONE on his show! I had no idea until watching this info-mercial peddling the TV series dvd's.

 

[jlprk]

Many variety shows were like that. Most lasted only a couple of years, like Glenn Campbell or Johhny Cash. Each had a couple of guests per show who are now legends. The first 10 years of Johnny Carson was erased. Many comedy shows like Red Skelton had only one guest per show, who was big at the time but isn't a legend now. Red took ownership of his tapes and threatened to destroy them because TV wouldn't give him a show anymore. But he didn't.

By the way, the Dean Martin show was ended by pressure from the Religious Right. They didn't like his playboy image on the show with all the girls adoring him. They succeeded in diminishing the Golddigger minutes per show in later years, but the show still got canned despite good ratings.

Just before that, the Smothers Brothers, the top-rated show for any day (beating Ed Sullivan and Bonanza, the former #1 shows) were cancelled because they opposed the Vietnam War and said so (not on TV).

 

[Mediocre Man]

The Dean Martin Roasts were also great tv. My parents got all of them on video, and I have watched them over the years. While I love the vulgar humor of the new roasts also, there is certainly an art to being funny without resorting to dick jokes. Don Rickles, Bob Newhart and Foster Brooks killed at those events. I encourage anyone who hasn't seen Foster Brooks to look him up on youtube under the roasts

 

[maxiep]

The Dean Martin Roasts were also great tv. My parents got all of them on video, and I have watched them over the years. While I love the vulgar humor of the new roasts also, there is certainly an art to being funny without resorting to dick jokes. Don Rickles, Bob Newhart and Foster Brooks killed at those events. I encourage anyone who hasn't seen Foster Brooks to look him up on youtube under the roasts

Before funny stoners, there were funny drunks. Foster Brooks was at the top of that list. Rickles is Rickles and Bob Newhart killed with understatement.

 

[jlprk]

With illegal drugs spreading, the media started giving favorable treatment to alcohol to slow down drugs, especially for youth. Some states lowered the legal age. So in the early 70s, Foster Brooks appeared, doing monologues on Carson. Womens Lib was created to combat all this change, with its conservative cultural revolution. Soon the media's 60s smirking references to Hugh Hefner and all things culturally liberal were replaced by heavyhanded negative remarks from the new female personalities and writers. By the late 70s, every media reference to Foster Brooks contained criticism that went like this: "With so much drug and substance abuse [abuse was the new term replacing use], this is no longer funny." They simply openly made little editorials about him whenever he was mentioned in a magazine. The late 70s were entirely different from the early 70s, ushering in Reagan. The mid-70s appeared onstage to be the CIA's Waterloo, but behind the scenes, that's when they truly took over the domestic side of power. That was the inflection point of the curve. So Foster Brooks' drunken character had about 5 years at the top and then long years of fade into blacklist.

Hmm, here's the politically correct way to say it. "Public sensibilities had changed regarding alcoholics and public drunkenness by the 1980s, so Brooks moved away from his drunk character."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_Brooks