Joe Besser on the Joey Bishop Show
![joey_bishop--300x300[1]](http://travsd.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/joey_bishop-300x3001.jpg)
Today is the birthday of the late Joey Bishop (1918-2007). I think of him mostly as a live comic, working night clubs and resorts, but this is mostly because his two TV shows in the 1960s (a sit com and a talk show) were both before my time and not played in reruns (at least where I grew up). And of course he has the occasional bit part in Rat Pack movies. And I am quite certain that John Byner was doing his Joey Bishop impression in those Ant and Aarvark cartoons on The Pink Panther cartoons. (The aardvark was Joey Bishop, the ant was Dean Martin).
In this clip, Joey’s guest is the wonderful bizarre burlesque and vaudeville comedian Joe Besser:
To find out more about the variety arts past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. And don’t miss Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, to be released by Bear Manor Media in 2013.
February 3, 2013 at 11:36 am
This is from Bishop’s sitcom, yes? On which he played a talk show host named Joey Barnes.
February 3, 2013 at 11:48 am
Indeed, indeed, elevating it then to the level of meta-Pirandello