The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Tim Jones, a regular at The Comedy Store throughout the 1980s comedy boom and into the 1990s, has died. Jones, a native New Yorker, headed west to Hollywood like many comedians in the 1970s. On the East Coast, he’d been a news writer for a local NBC station. “I wanted to …
Mike Allan MacDonald joked onstage that he was “the King of Canadian Comedy,” but to many in Canada, he was royalty. Unlike the other great comedians to come out of Canada, MacDonald stayed. He stayed ’til the end, dying Saturday from heart complications. He was 63. 62 according to his …
He wasn’t from Boston, but Barry Crimmins accomplished more in the 1970s and 1980s to make the metropolitan area an artistically and financially profitable hub for comedy than any comedian, booker or club owner. He wasn’t Nicaraugan, but Crimmins traveled there to perform for the Sandinastas and rail against then-President …
Goodbye dere. Marty Allen died on Monday in Las Vegas, from complications from pneumonia. Allen was 95. He was a favorite both on TV and in Vegas casinos for decades as the wild-eyed comedy partner of Steve Rossi. I spoke with Allen three years ago for his 93rd birthday. He …
Joe Recca, was a social worker, a black belt, and according to his website, “The Funniest Man in Clean Comedy!” Recca died last week in Baltimore. No further details were released. Born in Chicago and raised in Virginia Beach, Recca graduated from Norfolk State University in 1986 with a degree in …
Just a quarter of a century ago, you could see gay comedians on TV but never really knew they were gay. Then came Bob Smith. Smith was the first openly gay man to perform stand-up on The Tonight Show, as well as star in his own HBO half-hour comedy special. …
He could have been Gilligan, but Jerry Van Dyke wanted to be his own comedic self. That self, the younger banjo-playing happy-go-lucky, stammering brother of Dick Van Dyke, Jerry (six years Dick’s junior) managed to enjoy a lengthy TV career that started in the 1960s, peaked in the early 1990s …
Danny Breen made his mark in front of the camera as a cast member for eight seasons on HBO’s sketch comedy series, Not Necessarily The News. But Breen also won multiple Emmys for his work behind the scenes on a producer for Ellen and The Wayne Brady Show. An alum of …
Rose Marie, a vaudeville star at 3 and hit radio singer at 5, who performed opening night at Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingto resort in Las Vegas and is best known now for her co-starring role as TV comedy writer Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show, has died. She was …
It’s rather remarkable that most all of the funny nonagenarians profiled in this year’s HBO documentary, If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast, managed to make it through 2017 unscathed. But several other comedy legends passed away in 2017, old and not-so-old. Let us take one more look back …
