Forty years gone: The Ed Sullivan Show

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on July 4th, 2011

It’s been gone for four decades (as of last month). So the number of current, practicing comedians who received their first exposure to standup via The Ed Sullivan Show is understandably dwindling. It lives on via DVD’s and other media, but it’s impact was greatest when kids sat down in the living room– often with Mom, Dad and maybe even Grandma and Grandpa– and watched Myron Cohen or Alan King or George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Joan Rivers and secretly vowed, “THAT looks like something I’d like to do.”

Gerald Nachman has a piece in today’s L.A. Times about the show. And it’s shot through with references to comedians.

Few then had heard of — not to mention ever seen — Carol Burnett, the Supremes, Nat King Cole, Stiller & Meara, Jackie Mason, Eartha Kitt, Sam Cooke, Sammy Davis Jr., Phyllis Diller, Shelley Berman, Shecky Greene, Teresa Brewer, George Carlin, Keely Smith, Myron Cohen, Patti Page, et al. — when Sullivan escorted them into our homes on his national stage. His eclectic taste and a lust for the family audience inspired him to trot out acrobats, elephant acts, ventriloquists, along with the regulation comics and singers — plus, and perhaps most rarefied of all, little-known black performers.

Read the whole thing. Nachman is the author of, among other books, the seriously awesome “Seriously Funny,” an account of the cadre of comics who came up in the late-50s/early 60s and influenced our lives and the popular culture. And they nearly all owe a debt of gratitude to Ed Sullivan.


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