Post by merg on May 10, 2004 15:59:08 GMT -5
Source E Online
King of Comedy Dies
by Joal Ryan
May 10, 2004, 12:45 PM PT
Alan King once complained--as was his shtick--that despite a long career in TV, film and nightclubs, he was considered cool by modern audiences only because he'd worked with Jackie Chan.
King, the comedian's comedian, died Sunday in New York City's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of lung cancer. He was 76.
As his 2002 rant to the New York Daily News indicated, King appeared alongside Chan in Rush Hour 2. A busy character actor from the 1980s on, King's big-screen credits included Casino, Enemies, A Love Story and Memories of Me, in which he played Billy Crystal's father. (King also produced that 1988 comedy.)
King's greatest performances arguably came in smoky rooms and concert halls, where he opened for the likes of Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. In later years, he was his trade's elder statesman and historian, producing and hosting the anatomy-of-a-punchline series, The College of Comedy with Alan King, for PBS. He also spearheaded New York's Toyota Comedy Festival.
To King, the best jokes were stories.
"A good joke is like a little play, you hold their attention with a plot line, with a beginning, a middle and an end," King told PBS.org in 1997.
On stage, King famously was dubbed "an aggressive Jack Benny," after his one of his idols, the bespectacled, deadpan comic. There was nothing deadpan about King. He copped to having a big mouth, which he owed to hailing from a noisy family. (He was the youngest of eight kids.)
King's style of humor was not timid--he said most comedians were aggressive. In an interview with ABILITY magazine in the mid-1990s, he recalled telling a joke about lunch counter sit-ins at a Black Freedom rally at the height of the civil-rights movement.
"Why is everybody carrying on about Woolworth's?" King began. "Have you ever eaten at the lunch counter at Woolworth's? If you wanted to sit in the Colony Club, I could understand it."
Off stage, King was a big booster of civic and social causes. Through King, the Toyota Comedy Festival brought stand-ups to hospitalized children and rest-home residents via the "Laugh Well" program.
In 1997, he became the abbot (aka, the big cheese) of the roast-loving New York City Friars Club, succeeding Sinatra.
"Alan was the epitome of showbiz," the club said in a notice placed Monday in the New York Times.
Born Irwin Alan Kinberg in New York City on December 26, 1927, King dropped out of school as a teen to pursue comedy.
"I have written a million jokes in my life," King told PBS.org. "The first time I got laughs, I was hooked. I never looked back."
King's big break came in 1956 when he warmed up audiences for Garland's legendary appearances at The Palace in New York. His film debut had come a year earlier, in the musical-comedy Hit the Deck.
By his official bio's count, King appeared "more than 1,000 times on every variety show in the annals of TV."
"I did The Ed Sullivan Show so many times it was some kind of record," he told the New York Daily News' Mike Lupica in 2002.
In the 1990s, jaw cancer literally shut King up. But he battled back, and lived to tell more jokes.
"I'm almost 69 years old, and all things being equal, considering the life I have led, I am in pretty good shape," King said in ABILITY.
Survivors include his wife Jeanette, whom he married in 1947, and their three children.
R.I.P. Alan King