Word: allen
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...1960s, when I was a student at Berkeley, I took breaks by traveling down to Los Angeles to sit in the audience of the Steve Allen Show. This was the second of two syndicated late-night shows that Allen hosted through the '60s, a nightly, 90-minute showcase for his rowdy, improvisational comedy. Shows would typically open with some unscripted bit, and one night everyone in the audience was handed foam-rubber bricks and bats and told that, in honor of the campus unrest making headlines, when Steve ventured into the crowd, we'd erupt into an "audience riot." Since...
...when he died last week, at 78, it was apparent that of all the pioneers of TV's first generation, Allen remains the most relevant, one of the half-dozen indispensable people in the medium's history. When he became host of a new late-night broadcast on NBC called the Tonight show in 1953, he was a revolutionary. The infant medium was still feeling its way, adapting the formats of radio and vaudeville and the Broadway stage. Allen, who had honed his skills in local radio and TV, seemed to understand the medium in a new way. He relaxed...
...Tonight show (1954-57), a prime-time variety show on NBC (1956-60) and two late-night talk shows in the 1960s, Allen invented the style that TV hosts from David Letterman to Craig Kilborn are still developing. He looked for comedy in everyday trivia, taking a mike into the audience or turning on a camera outside the studio and simply commenting on people coming in and out of the Hollywood Ranch Market across the street. In one recurring bit, he would pick up a copy of the New York Daily News, don a cornball press hat and read angry...
...verbal comic, Allen was the fastest gun in the business, and a true heir to Groucho Marx for his inventiveness with language, constantly pirouetting around the tired cliché or the pretentious phrase. Yet he had an infallible internal censor that kept his wisecracks from ever being cheap, or risqué, or mean. He kept a police whistle at his desk, which he'd blow whenever a line or bit of business crossed the line. He remained old-fashioned that way, as well as in his stubborn refusal, unlike Carson and almost everyone that followed, to do "savers" when...
...Actually, Allen didn't "write" any books; he dictated them into his ever-handy micro tape recorder. After 50 years in show business, as an author and polemicist, Steve was still doing radio - still hosting a talk show, even when no one else was talking and his only audience was a stenographer. He became a relic of his time, a bespectacled version of a '56 Coupe de Ville. It took his death to remind people that, like that old Caddy, Steverino was a classic...