Foster Brooks (May 11, 1912 – December 20, 2001) was an American actor and comedian best known for his portrayal of a lovable drunk in nightclub performances and television programs.
Early Life and Varied Career
Brooks was born in Louisville, Kentucky on
May 11, 1912 to Edna (née Megowan) and Pleasant M. Brooks. He had seven
brothers. His career started in radio,
notably with station WHAS (AM) in Louisville. He was a staff announcer, and his
deep baritone voice was also well-suited for singing. Brooks gained fame for
his reporting of the Ohio River flood of 1937, where he was featured on
emergency broadcasts by WHAS and also WSM (AM) from Nashville, Tennessee. In
1952, Brooks appeared on local TV in a short-lived spoof of Gene Autry and his
"Singing Cowboys".
He later worked in local broadcasting as
a radio and TV personality in Buffalo and Rochester, New York, before moving to
the West Coast to launch a career as a stand-up comic and character actor. In Buffalo, Brooks performed with a country
and western vocal group known as the Hi-Hatters.
In 1960, Brooks moved with his family to
Los Angeles to seek more professional opportunities. During this time, he
appeared on the television comedies The Munsters, The Monkees and
Bewitched. Brooks also delivered
Christmas mail and phone books, and managed an apartment building in North
Hollywood. In addition, he worked as a
security guard for the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.
On the syndicated Steve Allen Show of
the 1960s, Allen introduced Brooks as an important movie producer. Brooks
stumbled on stage doing his drunk act, fooling some of the other guests. Brooks
claimed to be the executive in charge of editing movies for television. His
biggest success, he said, was the famous movie The Three Commandments.
His character also claimed to have invented the concept of removing clips from
the movies and inserting commercials.
In 1969, game show icon and television
personality Dennis James took his friend Brooks to a North Carolina charity
golf tournament to tell some jokes, and then introduced Brooks to good friend,
singer Perry Como, who in turn gave the comedian his major break. Como chose
Brooks to open for him at a Las Vegas hotel. When the hotel's owners balked at
Como's choice due to Brooks' age and lack of fame, Como insisted and the owners
acquiesced. Brooks was an instant hit. He made his first appearance soon
thereafter on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Comedy Career
Brooks regularly appeared on The Dean
Martin Show television program in the 1970s (for which he garnered an Emmy
Award nomination in 1974) as well as many situation comedies, talk shows (including
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson), and a few films.
His signature routine was the basis of a
hit comedy album titled Foster Brooks, The Lovable Lush (later
retitled Los Angeles Earthquake), released in the early 1970s. As
his "Lovable Lush" character, Brooks usually portrayed a
conventioneer who had had a few too many drinks — not falling-down drunk, but
inebriated enough to mix up his words and burp to comedic delight. Brooks is
best remembered for his appearances on The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast during
the 1970s, where he roasted other comedians, such as Don Rickles, Johnny Carson
and Lucille Ball, and serious public figures such as writer Truman Capote, consumer
activist Ralph Nader, and former vice-president Hubert Humphrey.
Brooks drew upon his own battles with alcohol
for his act. During his period of greatest fame, Brooks rarely drank. Of giving up drinking to win a bet in 1964,
Brooks said, "A fellow made me a $10 bet I couldn't quit, and I haven't
had a drink since. At the time I needed the $10."
He would occasionally make cameo
appearances in which his character was perfectly sober, such as his appearance
in a 1968 episode of Adam-12 playing a strait-laced citizen who tries to
get out of a parking ticket by dropping the name of an officer senior to the
main characters. He also played the character Harry Sachs in a 1969 episode
of Adam-12 in which he performed as a highly intoxicated man
standing in the middle of a street, waving his suit jacket at oncoming traffic,
as if he were a bullfighter. In a
later Adam-12 episode, he plays a stoned man, stopped for
erratic driving, who tries to hide the burning marijuana "joint" in
his suit's front pocket. In a more serious Adam-12 appearance,
he portrayed a drunken driver who killed another driver in an accident on
Christmas Eve.
On the comedy series Green Acres in
the 1969 episode "Economy Flight to Washington", Brooks' boozy,
bobble-headed character meets and befriends the pig Arnold Ziffel in a hotel
bar. In the scene, ostensibly through the haze of alcohol, Brooks mistakes the anthropomorphic
pig for a U.S. Air Force lieutenant, since the animal is sitting on a bar stool
and is wearing a white leather aviator's cap, goggles, and a red scarf. Brooks
acted again on Green Acres in 1969, this time giving a
"sober" performance as Charlie Williams, a chemist, in the episode
"The Milk Maker." The following year he returned to his
whiskey-soaked persona on the television western The High Chaparral. Brooks asked Dean Martin to join his group
"Alcoholics Unanimous", a play on Alcoholics Anonymous. He boasted he and Martin were charter members
of the DUI (Driving Under the Influence) Hall of Fame.
In the 1970s, Brooks appeared as a
celebrity panelist on the game shows Hollywood Squares and Match Game,
and in 1979, he appeared in the film The Villain as a bank clerk.
Public sensibilities had changed
regarding alcoholics and public drunkenness by the 1980s, so Brooks moved away
from his drunken character. In 1983, Brooks appeared in the film Cannonball
Run II with comedians Louis Nye and Sid Caesar as fishermen in a rowboat. He had a recurring role as Mr. Sternhagen,
Mindy's boss on Mork & Mindy. His name was a moniker on a Louisville
celebrity golf tournament benefiting Kosair Charities. Brooks was a Shriner and member of the Al
Malaikah Shriners, Los Angeles. He also
made occasional guest appearances on TV shows in which he would demonstrate his
singing voice.
Brooks' last performance was at a celebrity
roast in Las Vegas for Zsa Zsa Gabor.
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