Alan King, RIP

Ah, the Sunday evenings of my childhood and youth: the Ed Sullivan Show and a perennial appearance by Alan King. What a wiseguy. When he met Queen Elizabeth after a Command Performance, she said, How do you do, Mr. King? Alan King replied: How do you do, Mrs. Queen? It this is (fair & balanced) effrontery, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
May 10, 2004
Alan King, Comic With Chutzpah, Dies at 76
By BRUCE WEBER

Alan King, the stand-up comedian who parlayed a borscht-belt sense of humor, a tummler's cheek and a big appetite for the limelight into a thoroughgoing show business career that lasted more than half a century, died Sunday morning at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was 76 and lived in Kings Point, N.Y.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife of 57 years, Jeanette.

Mr. King was an unabashed exemplar of Jewish comedy, a through-and-through New Yorker whose sensibility, delivery and accent never migrated far from their Brooklyn roots. As a boy he worked in the Catskills and sang on the radio, and he was schooled in the rimshot wisecrack by Milton Berle.

Mr. King met Berle at the New York nightclub Leon and Eddie's, becoming the older comedian's protégé — and sometimes sharing dinner with him at Lindy's — while he was still a teenager. But Mr. King was never Berlesque in his own work, never the self-mocking goofball. He grew into his own swaggering persona — part impatient executive, part cranky citizen, part bedeviled husband and father — complete with elegant haberdashery, a long cigar and, frequently, an expression that seemed to indicate he had just eaten something disagreeable and was striving to rid his mouth of an unpleasant taste.

Over time, he evolved from a traditional joke-telling comedian into an astute addresser of audiences. "Why is everybody carrying on about Woolworth's?" he asked a black audience at a rally after the first lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960's. "Have you ever eaten at the counter at Woolworth's? If you wanted to sit in the Colony Club I could understand." Indeed, he became something of a first-person monologuist whose influence can be seen in the work of Robert Klein, David Steinberg and even Bill Cosby.

Mr. King became especially well known through his 56 appearances — only the Italian puppet mouse Topo Gigio and the Canadian comedy team Wayne and Schuster had more — on "The Ed Sullivan Show" during the 1950's and 60's and his frequent guest-host appearances on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." But that was hardly the extent of his ambition or his fame.

A prolific nightclub performer and renowned toastmaster who became a member of the Friars Club in 1945 — shortly after he opened for Frank Sinatra and shortly before doing the same, at the Palace Theater, for Judy Garland — he was a man who rarely met a podium he didn't like. And he stood on some important ones. In January 1961, he was the M.C. for part of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural party; in 1972, he was host of the Academy Awards.

"Modesty is not one of my virtues," he told The New York Times in an interview in 1993. Stretched by ambition, his career included 29 films as a character actor (he specialized in rabbis, show business agents and gangsters) and myriad guest appearances on television, not to mention, in 1986, a pilot film for a never-broadcast sitcom, "The Alan King Show," in which he was to play a beleaguered college professor. By the time he had his own HBO special in 1987, long before that became a measure of a comedian's arrival, he had already become, as John J. O'Connor noted in his otherwise negative review in The Times, "a show business institution."

He was a producer of both film and theater (his Broadway credits included "The Lion in Winter" in 1968); he was host of "Inside the Comedy Mind," a series of interviews with other comedians that was a staple on Comedy Central in that cable channel's early days; he was an executive producer of the Toyota Comedy Festival in New York from 1992 to 2002. A well-known tennis fanatic, he founded a pro tournament, the Alan King Tennis Classic, in Las Vegas, which he sponsored at Caesars Palace in the 1970's.

He was the author of five books, including "The Alan King Great Jewish Joke Book" and a collection of reminiscences, "Matzo Balls for Breakfast and Other Memories of Growing Up Jewish," to be published next year by Simon & Schuster. He also appeared onstage, most recently in the title role in "Mr. Goldwyn," a 2002 Off Broadway play about the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, whom Mr. King portrayed as a man of chutzpah and brass very much like himself.

Less well known was his charity work, which included fund-raising for the Nassau Center for Emotionally Disturbed Children on Long Island, his establishment of a chair in dramatic arts at Brandeis and the founding of the Alan King Diagnostic Medical Center in Jerusalem.

Alan King was born Irwin Alan Kniberg on Dec. 26, 1927, in Brooklyn; he grew up in Williamsburg and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father, Bernard, was a handbag cutter. Both his parents were Russian immigrants, and as he recalled in his autobiography, "Name-Dropping: The Life and Lies of Alan King" (Scribner, 1996), when he took his mother, Minnie, to see "Fiddler on the Roof," he thought the fictional village of Anatevka might bring back memories of her own childhood village. "And when the show was over and we were back on the street," Mr. King wrote, "I said, `Ma, how did you enjoy it? Did it bring back memories?' `It was wonderful,' she said. `Only I don't remember so much singing.' "

Mr. King seemed to know — or at least to have met — everyone in New York, Hollywood, Washington, Las Vegas and a few other places besides, from David Dinkins to Henny Youngman, from the Kennedys to the McEnroes, from Frank Sinatra and Jack Benny to Bugsy Siegel and Jesse Owens. (Even the family house in Great Neck had a pedigree: it was built by Oscar Hammerstein.)

After performing for the British royal family, the story goes, he was introduced to Queen Elizabeth.

"How do you do, Mr. King?" she is reported to have said.

"How do you do, Mrs. Queen?" he is said to have replied.

Even his wife was impressed by this who's who. Although he often made use of marital humor in his act ("If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books"), she recalled in her own wry chapter of Mr. King's autobiography that putting up with it was worth something.

"I met the queen of England," she wrote, "and Clark Gable."

In addition to his wife, whom he met in Brooklyn when they were teenagers, Mr. King is survived by two sons, Robert, of Manhattan, and Andrew, of Washington Township, N.J.; a daughter, Elainie Gagné of Vermont; and seven grandchildren.

In recent years, responding to suggestions that he slow down, he scoffed. A gardener, he was especially proud of his roses, but stopping to smell them, he said, wasn't as pleasurable as making people laugh.

"You only live once," he said. "Except for Shirley MacLaine."

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company