This morning, I remembered one more time I saw Irv Benson perform. It was in the early-to-mid eighties in Las Vegas. My friend Marv Wolfman and I were in town for a comic book distributors' meeting and I insisted we go to the Union Plaza Hotel downtown (It's now just The Plaza) to see what turned out to be a very odd production of my favorite musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It starred Alan Young, who later told me he was a last minute replacement for someone else who'd dropped out. He was very good, by the way.
It was a real Vegas production. A couple of roles and about a half hour had been eliminated, and the courtesans in the play were a little nuder than you might see in any other venue. Irv Benson was playing the role of Erroneous, the befuddled old man abroad now in search of his children, stolen in infancy by pirates. But though the rest of the show had been drastically trimmed, the part of Erroneous had been beefed up. Each time the character entered, he stopped and went into a small chunk of Irv Benson's Vegas/Reno act. For no visible reason, there on the street in Ancient Rome, there were jokes about slot machines and breasts and, of course, Liberace. In the eighties, you weren't allowed to set foot on a Nevada stage without at least one joke about Liberace.
At the end of the show, Mr. Young came out and did about a five minute monologue that commenced with, "Yes, he's working without the horse." He talked about Mr. Ed a little...and as he later told me, audiences expected that. Alan Young often toured in various plays — usually Showboat — and attendees didn't seem to feel the evening was complete unless Wilbur Post had alluded to his horsey friend. After that, Marv and I left and I explained to him how little the show we'd just seen resembled the actual musical by Stephen Sondheim, Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove.
A week later back in L.A., I ran into Gelbart in a car wash and told him about the bizarre production I'd witnessed. He apparently called up and threatened to have the show closed if they departed so drastically from his text...but by then, they were within days of closing anyway so the whole matter was moot.
The next time Marv and I were in Vegas, Irv Benson was in that Minsky's show at the Hacienda. I persuaded Mr. Wolfman and our mutual pal Len Wein to go see Irv in his natural habitat. Actually, what I told them to get them to go was that the show had naked women in it...but like me, they enjoyed Benson and his partner Dexter Maitland even more than they enjoyed the naked women. That may have been because the ladies were about the same age as Irv's material.
The guy on the right in the photo above is a great old comedian named Irv Benson. I'm posting this because there doesn't seem to be anything on the Internet about Irv Benson, apart from a few things I put there...so to begin rectifying that omission, let me tell you everything I know about Irv Benson.
Irv Benson was the last of the Minsky's Burlesque comedians. He was born in 1914 and I have no idea if he's still alive. He was playing in Las Vegas and Reno until around 1990, usually paired with a charming gent named Dexter Maitland, who was the last straight man from the Minsky's circuit. Their last gig was at the Hacienda Hotel in Vegas where they filled time between strippers in the Minsky's Burlesque Revue there. (When it closed, the next occupant of the Hacienda showroom was Lance Burton in his first starring show.) In the late eighties, I spent an evening backstage there with Mr. Maitland, hearing great stories about his long, long career. Unfortunately, I only got to say a brief hello to Benson that night and never had the opportunity to actually converse with him. A few years earlier, I'd seen the two of them at the Sahara in Reno, starring with the singing team of Sandler & Young, along with a bevy of Penthouse models, in the Penthouse Pet Revue. Benson and Maitland were very funny performing very old material.
I only know of three places Irv Benson appeared on television. In the sixties, when he hosted Hollywood Palace and his own variety show, Milton Berle always used Benson. Irv would be in a box seat or in the audience, appearing in the guise of a character named Sidney Spritzer. Mr. Spritzer enjoying heckling Mr. Berle. One joke that they did every time was when Benson/Spritzer would tell Uncle Miltie, "You're too close to the microphone!" Berle would ask, "How far should I be?" And Irv would answer, "You got a car?"
Apart from a bit part in one episode of Happy Days, the only other times I ever saw Irv on TV were on The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson was reportedly a huge fan of Benson and also of a couple of other Minsky's veterans who worked Vegas in the fifties and sixties — Hank Henry and Tommy "Moe" Raft. I don't think Johnny ever had them on his show but he booked Benson about a dozen times and played "straight" for him. In the above frame grab, Johnny has just asked Irv if he and his wife have any children, and Irv just replied, "Are you kidding? I won't even drink her coffee!" Bada-boom!
And that's just about everything I know about Irv Benson...a very funny man and the last of a now-extinct breed. I'm posting this in the hope that someone out there knows and will tell me more. And also because I thought there oughta be something on the Internet about Irv Benson.
I haven't been all that amused by David Letterman's show for quite some time...but this recent bit made me laugh out loud for some reason. Ignore the weird video at the beginning. It'll clear up in a few seconds.
And can you imagine what would happen if the day they were doing this, Steve Ditko suddenly got the urge for a Jamba Juice and went into that store?
I also enjoyed a game they played another night called "Please Stop Calling Me Mitt." What I find even funnier than the game is that the YouTube video of it seems to have been uploaded by the Mitt Romney campaign.
May 22, 2007
