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.