Shecky Greene
Shecky Greene is an actor, born 1926.
The best of Shecky Greene's work was never filmed. Born Fred Sheldon Greenfield in Chicago in 1926, he became a Las Vegas headliner across the 1950s and 1960s, at a point when the showroom and the lounge were the top of the profession rather than a consolation, and his reputation rests on nights in rooms that had no cameras in them. He died in 2023.
What survives on screen is a scatter of character parts and a great deal of talk-show tape, and the talk shows are the more honest record. He appeared repeatedly with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show, and turned up on The Hollywood Palace, Dinah! and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. That is where you can watch the method: volume, momentum, and a standing willingness to go somewhere the booked material had not planned for.
The films used him as a type rather than a talent, which is the usual fate of a great live comic. He is Catleg in the Sinatra detective picture Tony Rome, the Roman schemer Marcus Vindictus in Mel Brooks's History of the World: Part I, and a fast-talking salesman in Splash. The surprise on the list is Combat!, a serious war drama, where he played Braddock and was asked to do something other than be funny.
Movies (3)
TV (8)
Where to start with Shecky Greene
Start with History of the World: Part I, because Mel Brooks was one of the few filmmakers who knew what to do with a nightclub comic: he gave Greene a role scaled to a big room and let him play it enormous. It is broad, and that is the point.
Splash is the tighter piece of work, a small comic part in a film that does not need him, and he takes his laugh anyway. Tony Rome is the straight one, a hardboiled detective picture where he plays it mostly serious, and Combat! is the real surprise: a war series that cast a comedian and told him not to be one.
The rest is chat-show archive, and it is not filler. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and The Mike Douglas Show catch the thing the whole reputation was built on, which is a man being funny live with no script to hide behind.