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Norm Crosby, the comedian known as the master of malaprop because he talked about his diagram and told many funny antidotes, often to standing ovulation, died in Los Angeles on Saturday. He was 93 years old.
The cause was heart failure, her stepdaughter Maggie Crosby said.
Mr. Crosby started telling jokes in the late 1950s, when comedians often relied on one type of gag for their actions: Don Rickles was the insult comic, Henny Youngman was the king of the one-liners. As a young New England comedian, Mr. Crosby experimented with these forms and more.
“I was making everyone’s material,” Mr. Crosby said in an interview with show business historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2010. “I took Buddy Hackett, Jan Murray and Red Buttons. Everybody!”
Mr. Crosby developed his own shtick after being offered a job at New York’s famous nightclub, the Latin Quarter, in Times Square.
“I was taking Ed Sullivan jokes every week,” Mr. Crosby said in an interview for this obituary in 2013. “I couldn’t go to New York and do what I was doing.
He was trying to develop new material when a club owner made a casual comment about one of the club’s cabaret dancers. The owner, who had taken the young woman, “walked into my lodge and said, ‘Find out if the girl was staying or if she was communicating,'” Mr. Crosby recalls. “I said, ‘My God, a lot of people talk like that. It might be fun. So I started the pun.
He tried in Massachusetts, he added, “and the places where I worked, unfortunately people didn’t tell the difference.”
Due to the details of his booking in the Latin Quarter, Mr. Crosby’s routine was also not an immediate breakthrough with the Times Square public. He started playing 12-minute filler sets between stage numbers during his week-long engagement, and his jokes were largely ignored. “I spent five minutes before anyone knew I was there,” he said.
At the end of the week, a downcast Mr. Crosby packed his bags and picked up his check from the manager, who apologized for the difficult task and promised him a better seat on the show. Once the audience had a chance to figure out the joke it was a hit. He stayed in the Latin Quarter for 18 weeks, after which the prestigious William Morris agency began to represent him.
It was soon opening for singer Robert Goulet at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, and Mr. Goulet and his agent enjoyed Mr. Crosby’s act so much that they booked it as the opening act for a nationwide tour. The two worked together for the next three years. Mr. Crosby then toured with Tom Jones for a while before becoming a full headliner.
He has appeared on the television shows of Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin and in comedy series like “The Love Boat”. From 1978 to 1981, he hosted “The Comedy Shop,” a syndicated showcase for young comedians, and primarily performed on the 1988-89 Showtime sitcom “The Boys,” about a club that closely resembled the Friars Club, where he often participated in the roasts. Mr Crosby was also a regular at Dean Martin’s celebrity roasts, where his targets included Senator Barry Goldwater and actors Kirk Douglas and Carroll O’Connor.
Speaking of Senator Goldwater, he said: “When President Johnson declared war on puberty, it was Senator Goldwater who said, and I quote:” Wherever there is unemployment you will find men without. job “.
He was a pitchman in the late 1970s and early 1980s for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer, appearing in commercials with Mickey Mantle, Henny Youngman, and Joe Frazier.
In an advertisement, he said: “I always keep Natural on hand as I watch these athletes sweat for victory because these athletic calculations make me so dehybernated.
He has also been a frequent participant in Jerry Lewis’s Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. It was not his only charitable cause; Mr. Crosby, who was hard of hearing, also became the first national president of the Council for Better Speech and Hearing in 1979.
In 1982, Mr. Crosby’s name was, as he might have put it, immobilized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, placed between the stars of Jack Benny and Red Skelton.
Norman Lawrence Crosby was born September 15, 1927 in Boston. Known as a class card, he graduated from Dorchester High School and then studied advertising illustration at the Massachusetts School of Art, but enlisted as a radar operator in the Coast Guard before graduating.
His hearing was permanently damaged by deep charges that exploded while on anti-submarine patrol in the North Atlantic during World War II, although he only noticed hearing problems long after he returned home.
After the war, Mr. Crosby worked in advertising for a women’s shoe retailer in Boston with approximately 40 stores, before becoming director of advertising. He dabbled in comedy at small New England clubs and restaurants, becoming popular in the area before his opportunity in the Latin Quarter.
He married Joan Foley, a nightclub dancer and former Rockette, in 1967.
Besides his wife, the survivors include their two sons, Andrew and Daniel, and two grandchildren.
In recent years, Mr. Crosby continued to perform on cruise ships and in Las Vegas into his 80s and appeared on television sporadically. He also had small roles in Adam Sandler’s “Grown Ups 2” and other films.
Mr. Crosby was not the only person known to have misused words: so was the 43rd President, George W. Bush. Mr. Bush’s false statements brought to mind some of Mr. Crosby’s malaprops, even though they were not part of a routine.
“Everyone was like, ‘Hey! He does your deed, ”Mr. Crosby said.
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