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The Comedy Show With Dick Cavett?

FilmCritic3K

FilmCritic3K

I always TiVo The $100,000 Pyramid on gsn and in this week's batch of episodes, Dick Cavett is one of the celebrities. He mentioned that he took over a radio show recently (this episode was from 1987) and that it's on over 200 stations. However, I can't find any info about The Comedy Show on Wikipedia, aside from that it ran from 1986-1989). He said that it was original comedy, listener calls, and old comedy routines and songs from yesteryear. He also mentioned how the show provided an opportunity for the younger generation to hear radio from the past.

Does anyone have any recollection of this show, how popular it was, how big its carriage was, etc?

Thanks in advance.
 
..."The Comedy Show" was mainly carried on talk stations, so I guess it would qualify for discussion here instead of getting the thread moved to Classic Radio...

...as I recall, the show was originally hosted by Jack Carney, the former WIL St. Louis/WABC New York disc jockey. I believe it was originally produced at KMOX St. Louis. After Carney died of cancer in 1987, Cavett took over with voice tracks recorded in New York and shipped to St. Louis for mixing. I suspect the same company that produced this one also handled the early years of "When Radio Was," which had been hosted by Art Fleming at first (Fleming was also co-hosting KMOX's trivia phone-in with Dave Strauss at the same time); Stan Freberg took over when Fleming retired circa 1993, and Freberg himself was just replaced by Chuck Schaden a few weeks ago...
 
We ran the program for awhile. I remember having to tape it off the Missouri Net state network feed, which makes sense if it came out of KMOX. I suppose it was also distributed on tape. It was about 3 or 4 minutes long, and from what little I remember of it, Dick Cavett read an intro, then there was a spot, then an except from an old comedy routine, followed by a short close by Cavett. The comedy tended to be from 1960s comedy albums, like Bob Newhart or Phyllis Diller.
 
...the show I'm referencing was a weekly two-hour item on the weekends. I never heard a daily capsule version of it; if there was one, it didn't get as wide distribution as the weekender, which at one point I recall being able to pick up in Southern Wisconsin late on Saturday nights from four or five different stations in overlapping slots...
 
It was distributed on vinyl, configured so that it could be played on dual turntables without interruption.
It was two hours long, once a week. The content was a combination of comedy album cuts, some clips from TV, and some clips from Jack Benny-style old-time radio. I believe the original title of the show was "Comedy Store" and it was changed at some point to the "Comedy Show."

BTW, IIRC, many album-rock stations aired similar comedy compilations, usually on Sunday nights, without a "host" to intro segments. These tended to have less of the old-time radio stuff and more contemporary (1970s) humor -- National Lampoon, SNL, Cheech and Chong and the like. A sound effect such as a tuning radio or a clicking manual TV dial would be used to separate the elements.
 
Would like to add some recollections of Jack Carney's Comedy Show. A cousin of mine was a DJ at a station that ran the show, and gave me a big stack of the discs back in the 80's; I still have some. The series was originally syndicated as "Jack Carney's Comedy Store," which may have been its local title in St. Louis; I believe the owners of the Comedy Store night club in LA (and their lawyers) forced the title change. It was syndicated on LP discs by the Clayton-Webster Corp. which may also have been based in St. Louis. They also distributed a country countdown show; its title escapes me now though I had some discs of it as well at one time.

I do remember the short features; they were called "Jack Carney's Comedy Spot" and were added on to the same 2 LPS as the two-hour main show, by lowering the overall audio level (a la the K-Tel 20-hits-on-one-LP method, you really had to crank 'em up.) They were edited from the main shows and intended to serve as "teasers," they varied in length from 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 minutes, including a commercial. The "Comedy Spots" started a year or more into the show's run. Sponsors on the shows included Ford, Pillsbury, Kelly Springfield Tires, and State Farm Insurance (in certain regions only.)

If memory serves correctly, Robert Klein replaced Dick Cavett as host. Both Klein and Cavett re-recorded Carney's scripts word for word, including local St. Louis jokes; a record of the Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band was announced as the "Knob Noster, Missouri High School Band." (Only years later did I learn who the real artist was!) After Carney's death, however, the producers apparently did not edit any new shows, but simply recycled Carney's programs with new "host" segments; the lack of new shows was probably a factor in the series' demise.

Carney edited his shows mainly from comedy albums of the 50's and 60's (Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers) and old-time radio sketches (Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Fibber McGee & Molly.) All great stuff then and now, but with a "family fare" vibe that probably didn't appeal to stations looking for something "hip" and "edgy." It aired here on a full-service MOR station that later went to right-wing talk. And while Carney also included comedy musical numbers like Allan Sherman, Spike Jones, Stan Freberg, and David Seville; he wasn't really aiming at Doctor Demento's audience either. Still, I think the series would have lasted longer had they only invested in new episodes; and I wish there was something like it now.
 
Regarding "When Radio Was": Art Fleming became ill and it was announced on the show that it was Stan Freberg, sitting in for Art Fleming. A short time later(maybe days), Art Fleming died. Stan Freberg was suddenly the host, as if he always had been and there was never any mention of Art Fleming!
 
A minor bad, but still mine; Jack Carney's sponsor was Betty Crocker, not Pillsbury. Guess you'd call that a cake mix-up... ::)
 
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