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Dave Barry was a trailblazing stand-up comedian who began his comedy, acting and voice-over career at age 17. He played his first professional gig at New York's old Palace Theater in April of 1935. The young comedic talent (born Dave Siegel, and then changing legally to Dave Barry in the early 1940s) was the son of a furniture store owner in Brooklyn, calling himself an "amateur cartoonist and sign painter" when he made his debut in April 1935 on the radio talent show "Major Edward Bowes and the Original Amateur Hour." Bowes radio show encouraged listeners to vote for favorite acts either by calling the station in New York or sending in a postcard. The act that gained the most votes won the opportunity to go on a road tour with one of Major Bowes' touring "units," making $50 weekly plus meals. Barry was a hit with listeners, winning several contests and Major Bowes signed him to a contract for live shows. Bowes became Barry's first mentor, schooling him on showbiz and suggesting that Barry hang out by the New York docks to soak up the funny sounds and things he heard.
Barry next cut his comedic chops on the vaudeville stage, touring for almost 7 years with Major Bowes units, handling emcee chores and featured in a nightly comedy slot among a troupe of variety acts doing 35 shows a week across the 48 states, including Mexico and Canada. Constant work followed during which he played theaters nationwide with acts such as Paul Winchell, Jack Carter, George Liberace, Beverly Sills, Glen Gray, Jimmy Dorsey, and Charlie Barnet. Dave Barry was given a headline spot in Bowes unit #1 in June 1935, opening in Houston Texas and learning the showbiz ropes, surrounded by many future luminaries. It was on the road that he met beautiful singer Ginny Wayne (Ginger Seiden), who was also working the same unit. The two married while touring in 1940, garnering a standing rousing ovation from their fellow performers during a ceremony in between shows. They had their first son (Alan) while on the road in August 1941, just a few months before the attack at Pearl Harbor and the beginning of WW2.
Barry built up a reputation as a dependable stand-up comic and impersonator, entertaining troops during his military service in World War II while serving at Camp Roberts CA where he became an army sergeant in June 1944. He performed on radio often (Command Performance USO, Major Bowes, The Connee Boswell show) and while attached to the army's Special Services Unit he spent his short stint in the war doing what he did best - entertaining servicemen and women at home & overseas with luminaries such as Red Skelton, Eddie Cantor, Mary Pickford, Jimmy Durante, The Mills Brothers, Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope. In 1945 he came to Hollywood landing a spot at Billy Gray's Band Box, a popular comedy club and dinner bistro on Fairfax Blvd. His droll humor and smart impersonations scored immediately with the Band Box crowd, and Barry was held over for months. It was here that his work attracted the attention of local radio and film execs, bringing the lad plenty of radio appearances and finally a permanent berth on the Jimmy Durante radio show.
Jimmy Durante became Barry's mentor, bringing him under his wings for his 1947-1948 radio broadcasts, with Barry regularly appearing in cameos doing gags and sounds, and as "Mr. Ripple," the Commissioner of Waterways. On some episodes, his six-year-old son Alan Barry would chime in as his youthful cherub "Trickle." Guest stars on Durante's popular show included Bob Hope, Van Johnson, Rose Marie, and Frank Morgan - the well known Wizard in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Barry also did a short lived "Hollywood Showcase" radio show with Mickey Rooney in July of 1947. All the while, Barry was also working his stage show jokes & gags - honing and testing them for bigger laughs. In December of 1948 Barry made his very first TV appearance on "Toast Of The Town" with Ed Sullivan, just as the new TV medium was about to begin its golden age.
Barry excelled at mimicry and mastered an endless stream of accents/dialects and offbeat sounds (in fact at the start of his stage work he advertised himself as an impressionist). He based his routines on the everyday happenings of "Mr. Average" -things that happen at home, problems with money, and the trials and tribulations with the wife and kids. When Barry moved to Hollywood, he sought out more cartoon voice work and signed contracts with Columbia, Warner Brothers, Disney, Republic Pictures, and Screen Gems. He was initially sought-after as an animation voice artist in the 1930's at the age of just 18, hired by the legendary Warner Bothers (Merrie Melodies) mogul Leon Schlesinger with the Hollywood themed The CooCoo Nut Grove (1936) where he voiced actor Ned Sparks, Porky's Road Race (1937) and then a year later with Disney with the star studded Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938). Barry partnered with the most creative minds of early animation, and cartoon voice work (especially celebrities) became a lucrative side gig supplementing his comedy résumé. During a 1942 Miami stand-up performance, he was doing his act at a hotel when a man from the audience (who worked for the Miami based Famous Studios) approached him at the bar after the show. He said they needed a deeply baritone voice for Popeye's arch nemesis Bluto in a series of Popeye features. Barry got the Miami cartoon job starting with Kickin' the Conga Round (1942). Ultimately Barry provided the swaggering voice for Bluto between 1942 and 1944, and worked on six Popeye features.
Barry's cartoon work grew along with his reputation, voicing more than 50 credited (and mostly uncredited) features . His most sought-after skills were foreign dialects and uncannily impersonating celebrities of the period including Groucho Marx, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, James Cagney and Clark Gable, which he did with gusto in countless Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. He also voiced Elmer Fuddstone in Pre-Hysterical Hare (1958), standing in for Arthur Q. Bryan when he was taken ill and was not able to voice him. For Looney Tunes, Dave Barry became best known for numerous appearances of Humphrey Bogart and other classic celebrities in cartoons such as "Bacall to Arms (1946)," "8 Ball Bunny (1950)" and the star studded "Hollywood Steps Out (1941)." He also voiced many nameless background characters.
Barry also performed a bevy of distinctive radio voices for the famous "Marilyn Monroe Is Getting Married" radio episode on the Edgar Bergen show, aired October 26th 1952 with Marilyn Monroe and Bergen's ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy.
Barry continued to find his sweet spot with clean but punchy jokes about the everyday guy or gal; hilarious stories about wives who can't drive straight, long-haired kids who won't get a haircut and sexy bald men like himself who get stopped by the cops after a few too many drinks. Barry's comedic stage work in Las Vegas started around 1945, just as the desert town became a magnet for top entertainment. Starting at the newly opened El Rancho and Desert Inn Hotels, Barry became a fixture in Vegas for over 5 decades. In these early Vegas days before the strip (with junket buses bringing in gamblers from nearby Los Angeles), Barry performed in luxurious smoke-filled showrooms with singers Marilyn Maxwell, Sunny Skylar, Betty Grable, Ethel Smith, Frank Sinatra, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, Nat 'King' Cole, Liberace and Jane Powell. During his decades in Vegas, he played at nearly every resort including The Dunes, The Stardust, The Royal Nevada, The Riviera, and what was originally known as The Last Frontier. In the 1950s he performed his impressions and fast-paced gags at the El Cortez and newly opened Flamingo opened by the infamous mobster Bugsy Siegel (no relation to Barry). While at The Flamingo, Barry performed comedy opening for soprano Tony Martin and Rose Marie.
In addition to Vegas, Barry also appeared in comedy clubs (nightery dates) across the USA: Chicago (Chez Paree), San Francisco (Bimbo 365), New York (The Paramount), Austin TX (The Paramount), Florida (The Americana) Palm Springs (The Chi Chi and Palm House), and Los Angeles (Billy Grays Band Box. The Moulin Rouge, Cocoanut Grove, Ciros).
Constant back-to-back nightclub work across the USA paired Barry with glittering names of the period including Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, Della Reese, Frank Sinatra, Liberace, The Four Step Brothers, Gypsy Rose Lee and Tommy Dorsey. In June 1949 Barry was flown in for a one month engagement at the London Palladium paired with The Marx Brothers (Harpo Marx and Chico Marx).
Voice-over work, inevitably, came second to his growing vocation as a busy Vegas comedian and entertainer. In the early 1950's Barry pivoted from stage and radio to the new medium of television and garnered appearances during TV's golden age including The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950), The Jackie Gleason Show (1952), The Perry Como Show (1948) and appearing eight separate times on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948) - including the third highly anticipated USA appearance by The Beatles in February 1964 in a prerecorded segment. He appeared in 1952 with Eddie Cantor in a Colgate Comedy Hour Maxie The Taxi sketch with the immensely popular Eddie Cantor at the time. From there he appeared as himself doing his stand up-act or skits in numerous shows including "Four Star Revue (1950)," and "The Jackie Gleason Show (1952) ."
As Dave Barry's confidence grew, he was offered film roles. His first cameo role was as tough guy Eddie Steele in the 1947 picture Joe Palooka in the Knockout (1947), playing a carnival barker who gets quickly knocked off. The next year in 1948 Barry was cast as the smartly dressed (but odd) interior decorator "Mr. Ripple" in Marilyn Monroe's third feature film, Ladies of the Chorus (1948) using his distinctive gurgle voice that he was using on Durante's radio show. Other movies followed, including Playgirl (1954) with Shelley Winters where Barry played the sneezing Photographer Jonathan Hughes. Barry morphed into his hilarious role of the pianist Señor Palumbo in the popular Bowery Boys High Society (1955). For this more physically comedic role, Barry played a cross-eyed candelabra impression of Liberace, which he had been using to great effect as a stage gag.
Barry also began to get some serious roles for a variety of TV series - playing a gangster kingpin on death row in 87th Precinct (1961), a bookie in a barbershop Going My Way (1962), or as a jewel thief in M Squad (1957).
But Dave Barry's most iconic movie role landed by happenstance in 1959 with Billy Wilder's hilarious romp Some Like It Hot (1959) where he played the bespectacled "Bienstock," the manager of the all-girl band with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. It was this role that marked the pinnacle of all his work in a movie widely called one of the funniest comedies of all time,
"What is this part?" Barry asked his agent, trying out initially for a minor part in the film. "It will be four days in a great movie," the agent promised. However, at the audition, director Billy Wilder watched Barry's performance and took a moment, then looked at writer I.A.L. Diamond and announced, "Its Bienstock!" Diamond agreed, "Bienstock!"
Barry called his agent and quizzically asked, "What the hell is a Bienstock?" "Dave that's four paid weeks in the movie!" his agent explained.
In 1966 Barry also made a brief cameo appearance with the legendary Elvis Presley as his manager Harry in the movie Spinout (1966). He was also heard in Roger Corman film "The Raven (1963)," making sounds for the title character and dubbing voices for Peter Lorre and Vincent Price.
On November 30, 1965 Dave Barry opened for legendary singer Judy Garland at the Sahara Congo Room for a 2 week engagement of sold out shows, backed by the 30-piece Louis Basil orchestra. In 1966 Barry was signed as the headliner for the Desert Inn's lavish musical revue "Hello America." Highlights of the Donn Arden produced Vegas show included the sinking of the Titanic, a recreation of the San Francisco earthquake, and a mid-air butterfly ballet. One of the newly hired showgirls was a young unknown actress by the name of Goldie Hawn, who was apparently fired by producer Arden after only three weeks. The long running show was popular, and when "Hello America" closed at the Crystal Room in March of 1967, it had reportedly entertained over a million people.
"I'm the kind of comic who fits here," Barry told The New York Times about his 5 decades in Vegas. "My jokes are short and punchy. I give the audience no time to think. They've been saturated with free drinks in the casino - to give them cerebral comedy would be deadly. I think the people from Keokuk Iowa want to hear something they don't hear there - something a little risqué, a little salty, but not too much."
For nearly a decade in Vegas, Dave Barry provided opening act laughs for legendary "Midnight Idol" Wayne Newton working in the early 1970's at all of the Howard Hughes owned hotels including The Sands, The Desert Inn and The Frontier. He was also a founding member of the Friars Club in Beverly Hills, and for decades roasted longtime showbiz pals like Phyllis Diller, George Jessel, Phil Silvers, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Milton Berle.
Barry continued to do stand-up well into the late 1990's, plying his craft in Las Vegas at the Comedy Store, on cruise ships and as a member of the cast of The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies, a throwback to the Ziegfeld Follies replete with vaudeville acts, lavish production numbers and a bevy of statuesque over 60 showgirls in feathers and rhinestones.
Dave Barry's trademark one liners lasted until the final gags. At one of his last shows lamenting a gig on a cruise ship, Barry recalled "Some of those people were so old I didn't know whether to say hello or goodbye! The late show was at 2 o'clock. Anybody with their own teeth was overdressed."
