Drew Carey: 40 Years in Show Biz

1985 was the year Marine Corps vet Drew Carey (b. 1958) started writing jokes for a local Cleveland radio station. His stand-up grew out of that. By 1988 he had made it onto Star Search, and by 1991, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he killed and got called over to the couch. Followed by Letterman, then a 1993 Showtime comedy special, then a failed sit-com called The Good Life (1994), then the smash-hit sit-com The Drew Carey Show (1995-2004), then Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1998-2006), and then — a real shock to the system, I thought — his long-term stint taking over for Bob Barker as host of The Price is Right, starting in 2007. (Hey and Johnny Olson’s birthday was yesterday!)

That last one threw me for a loop, and yet somehow it was also perfect. The guy had always been a throwback. The crew cut and horn-rims reminded me of Bill Cullen or somebody, and the unhealthy girth (which he shed a good long time ago) spoke of a midwestern diet featuring lots of red meat, potatoes, and desserts that was also straight out of the ’50s. While he had a weirdness and an edge, there was also this next-door-neighbor thing going on both in the act and the sit-com that was comforting somehow, and a bit of a vacation to an America that wasn’t constantly strapped to a hot radio with piano wire. Most of America embraced him and he rapidly become something like an institution. He played celebrity poker! He wrestled with the WWE! (May 23 is also World Wrestling Day). Like Penn Jillette, he was one of Hollywood’s few “out” libertarians, which you don’t have to love, but which I responded to at the time. In 2016 he was for Gary Johnson, in 2020 he donated to Biden, which tells me he’s okay. Yeah, I have a litmus test. I know how it’s all “woke” not to support leaders who put people in concentration camps and hand the government over to billionaires and everything, but, yeah, if you do, you won’t get the time of day from Travalanche.

Besides the nice round anniversary of his time in show biz, I was prompted to add Drew here on account of a true crime doc I watched a few months ago that concerns him. In early 2020 his former fiance Amie Harwick was brutally murdered by another of her ex-boyfriends, a failed comedian named Gareth Pursehouse, who had been stalking and harassing her for months. Pursehouse had lain in wait for her on Valentine’s Day, strangled her, and threw her off the balcony of her L.A. apartment. Amie was a love, marriage, family and sex therapist, an author, and podcaster, as well as a former model and actress, and if I remember correctly, one of our own, a burlesque dancer. She had been at a burlesque show on the night of her murder.

Obviously, in early 2020, people weren’t thinking about much beyond the looming Covid-19 pandemic. The press sure wasn’t. I first learned about the case from the Hulu series Death by Fame in 2023. It was the subject of the show’s very first episode. There is added irony in the fact that Harwick devoted her life to helping abused women. There is a site dedicated to creating a memorial to her. Check it out here.