Foster Brooks: The Art of Drunk

Today is the birthday of perhaps the greatest comic drunk of all time, Foster Brooks (1912-2001).

With that tremendous baritone, it’s no shock to learn that Brooks got his start in radio. A native Kentuckian, he was an announcer, a singer, a reporter, and an all around personality at local stations in Louisville, Nashville, and Buffalo in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. He was nearly 50 years old when he decided to try his luck in L.A. as a comedian and character actor.

Brooks started to gain fame on television with his comic drunk act with performances on Steve Allen and Perry Como’s shows. Dean Martin (also famous for his comic drunk) was to be his biggest booster, and thanks to appearances on Martin’s celebrity roasts and variety shows, Brooks was to enjoy his greatest success with his drunk act in the 1970s. One of the things that sets his act apart from similar turns is its specificity. The character weaves and bobs and slurs and belches and hiccups and for all purposes looks to be what we would call “severely impaired”, but it’s not the stock bit, with conventional mannerisms, as Red Skelton might do. It’s sharply observed from nature and a great piece of comic acting. Also distinctive was that the character appeared to be well-heeled. He wasn’t some skid row bum. He was well-dressed and groomed with a lot of dash and style. You got the sense that he was a doctor or an executive or something, just in town for a convention.

We so associate Foster Brooks with variety shows that we are apt to forget that he had guest starring roles on many tv series throughout the years, in roles both drunk and sober. He appeared on The Munsters, I Dream of Jeannie,Bewitched,The Monkees, The Flying Nun, Adam-12, Gunsmoke, Bonanza,The Beverly Hillbillies,Here’s Lucy, Starsky and Hutch, Mork and Mindy, Quincy, Murder She Wrote, et al. Only a couple of times did he appear on the big screen, in movies like Jerry Lewis’sCracking Up (1983) and Cannonball Run II (1984). He retired in the 1990s.

To find out more about the variety artspast and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. And please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.