RIP Dick Capri

Thanks, Eve Golden, for the intel that Catskills comedian Dick Capri (1931-2024) has packed his bags for the Great Mountain Hotel in the Sky.

As they are wont to do, obituarians are unfailingly using the adjective “legendary” to describe Capri, but if it applies, it refers only to a small fraternity of show biz insiders from previous generations. Capri’s bread and butter was live performance in the Borscht Belt, and resort venues in places Las Vegas and Florida. He was on The Ed Sullivan Show twice, and did Merv’s and Mike Douglas’s talk shows a couple of dozen times in the ’60s and ’70s. Later he did Jerry Lewis telethons, and Sally Jessy Raphael, and that’s roughly the extent of his high profile television appearances. A tour with Engelbert Humperdinck in 1973 is being parroted by most sources as Capri’s “big moment”, but…come, come, that’s not what moves the needle in American popular culture, nor is the fact that he also opened for similar live acts like Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, and Tom Jones.

No, I would have to judge that Capri’s moment of arrival occurred in 1991, when at the age of 60, he was one of the cast of Catskills on Broadway. That show played until early 1993. In 1998, he performed in the televised N.Y. Friars Club Roast of Drew Carey, and that would have to be his high water mark in terms of national visibility. Capri was also in a couple of films, including They Still Call Me Bruce (1987) with Johnny Yune, Bittersweet Place (2005, in which he appeared alongside Catskills cohort Freddie Roman), and Jackie Mason’s One Angry Man (2010).

Capri was from Reading, Pennsylvania, where he first clowned around for patrons at his family’s grocery store. One of his signature talents was mime, which he cleverly worked into his stand-up act, an undeniably unique feature that Chaplin would have appreciated. Fairly unusual among Catskills comedians, Capri (like Pete Barbutti and Pat Cooper) was Italian, not Jewish.

Knock them dead in show biz, heaven, Dick! Or maybe…knock them alive?