GONG BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Wacky Barris, 87, a TV pioneer
He was a familiar face on TV in the 1970s and maybe he could kill you, too.
At least two generations of devotees to the weird and bizarre are going to miss Chuck Barris, the loony, laid-back host of the original “Gong Show,” which acted as the inspiration for ridiculous sketches that became the stuff of legend on playgrounds and summer camps around the world.
Barris, 87, who died Tuesday at his home in Palisades, Rockland County, laid the groundwork for some of television’s biggest hits, like “American Idol,” but was never taken seriously during his heyday.
Barris’ “The Gong Show” aired on NBC and in syndication in daytime and primetime from 1976-80. On the show, amateurs revealed generally horrible talents for a panel of three celebrity judges who usually would end the act midway by slamming a huge, bedazzled gong.
“Everybody could relate to somebody wearing a lampshade and dancing around,” Barris once said. “Bad acts are inherent in everyone.”
The show collected oddballs, much as Howard Stern’s Wack Pack would do, years later. Among Barris’ collection of cuckoo birds was the Unknown Comic (Murray Langston), a guy wearing a brown paper bag over his head telling bad jokes; future Hollywood composer Danny Elfman; Paul (Pee Wee Herman) Reubens, and even Barris’ own mother. Sometimes, for no reason, a musical cue would summon Gene Gene the Dancing Machine (stagehand Gene Patton), who would boogie down to the tune of “Jumpin’ at the Woodside.”
Due to the sheer insanity of the show, many people considered Barris to be the “Jerry Springer of his day,” as Time’s Joel Stein once put it.
But there may have been an even stranger side to Barris, beyond “The Gong Show.”
In his book, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Biography,” Barris claimed to have been an assassin for the CIA. His implausible story became a 2002 movie directed by first-timer George Clooney and written by Charlie Kaufman.
The CIA flat-out denied his claim.
“He also fabricated his life because it might have been the best way of getting at the truth. The truth was that back when he was the Jerry Springer of his day, he couldn’t stomach being attacked for doing something he considered harmless,” Stein wrote in Time in 2003.
Once asked if he really had worked as an assassin, Barris said: “I don’t answer that question, ever. I can just tell you that the No. 2 guy in the CIA said that I must have been standing too close to the gong when I said things like that.”
Long before “The Gong Show,” Barris, who was married three times, was already a game show mogul.
In the mid-1960s, the Philadelphia native cooked up “The Dating Game,” a classic that paired eligible bachelors and bachelorettes. Steve Martin, Phil Hartman, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Farrah Fawcett were all contestants before they were famous. He followed that act with “The Newlywed Game” and other shows.
Barris was also was a musical maestro who wrote the music for all his shows and a top 10 hit: “Palisades Park,” the 1962 Freddy Cannon homage to the beloved amusement park that once spanned parts of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee in New Jersey.