LEGENDARY STAND-UP COMEDIAN BECAME A LAS VEGAS MAINSTAY
Shecky Greene, the gifted comic and master improviser who became the consummate Las Vegas lounge headliner and was revered by his peers and live audiences as one of the greatest stand-up acts of his generation, has died. He was 97.
His widow, Marie Musso Green, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that her husband died early Sunday at their home. She said her husband of 41 years died of natural causes.
Those who saw Greene in his decades of comedy dominance on the Vegas Strip in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s said that with a mic in his hand he could roam a room and work a crowd like no other.
He couldn’t wait to abandon written jokes for the shared thrill of improv.
“I’ve never had an act,” Greene told the Las Vegas Sun in 2009. “I make it up as I go along.”
Greene made huge fans of his fellow entertainers including Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, and, most famously, Frank Sinatra, who handpicked him as his opening act for a stretch. Greene couldn’t resist the gig with the biggest star in America at the time, but the two big personalities butted heads frequently, and the relationship ended with the comic taking a beating from the singer’s cronies at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach.
It led to his most famous joke:
“Frank Sinatra once saved my life,” Greene would say. “A bunch of guys were beating on me and Frank said, ‘OK that’s enough.’ ”
Sinatra wasn’t actually there, Greene later said, but the beatdown was real.
With a body like a linebacker’s, a wit as quick as lightning and a voice that suggested he could’ve been a lounge singer instead of a lounge comic, Greene in the course of a night would plow through dozens of impressions, do extended riffs at audience members’ tables and turn musical standards into parody songs on the spot.
He made appearances in films including 1967’s “Tony Rome” with Sinatra, 1981’s “History of the World Part I” with Mel Brooks, and 1984’s “Splash” with Tom Hanks, showed-up on network sitcoms including “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mad About You,” and was a frequent guest on talk and variety shows.