George Gobel

George Leslie Goebel was born on May 20, 1919, in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of Hermann and Lillian (MacDonald) Goebel. His father, Hermann, had emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1890s and worked as a butcher and grocer. His mother was an Illinois native whose own father, a tugboat captain, had immigrated from Scotland. Gobel graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Chicago in 1937, though even before that he had begun performing as a country music singer on the National Barn Dance on Chicago's WLS radio and later on KMOX in St. Louis. In 1942, he married his high-school sweetheart, Alice Rose Humecki. During World War II, Gobel enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and served as a flight instructor in Curtiss AT-9 aircraft at Altus, Oklahoma, and later in Martin B-26 Marauder bombers at Frederick, Oklahoma. He later joked during a 1969 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson that no Japanese aircraft had gotten past Tulsa during the war. After his discharge, he shifted his focus from singing toward comedy.

Gobel became one of the most prominent television comedians of the 1950s as the star of The George Gobel Show, a weekly comedy variety series that debuted on NBC on October 2, 1954. The program ran on NBC through 1959 and then on CBS from 1959 to 1960, alternating in its final season with The Jack Benny Program. The show featured vocalist Peggy King and actress Jeff Donnell as semiregular performers, and its guest roster included James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Fred MacMurray, Kirk Douglas, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Shirley MacLaine, and Evelyn Rudie, among others. The writers included Hal Kanter, Jack Brooks, and Norman Lear. In 1955, Gobel received an Emmy Award for most outstanding new personality. On October 24, 1954, he also appeared in a 12-minute segment on Light's Diamond Jubilee, a two-hour special broadcast simultaneously across all four U.S. television networks.

The centerpiece of Gobel's television comedy was a monologue built around his hesitant, low-key delivery and a tendency toward tangled digressions. His supposed domestic life with his wife Alice, nicknamed Spooky Old Alice and portrayed on screen by Jeff Donnell, supplied much of the material. The show popularized several catchphrases, including "Well, I'll be a dirty bird," "You can't hardly get them like that no more," and "Well then there now." He labeled himself Lonesome George, a nickname that remained with him throughout his career. The show also featured a recurring segment in which Gobel would begin playing guitar and singing before veering into a story, leaving the song perpetually unfinished. Tommy Smothers later cited Gobel as his original motivation for entering comedy, noting that Gobel relied on timing rather than jokes. Gobel played a scaled-down version of the Gibson L-5 archtop guitar built to accommodate his smaller stature, and Gibson produced several dozen of this L-5CT, or George Gobel, model in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1959, Gibson also issued a specially designed electric guitar bearing his name, chosen in part because of his visibility as a nationally broadcast television personality. He additionally played harmonica.

Gobel and his business manager David P. O'Malley formed a production company called Gomalco, a combination of their surnames. Beyond Gobel's own series, the company produced the first four seasons of Leave It to Beaver from 1957 to 1961, as well as the films The Birds and the Bees in 1956 and I Married a Woman in 1958, both of which starred Gobel. From 1958 to 1961, he also performed in Las Vegas at the El Rancho Vegas and in Reno at the Mapes Hotel, and he continued to work club dates at various Playboy Club properties.

Gobel's Broadway career spanned from 1961 to 1966 and included two productions. The first was Let It Ride!, a musical that opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on October 12, 1961, and closed on December 9 of that year after 68 performances and one preview. The show was based on the 1935 Broadway play Three Men on a Horse, co-authored by George Abbott and John Cecil Holm, which had originally run for 835 performances. Let It Ride! featured a book by Abram S. Ginnes and a score by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, and was directed by Stanley Prager. Gobel starred alongside Sam Levene, playing the roles of Erwin and Patsy respectively. His second Broadway credit was The Odd Couple.

Among Gobel's most frequently recalled television moments was a 1969 segment on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in which he entered after Bob Hope and Dean Martin and remarked to Carson, "Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?" The line drew laughter from Carson, Hope, Martin, and the studio audience. He was also a familiar panelist on the NBC game show Hollywood Squares and made guest appearances on programs including The Red Skelton Show, The Dean Martin Show, What's My Line, The Carol Burnett Show, Wagon Train, Death Valley Days, and Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, among others. In December 1960, an episode of My Three Sons titled Lonesome George featured Gobel playing himself. In 1966, he appeared on F Troop as amateur inventor Henry Terkel in the episode Go for Broke. George Gobel died on February 24, 1991.