About 24 hours ago here, I linked you all to a video of Steve Allen laughing his fool head off in skit. Here's some more information on it.
Mike Hylton writes to inform me that it's from The Steve Allen Show for March 16, 1958. This would be his Sunday night show, the one opposite Ed Sullivan. He was playing a recurring character, sportscaster Bill Allen.
And Barry Mitchell sends me the following, excerpted from the book, Inventing Late Night by Ben Alba…
Before the show, I had put some greasy tonic on my hair to make it stay down; the reverse occurred. Having no time to fix it, I grabbed the fedora I always wore for the routine and hurried onstage. When I glanced at myself in the monitor as I started the bit, the way I looked — like Mark Twain's Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer — struck me so funny that I began to laugh. The fact that it was striking me funny struck me funny. It was the old laughing-in-church syndrome. Another reason I kept laughing was that the always funny rotund comedian Jack E. Leonard, the next guest scheduled to appear, was yelling lines at me from the wings. I was eating into his time by laughing for so long. "Come on, goddamit," he bellowed. "I've got only five minutes and you've blown three of them already!"
I might have mentioned that one of the things that probably contributed to Mr. Allen's hysteria was that it was live television. When he started laughing at how much he was laughing, he knew all of America was seeing a grown man doing it at that very moment. There's an immediacy to being on live that adds to the risk…and therefore the potential silliness when things go wrong. Anyway, it's a funny clip.