This is from The Ed Sullivan Show for Sunday evening, November 13, 1960. It's Dick Van Dyke performing the number "Put on a Happy Face" from the then-running Broadway show, Bye Bye Birdie. If you're only familiar with the movie version of the show, you may be puzzled by the context. The book was heavily rewritten when it was made into a movie.
On stage, Albert Petersen (Van Dyke's character) was an aspiring English teacher who was writing songs for Elvis Presley Conrad Birdie and who hoped to get another song recorded by Birdie and on the Hit Parade charts before the recently-drafted singer went into the army. The happy ending [SPOILER ALERT!] is that Albert gives up songwriting, marries his long-waiting fiancée Rosie and they move to a small town so he can become an English teacher.
The movie inserted most (not all) of the songs into a new storyline. Albert was a biochemist who was pursuing songwriting to make money and to keep a promise to his mother. There was a weird subplot involving Russians along with ballet dancers and tortoises on speed and the happy ending this time is [SPOILER ALERT!] that Albert gives up songwriting, marries his long-waiting fiancée Rosie and they move to a small town so he can pursue his biochemistry.
That's why in this clip, he sings the song to a morose Conrad Birdie fan instead of to the woman he's going to marry. By the way, the script for the film was written by Irving Brecher, who also wrote At the Circus and Go West for the Marx Brothers.
Some interesting dates: Bye Bye Birdie opened on Broadway on April 14, 1960. Business was probably sagging a bit by November, which is why the cast was doing numbers from it on Ed's show.
Dick took a week off in January of 1961 to fly to Hollywood and film the pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show. His replacement for that week was Charles Nelson Reilly, who ordinarily played the role of Mr. Henkle in the show except on most Thursday nights when he filled in for Paul Lynde, who was playing Harry McAfee. Lynde had a contract to appear every week (live) on Perry Como's TV show. Whenever Reilly was playing Albert or Harry, a cast member named Lee Howard played Mr. Henkle and also covered Harry when necessary.
I once heard Dick Van Dyke tell a very funny story about returning from California. He got back too late to do that evening's performance but not too late to get a seat in the audience and watch it with Reilly playing Albert. And then Dick did a very funny impression of C.N.R. trying to ad-lib his way through songs for which he did not know the lyrics. This one went: "Ya-da-da-da-da-da-da, put on a happy face…Ya-da-da-da-da-da-da, put on a happy face…" Here's how it was supposed to go…
The show finally closed on October 17, 1961, two weeks after The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted on CBS. The Broadway run was 607 performances but Van Dyke and Chita Rivera (the original Rosie) left after April 8, 1961 and were replaced by Gene Rayburn (yes, the game show host) and Gretchen Wyler.
But "Put on a Happy Face" long outlived the show. It was recorded by dozens of top recording artists and it even became the theme song for the TV series, The Hollywood Palace where it sounded like this…