Dave Garroway was a popular TV host in the early days of television. He was best known as the host of The Today Show on NBC from 1952 to 1961 but before that, he hosted a live variety half-hour called Garroway at Large. It came out of Chicago from June of '49 until June of '51. As you'll see if you watch the entirety of this episode from November 19, 1950, the show had a nice troupe of singers and comedians as well as the then-typical array of on-air bloopers and mistakes.
The member of his cast that you're most likely to have heard of was Cliff Norton, who had a pretty good career as a supporting player and comic actor. I wrote about him here. He had the distinction of being edited out of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World shortly before its release so his name is in the opening credits but he's not in the film.
The special guest on this episode of Garroway at Large was Al Capp, a very awful man who wrote and drew the very wonderful comic strip, Li'l Abner. Before we had the recent debates about whether you could still admire Bill Cosby's work despite his personal transgressions, I heard professional cartoonists having the same argument about the work of Mr. Capp. He appears in the last third of the show mainly to segue into a sketch with the Garroway supporting players dressed up very badly as the characters from Lil Abner. It's…odd.
I've set the video embed below to begin playing at the point in the program when Capp is introduced but if you want to watch the whole show, you can click here. You can also just watch in the window below by moving the little slider back to the beginning…