I've long had an interest in a stand-up comedian named Dave Barry, not to be confused with the current funny columnist by that name. My Dave Barry had a long career doing occasional acting jobs — he was in Some Like It Hot, among other films — and a lot of cartoon voiceovers. He was they guy who did most of the celebrity impressions — especially Humphrey Bogart — in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the late forties and fifties. Here's a link to an obit I wrote about him in 2001.
As I said in that piece, his main line of work was doing stand-up and he worked constantly for about thirty years, mainly in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Miami Beach. Most of his visits to New York also involved an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This is one he made in 1964 and I'm afraid it's not one of his best. The audience is pretty cold and he doesn't bother to wait for laughs and massage them and work the material. He just rushes on to the next line. And the next line and the next line.
Also, it sure looks to me like he's working off cue cards. You can tell by his eye movements and even see what may be the cards reflected in his glasses. I don't recall noticing that often on the Sullivan program. Since this is undoubtedly material he'd been doing in clubs then, probably to greater effect, my guess is that Ed picked which jokes he wanted out of Barry's act and told him to do every one of them in six minutes…so he needed the cards to remember which jokes and to get them all in within the allotted time. Barry was a much better comic than this.
I wish I had a video to show you of when I saw him in Las Vegas in one of his last engagements there around 1992. He got more laughs in his first minutes than he did in the entirety of the clip below. In fact, if you watch the piece below — which I offer as a good example of what most stand-ups were doing in 1964 — watch a little of him in the clip I linked here from a 1991 appearance. I thought he was really good on stage — usually — and really good at adapting his act to changing times. Here he is doing what a stand-up was supposed to do in '64 before guys like Carlin and Klein changed the game forever…
