I don't have a lot to offer about comedian Marty Allen, who died a few hours ago in a Las Vegas rehab center. He was 95 and had been suffering from complications related to pneumonia.
But I have that photo of me with him and I thought I oughta run it again and say that I always found the guy funny — not witty, not incisive, not innovative…just funny. In fact, he was funny with some of the worst material anyone ever took onto a stage. I think that's a compliment.
This obit and others online will give you the details of his life but I'll give you the quick summary. After Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis became the hottest act in show business and for many years after, every outta-work handsome male singer tried pairing up with some outta-work goofy comedian or vice-versa.
There were thousands of those teams and there were some comedians who tried hooking up with fifty different singers, just as there were singers who tried working with fifty different comics. If you leave aside Rowan and Martin — who didn't fit the singer/comedian role model — the only Martin/Lewis successors who ever had any real success was the duo of Marty Allen and Steve Rossi. Why did they make a go of it where so many others had failed? Well, it sure wasn't because of Steve Rossi.
Marty was just one of those guys who loved performing so much that no matter what he did on stage, you couldn't dislike him. During the few minutes I spent with him before and after the above photo, he was happier to meet the people who wanted his autograph and/or photo than they were to meet him…and most of them were pretty happy. And he made every one of us laugh.
Allen and Rossi both wound up where old acts go to die — in Las Vegas, occasionally reteaming to create an "event" that nobody thought was much of one. I wrote about seeing them individually and together over in this post after Mr. Rossi died. Pretty much everything I have to say about either man is in that post…
…except for this: Right now, some cartoonist somewhere is drawing Rossi in Heaven wearing an angel suit complete with halo, standing there with a look of delighted surprise as Marty Allen (also in an angel suit) enters through them Pearly Gates saying, "Hello Dere!" If they really are meeting up there, it's about their seventeenth — and last — reunion.