Today's Video Link

Here's the late comic Guy Marks again, this time on The Dean Martin Show in 1967. You could do this routine in 1967 but you probably couldn't do it today. For that matter, I don't think you could do Dean's act, playing drunk all the time, today. If he were still alive, society would probably "grandfather" him in and laugh at him acting tipsy but I don't think most people find it as funny as they once did and I don't think it's a matter of so-called "political correctness." Some comedy just does not age well.

Guy Marks did this routine thousands of times on nightclub stages, in casino showrooms, at resorts, etc. Another thing which does not work as well these days is for a comic to develop a couple of hunks of material and then to do them over and over and over for the rest of his career. Audiences nowadays expect something relatively fresh. A "classic" bit now and then is fine. When I saw Robert Klein in October of 2016, I was glad to see him do some of his better routines from the past but also pleased that he had topical stuff which I had not heard.

This is not Guy Marks in the perfect setting. The Dean Martin Show was taped at a furious pace and then assembled like a video jigsaw in the editing room. Not only was Dean probably not on the premises when Marks was recorded doing this monologue but it's very possible that very little audience was in the room. Some or all the laughter you hear (and there's way too much of it) was obviously added in post-production. I suspect the pauses Mr. Marks takes for the laughs are the pauses he knew to take because he'd done this act 52,000 times in front of a full complement of actual human beings.

Most canned audience response in those days was added by someone who was deathly afraid of two seconds of silence so they often laid it over the comedian speaking. But Guy Marks was a pro so it works — though surely not as well as if they'd had an actual full audience there. He would have timed the act more towards them…