If you're a fan of Red Skelton — and I kinda/sorta was and am — you might want to know that the Red Skelton Museum has uploaded an awful lot of his work to YouTube including many, many episodes of his weekly hour show that ran on CBS from 1953 to 1970. It then switched to a rather sad half-hour on NBC for its final year. But I may be more fascinated by the making of the show and Red's (shall we say?) "eccentricities" than I am by the actual content of the programs.
As I wrote here, I used to run into Mr. Skelton a lot in Westwood Village when I was attending U.C.L.A. about the time his show ended. I would have liked to have talked to him about his work — and he did give me short, get-it-over-with answers to a few questions I managed to slip in. But mostly, he just wanted to tell me (or anyone around) dirty jokes. At least, they were dirty jokes in 1971. Today, they might get a soft "R" rating. At least around me and in a public place, he was a man who went through life making others and himself laugh constantly. I have never seen another human who was that insufferably happy while telling jokes.
You can read that old article of mine if you're of a mind to and if you do, you'll find that I went to see him do his show at CBS twice. Once was a taping with Marcel Marceau as his only guest for an all-pantomime hour. The other was a rehearsal where Red ignored the lines on the cue cards and just told more of his dirty jokes to amuse himself and an audience of his crew and various CBS employees from around the lot. He seemed to live for that rehearsal and the subsequent taping of the actual script, and I'll bet it was jarring for him when he didn't have all that in his life. Maybe he began compensating by telling dirty jokes to college kids in Westwood Village.
I picked out one hour to embed below here. They occasionally messed with the format but most episodes started and ended with a troupe of singers and dancers welcoming you and in the opening, they billboarded the guests. A pretty wide array of folks in show business were guests…and in the sketches, you might also see a lot of great comic actors like Lennie Weinrib, Burt Mustin, Chanin Hale, Joi Lansing, Milton Frome, Robert Easton or Joyce Jameson. Among the supporting players in this one are Walker Edmiston and Dave Sharpe. Dave was a pretty famous stuntman and if you see someone take a big fall or crash through a wall in a Red Skelton Hour of the sixties, it's probably Dave.
The main guest in this one (which aired 2/13/68) is Burl Ives, who plays in the main sketch opposite Red's Deadeye character. Red had a little repertoire of characters — Clem Kadiddlehopper, Freddie the Freeloader, The Mean Widdle Kid, etc. — and he'd play one of them a week. Ives also does a song as does the musical guest, Lulu. There's also Red's monologue near the top, a pantomime bit ("The Silent Spot") at the end and around the 30-minute mark, Red does some comic blackouts and there's one that calls for him to be hit in the face with a tomato. Whoever was throwing the tomato had lousy aim so they had to do it again and again…and the funny thing about the sketch is about how much Red seems to enjoy that they had to do it again and again.
I doubt you'll make it through the entire show but if you do, there are plenty more on YouTube where this one came from…