The Washington Post obit is here ...

No ... it's not Sal Governale.

The still is from "Which Way to the Front?" (1970), in which Jerry plays a 4-F millionaire who forms his own "Dirty Half-Dozen" of other rejects to kidnap a Nazi mastermind during World War II. A mission they carry out wearing blue and orange jumpsuits, by the way.

One of the oddest casts ever assembled make for odder goings-on in another Lewis-directed train-wreck and ill-timed, ill-conceived concept. I mean, who else would make a comedy about the Nazis at the height of the Vietnam War?

And I just know Jerry himself wrote the tagline ... "You VILL see 'Which Way To The Front?' and you VILL laugh!"

Und ZAT is EIN order!

The guilty SAG card holders in this "Hogan's Heroes Meets The Inglorious Bastards Crossed With At War With the Army With A Tip of the Helmet to To Be Or Not to Be" mash-up include second-billed Borscht Belt comic Jan Murray (as Sid Hackle), John Wood (as Finkel), Steve Franken (as Peter Bland), Dack "Guns of Will Sonnett" Rambo (as Terry Love), Sidney Miller (as Hitler), Robert Middleton (as Colonico), and Los Angeles Dodger Willie Davis (as Lincoln — because, I guess, another athlete, football player Jim Brown, had played another Black GI named for a President in an action flick, namely Jefferson in "The Dirty Dozen").

Tagging along for mortgage money and child support while Jerry yells and screams and pronounces his Ws as Vs (his idea of acting like a German) are Kaye Ballard, Harold J. Stone, Paul Winchell, Joe "Stinky" Besser, Gary Crosby (as an SS guard no less), and George "Sulu" Takei.

The last straw comes in the final scene when the team gets ready to go up against the Japanese. They promptly disguise themselves with fake buck teeth and practice eye-squinting, bowing, and fast-talking in a "funny" accent.

"WWTTF?" was Lewis' last film until "Hardly Working" in 1981, and either film — in retrospect — could be viewed as being to his career what "The Love Guru" was to Mike Myers'.

It makes me pine (well, almost) for "Don't Raise The Bridge, Lower The River."

While poring over some press photos by legendary Maurice Seymour (see preceding post), I found this and thought ...

Herve Savalas?

Nope. Name's Dobie Broadway.

The Dobemeister looks like Tattoo after too much HGH, which collaterally made his plush velour bowtie grow as well.

Or like David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz — if he'd had gone into comedy instead of ritual murder.

Is that a lei or a salad stuffed in his tux?

Hard-working Corbett Monica wannabes like this were a dime a dozen in the Borscht Belt nightclubs dotting southeastern New York's Catskill Mountains back in the day, warming up crowds for bigger comedians (and I use the term crowds loosely — I'm not counting the bed-bugs that got in without paying) at hotels like The Concord, Grossinger's, The Friar Tuck Inn, Kutsher's, and The Nevele. By bigger, I mean the likes of Shecky Greene, Morey Amsterdam, Pat Cooper, or Shelley Berman. Physically bigger.

I can imagine Dobie being a hustler too. Maybe he drove comics like Charlie Callas and Jackie Vernon to a gig in Livingston Manor from Manhattan one rainy night in exchange for five minutes on stage.

You'd be in the Liberty Diner just off of the Route 17 Quickway, and catch them ordering hamburgers with coffee, and think they were celebrities, but not really sure. (Everyone knows real celebrities prefer the Roscoe Diner.)

Dobie seems a little out of time though, as if trapped between Vaudeville and Laugh-In, between 1928 and 1968, between Dobie Gillis and Dobie Gray.

I can hear him now ...

A Jewish boy comes home from school and tells his mother he has a part in the play.
She asks, "What part is it?"
The boy says, "I play the part of the Jewish husband."
The mother scowls and says, "Go back and tell the teacher you want a speaking part."

Thumpthumpthump!

Is this thing on?

Vaudevillians Pick Malone and Pat Pagdett were better known as the blackface comedy team Molasses and January (remember the old adage "slower than molasses in January"?)

The Jolsonic duo were a fixture on "The Maxwell House Showboat" for almost five years in the early to mid-Thirties. "Showboat" was broadcast on the NBC-Red and Blue radio networks.

What? No NBC-White????

The pair later started using their real names after to moving over to CBS, and as "Pick n' Pat" they broke into the Top 5 comedy act rankings in the Crosley Rating Service report for 1939, beating out their main competition, stalwart Kiwi-faces "Amos n' Andy."

M and J were alternately described as "America's foremost exponent of blackface buffoonery," "two dusky delineators of devastating dumbfoolery," "two dusky dynamos of comedy," and "two dark clouds of joy."

The show featured characters like Uncle Anthracite and Aunt Carbona and Sal Governalean dialogue like "I nevers granulated from high school."

One critic awarded them the title of "Worst Blackface Team In The History Of The World."

That guy probably never got to see "Bad Boys" or "Bad Boys II".

(Photo by Edward H. Rehnquist.)