Norm Crosby, 1927-2020
No. 22600 Norm Crosby
Norm Crosby graduated from Dorchester High School.
Wikipedia
Norm Crosby (born Sepbember 15, 1927) is a comedian sometimes associated with the Borscht Belt, but often seen on television in the 1970s. He is best known for his use of malapropisms, and is often called “The Master of Malaprop.”
Born in Boston, he was originally half of the nightclub comedy team of Ethan Eichrodt and Norm Crosby. The act was a big draw at Bally’s Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. The duo enjoyed the height of its popularity in the early 1950s.
Crosby went solo as a stand-up comedian, adopting a friendly, blue-collar, guy-next-door attitude. He often opened for top Vegas entertainers like Tom Jones, and would comment on this in his act: “I can’t believe it, these ladies are flinging their panties at him on the stage. That’s dangerous. If you’ve ever been hit with a flying panty…!”
Norm Crosby refined his stand-up monologues by interpolating malapropisms, in the manner of movie comedian Leo Gorcey. (Crosby’s version of “He had panache” came out as “He had pistachio.”) This was immediately successful, and Crosby has since become identified with fractured English. (Appropriately enough, he offered commentary when Turner Classic Movies’ briefly revived Leo Gorcey’s movies with The Bowery Boys.)
Since 1983 Norm Crosby has co-hosted and contributed to the annual Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6560 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles.
He appeared on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and did a short sketch wit Judy Carne. She introduced him by saying, “And here’s another draft card burner.”
Crosby: Whadduya mean draft card? This is my Diner’s Card!
Carne: What does that have to do with Vietnam?
Crosby: How should I know? I never ate there!
Crosby’s non-malapropism wit could be devastating at times, as well. In 1978, appearing on Merv Griffin’s long-running talk show, Helen Gurley Brown was the other guest. Brown was going on and on about how many men she had slept with, and if she saw a man that struck her fancy she had no reservations about inviting him home with her. At the end of the segment, Brown stated she had to leave, that she had to catch a plane in 30 minutes. She left to polite applause, As Griffin started to announce the commercial break, Crosby said: “God, I hope she doesn’t get a good-looking cab driver. She’ll never make it.”
Crosby is hard of hearing, and wears a hearing aid in each ear.
Crosby is a very accomplished Freemason, having served as Master of at least one lodge and participating in many charitable activities.
NY Times Norm Crosby, Comedian Who Had a (Wrong) Way With Words, Dies at 93
You might call him the Boston mangler. “I was doing everybody’s material,” he said, before discovering his own shtick and becoming the master of the malaprop.
By Daniel E. Slotnik
Published Nov. 8, 2020Updated Nov. 9, 2020
Norm Crosby, the comedian known as the master of malaprop because he spoke from his diagram and related many funny antidotes, often to a standing ovulation, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 93.
The cause was heart failure, his daughter-in-law, Maggie Crosby said.
Mr. Crosby started telling jokes in the late 1950s, when comedians often relied on one type of gag for their acts: Don Rickles was the insult comic, Henny Youngman was the king of the one-liners. As a young comedian in New England, Mr. Crosby experimented with those forms and more.
“I was doing everybody’s material,” he said in an interview with the show business historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2010. “I took from Buddy Hackett, Jan Murray and Red Buttons.. Everybody!”
Mr. Crosby developed his own shtick after he was offered a job at the popular New York City nightclub the Latin Quarter, in Times Square.
“I was taking jokes from Ed Sullivan every week,” Mr. Crosby said in an interview for this obituary in 2013. “I couldn’t go to New York and do the stuff I was doing.”
He was trying to develop new material when a club owner made an offhand comment about one of the club’s cabaret dancers. The owner, who had given the young woman a ride, “came into my dressing room, and he said to me, ‘Find out if the girl is staying over or if she communicates,’” Mr. Crosby recalled.
“I said, ‘My God, a lot of people talk like that. Maybe that would be fun.’ So I started the play on words.”
He tried it in Massachusetts, he added, “and the places I worked, unfortunately, people didn’t get the difference.”
Because of the particulars of his Latin Quarter booking, Mr. Crosby’s routine was not an immediate breakthrough with Times Square audiences, either. He started out performing 12-minute filler sets between stage acts during his weeklong engagement, and his jokes were largely ignored. “I was on for five minutes before anybody knew I was out there,” he said.
At the end of the week, a dejected Mr. Crosby packed his bags and went to pick up his check from the manager, who apologized for the difficult assignment and promised him a better slot in the show. Once audiences had a chance to get the joke, he was a hit. He stayed at the Latin Quarter for 18 weeks, after which the prestigious William Morris Agency began representing him.
Mr. Crosby was soon opening for the singer Robert Goulet at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, and Mr. Goulet and his agent enjoyed Mr. Crosby’s act so much that they booked him as the opening act on a nationwide tour. The two worked together for the next three years. Mr. Crosby then toured with the singer Tom Jones for a time before becoming a headliner in his own right.
He appeared on the television shows of Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson andMerv Griffin and on comedy series like “The Love Boat.” From 1978 to 1981, he hosted “the Comedy Shop, ,” a syndicated showcase for young stand-up comedians, and essentially played himself in the 1988-89 Showtime sitcom “The Boys,” about a club that closely resembled the Friars Club in New York, where he often took part in celebrity roasts. Mr. Crosby became a regular on Dean Martin’s televised roasts, where he skewered, among others, Senator Barry Goldwater, Kirk Douglas (“a serious equestrian performer”) and Carroll O’Connor (“very deceptive about all kinds of people; as a matter of fact he has extra sensible reception”).
Speaking of Senator Goldwater, he said, “When President Johnson declared war on puberty, it was Senator Goldwater who said, and I quote, ‘Wherever there is unemployment, you’ll find men out of work.’”
He was a pitchman in the late 1970s and early ’80s for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer, appearing in commercials with Mickey Mantle, Henny Youngman and Joe Frazier.
In one commercial, he declared, “I always keep Natural on hand while I watch these athletes perspiring to achieve victory, ’cause these sporting computations make me so dehybernated.”
Mr. Crosby was a frequent participant in Jerry Lewis’s muscular dystrophy telethon, but that was not his only charitable cause: Mr. Crosby, who was hearing-impaired, was the first national chairman of the Council for Better Speech and Hearing, in 1979.
In 1982, his name was, as he might have put it, immobilized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, placed between those of Jack Benny and Red Skelton.
Norman Lawrence Crosby was born on Sept. 15, 1927, in Boston. Known as a class card, he graduated from Dorchester High School and then studied advertising illustration at the Massachusetts School of Art but didn’t graduate, enlisting instead as a radar operator in the Coast Guard.
His hearing was permanently damaged from depth charges that exploded while he was on anti-submarine patrol in the North Atlantic during World War II, although he did not notice hearing problems until long after he had returned home.
After the war, Mr. Crosby worked in advertising for a chain of 40 or so women’s shoe stores in the Boston area and eventually became its advertising manager. In the meantime he dabbled in comedy at
small clubs and restaurants in New England, becoming popular in the region before his big opportunity at the Latin Quarter.
He married Joan Foley, a nightclub dancer and former Rockette, in 1967. Besides his wife, survivors include their two sons, Andrew and Daniel, and two grandchildren.
Mr. Crosby continued to perform on cruise ships and in Las Vegas well into his 80s and appeared sporadically on television. He also had small parts in Adam Sandler’s “Grown Ups 2” and other movies.
Mr. Crosby was not the only person known for mangling words: So, too, was the 43rd president, George W. Bush. Mr. Bush’s misstatements reminded some people of Mr. Crosby’s malaprops, even though they were not part of a routine.
“Everybody was saying, ‘Hey! He’s doing your act,’” Mr. Crosby said.
A correction was made on Nov. 9, 2020
A picture caption with an earlier version of this obituary misspelled the surname of the sports commentator shown at a roast for O.J. Simpson. He was Howard Cosell, not Cossell.