Half The George Kirby Comedy Hour
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Half The George Kirby Comedy Hour
George Kirby (June 8, 1923 – September 30, 1995) was an American comedian, singer, and actor. Career Born in Chicago, Kirby broke into show business in the 1940s at the Club DeLisa, a South Side establishment that employed a variety-show format and preferred to hire local singers, dancers, and comedians. His first recording was as a stand-up blues singer, performing "Ice Man Blues" on a Tom Archia session done in 1947 for Aristocrat Records. He was one of the first African-American comedians to appeal to white as well as black audiences during the height of the Civil Rights era, appearing between 1963 and 1972 on Perry Como's ''Kraft Music Hall'', ''The Ed Sullivan Show'', ''The Dean Martin Show'', ''The Jackie Gleason Show'', '' The Temptations Show'', ''Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In'', and ''The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson''. As an impressionist, he mimicked white celebrities such as John Wayne and Walter Brennan, not solely black stars like Bill Cosby and Pe ...
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Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = United States , subdivision_type1 = State , subdivision_type2 = Counties , subdivision_name1 = Illinois , subdivision_name2 = Cook and DuPage , established_title = Settled , established_date = , established_title2 = Incorporated (city) , established_date2 = , founder = Jean Baptiste Point du Sable , government_type = Mayor–council , governing_body = Chicago City Council , leader_title = Mayor , leader_name = Lori Lightfoot ( D) , leader_title1 = City Clerk , leader_name1 = Anna Valencia ( D) , unit_pref = Imperial , area_footnotes = , area_total ...
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Walter Brennan
Walter Andrew Brennan (July 25, 1894 – September 21, 1974) was an American actor and singer. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performances in '' Come and Get It'' (1936), ''Kentucky'' (1938), and '' The Westerner'' (1940), making him one of only three male actors to win three Academy Awards, and the only male or female actor to win three awards in the supporting actor category. Brennan was also nominated for his performance in ''Sergeant York'' (1941). Other noteworthy performances were in ''To Have and Have Not'' (1944), '' My Darling Clementine'' (1946), '' Red River'' (1948), and '' Rio Bravo'' (1959). Early life Brennan was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, less than two miles from his family's home in Swampscott, Massachusetts.World War I Draft Records, Essex County, Massachusetts, Roll 1684678, Draft Board 24. His parents were both Irish immigrants. His father was an engineer and inventor, and young Brennan also studied engineering at Rindge Tec ...
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Steve Martin
Stephen Glenn Martin (born August 14, 1945) is an American actor, comedian, writer, producer, and musician. He has won five Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, and was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 2013. Additionally, he was nominated for two Tony Awards for his musical '' Bright Star'' in 2016. Among many honors, he has received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the Kennedy Center Honors, and an AFI Life Achievement Award. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Martin at sixth place in a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics. ''The Guardian'' named him one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. Martin came to public notice in the 1960s as a writer for ''The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour'', for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1969, and later as a frequent host on ''Saturday Night Live''. In the 1970s, Martin performed his offbeat, absurdist comedy routines before sold-out theaters on national tours. Since the 1980s, havi ...
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Variety Show
Variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is entertainment made up of a variety of acts including musical performances, sketch comedy, magic, acrobatics, juggling, and ventriloquism. It is normally introduced by a compère (master of ceremonies) or host. The variety format made its way from the Victorian era stage in Britain and America to radio and then television. Variety shows were a staple of English language television from the late 1940s into the 1980s. While still widespread in some parts of the world, such as in the United Kingdom with the '' Royal Variety Performance'', and South Korea with '' Running Man'', the proliferation of multichannel television and evolving viewer tastes have affected the popularity of variety shows in the United States. Despite this, their influence has still had a major effect on late night television whose late-night talk shows and NBC's variety series '' Saturday Night Live'' (which originally premiered in 1975) ...
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Sketch Comedy
Sketch comedy comprises a series of short, amusing scenes or vignettes, called "sketches", commonly between one and ten minutes long, performed by a group of comic actors or comedians. The form developed and became popular in vaudeville, and is used widely in variety shows, comedy talk shows, and some sitcoms and children's television series. The sketches may be improvised live by the performers, developed through improvisation before public performance, or scripted and rehearsed in advance like a play. Sketch comedians routinely differentiate their work from a "skit", maintaining that a skit is a (single) dramatized joke (or "bit") while a sketch is a comedic exploration of a concept, character, or situation.Sketch
definition 3b, Merriam-Webster online. Retrieved 5/4/2019


History

Sketch comedy has its origins in
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Half The George Kirby Comedy Hour
George Kirby (June 8, 1923 – September 30, 1995) was an American comedian, singer, and actor. Career Born in Chicago, Kirby broke into show business in the 1940s at the Club DeLisa, a South Side establishment that employed a variety-show format and preferred to hire local singers, dancers, and comedians. His first recording was as a stand-up blues singer, performing "Ice Man Blues" on a Tom Archia session done in 1947 for Aristocrat Records. He was one of the first African-American comedians to appeal to white as well as black audiences during the height of the Civil Rights era, appearing between 1963 and 1972 on Perry Como's ''Kraft Music Hall'', ''The Ed Sullivan Show'', ''The Dean Martin Show'', ''The Jackie Gleason Show'', '' The Temptations Show'', ''Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In'', and ''The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson''. As an impressionist, he mimicked white celebrities such as John Wayne and Walter Brennan, not solely black stars like Bill Cosby and Pe ...
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The George Kirby Show
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a ...
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Joe Williams (jazz Singer)
Joe Williams (born Joseph Goreed; December 12, 1918 – March 29, 1999) was an American jazz singer. He sang with big bands such as the Count Basie Orchestra and the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and with his combos. He sang in two films with the Basie orchestra and sometimes worked as an actor. Life Williams was born in Cordele, Georgia, the son of Willie Goreed and Anne Beatrice ''née'' Gilbert. When he was about three, his mother and grandmother took him to Chicago. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where he attended Austin Otis Sexton Elementary School and Englewood High School. In the 1930s, as a teenager, he was a member of a gospel group, the Jubilee Boys, and performed in Chicago churches. Work He began singing professionally as a soloist in 1937. He sometimes sang with big bands: from 1937 he performed with Jimmie Noone's Apex Club Orchestra, and also toured with Les Hite in the Midwest. In 1941 he toured with Coleman Hawkins to Memphis, Tennessee. In 194 ...
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Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917June 15, 1996) was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing. After a tumultuous adolescence, Fitzgerald found stability in musical success with the Chick Webb Orchestra, performing across the country but most often associated with the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. Her rendition of the nursery rhyme "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" helped boost both her and Webb to national fame. After taking over the band when Webb died, Fitzgerald left it behind in 1942 to start her solo career. Her manager was Moe Gale, co-founder of the Savoy, until she turned the rest of her career over to Norman Granz, who founded Verve Records to produce new records by Fitzgerald. With Verve she recorded some of her more widely noted works, particularly ...
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Nat King Cole
Nathaniel Adams Coles (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965), known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American singer, jazz pianist, and actor. Cole's music career began after he dropped out of school at the age of 15, and continued for the remainder of his life. He found great popular success and recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts. His trio was the model for small jazz ensembles that followed. Cole also acted in films and on television and performed on Broadway. He was the first African-American man to host an American television series. He was the father of singer Natalie Cole (1950–2015). Biography Early life Nathaniel Adams Coles was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 17, 1919. He had three brothers: Eddie (1910–1970), Ike (1927–2001), and Freddy (1931–2020), and a half-sister, Joyce Coles. Each of the Coles brothers pursued careers in music. When Nat King Cole was four years old, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where ...
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Louis Armstrong
Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and Singing, vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and several eras in the history of jazz. Armstrong was born and raised in New Orleans. Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an inventive trumpet and cornet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the focus of the music from collective improvisation to solo performance. Around 1922, he followed his mentor, King Oliver, Joe "King" Oliver, to Chicago to play in the . In Chicago, he spent time with other popular jazz musicians, reconnecting with his friend Bix Beiderbecke and spending time with Hoagy Carmichael and Lil Hardin Armstrong, Lil Hardin. He earned a reputation at "cutting contests", and his fame reached band leader Fletcher Henderson. Henderson persuaded Armstrong to come to New York City, where he became a featur ...
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Bebop
Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early-to-mid-1940s in the United States. The style features compositions characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure, the use of scales and occasional references to the melody. Bebop developed as the younger generation of jazz musicians expanded the creative possibilities of jazz beyond the popular, dance-oriented swing music-style with a new "musician's music" that was not as danceable and demanded close listening.Lott, Eric. Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style. Callaloo, No. 36 (Summer, 1988), pp. 597–605 As bebop was not intended for dancing, it enabled the musicians to play at faster tempos. Bebop musicians explored advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords, extended chords, chord substitutions, asymmetrical phrasing, and intricate melodies ...
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