Gobel, George Leslie

(b. 20 May 1919 in Chicago, Illinois; d. 24 February 1991 in Encino, California), comic performer, monologist, and musician who rose to fame during the 1950s as the host of a prime-time television comedy-variety hour.

Gobel was born George Leslie Goebel. His father, Herman Goebel, was a grocery store owner, and from an early age George delighted in performing imitations of the customers who came into the shop, some of whom appreciated these renditions more than others. His mother, Lillian MacDonald, had been a music teacher, and she encouraged him to learn to play the guitar and sing. When his church choir was invited to perform on a Chicago radio station, Gobel was featured as a soloist. Soon after, the twelve-year-old was signed to a contract with the NBC Radio. “Little George Gobel” (he was only five-feet, five-inches-tall as an adult) appeared regularly on the NBC Blue Network’s country-and-western variety program, National Barn Dance.

As he matured, Gobel’s soprano voice deepened. As a result, the teenager redirected his career toward radio acting, gaining parts in the soap operas and Westerns that originated from Chicago during the 1930s. He attended Roosevelt High School throughout this period, and upon graduation in 1937 he set off to become a country-and-western musician and storyteller, appearing on regional radio stations in the Midwest and South. He married Alice Humecki in 1942, and they eventually had three children. An amateur pilot, Gobel enlisted in the U.S. Air Army Corps in 1943. He served mainly as a flight instructor in Oklahoma until he was discharged as a first lieutenant in 1945.

In his radio act Gobel had always flavored his guitar picking with witty stories. But in the years immediately following World War II, he decisively shifted the focus of his work toward stand-up comedy, though his guitar usually remained in hand. He emerged as a stand-up comic, developing material on the rough-and-tumble Chicago nightclub circuit. His engagements encompassed a range of venues, from the city’s most elegant hotels to barrooms where heckling was an expected part of the evening’s entertainment. He credited his nightclub experiences for his success in reaching the mass, heterogeneous audience of the 1950s. For his act, Gobel punctuated short guitar riffs with humorous anecdotes and stories in a patter that did not quite qualify as joke telling. His signature was his unflinching poker face, which remained implacable, even when the house roared with laughter. This distinctive style helped earn him the nickname “Lonesome George.”

Television was expanding rapidly in the 1950s, and Gobel became a frequent guest on such popular network programs as the Garry Moore Show and the Colgate Comedy Hour. At a time when nightclubs were becoming increasingly identified with risque “blué” material, Gobel’s act was family fare, just the kind that television advertisers were looking for. He signed an exclusive contract with NBC Television in 1952. However, it took the network more than a year—and two failed situation comedy pilots—to find an acceptable vehicle for the offbeat comedian. “Maybe it’s because I sometimes used a guitar and sang, they thought of that homespun or bucolic nonsense. I’m really a city boy at heart.”

The George Gobel Show, a comedy-variety hour, premiered on NBC’s Saturday lineup in the fall of 1954. It won both a large audience and critical acclaim. Comedy-variety was generally dominated by the frenetic pace that had been established by such comedians as Milton Berle, Martha Raye, Jerry Lester, and the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Gobel’s deliberate, almost leisurely timing was refreshing for segments of the audience who had grown weary of early television’s “Hellzapoppin’” style. Moreover, many new viewers in the Midwest and South, who were getting television service for the first time, found Gobel’s homespun style recognizable and friendly. The New York Times praised Gobel’s “low pressure, off-beat humor.” He won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award during that first season.

If Gobel’s personal style was quirky, the form of his comedy-variety program was not. It started with the star delivering a stand-up monologue, followed by the introduction of the week’s guest star and perhaps a song. The hour then moved into a series of sketches, most of which explored the banalities and aggravations of middle-class married life, as experienced by George and his television wife, Alice. Some of Hollywood’s best writers were attracted to the staff, including Hal Kanter, Norman Lear, and Ed Simmons. Simmons, who went on to produce the Carol Burnett Show, called the year he spent writing for Gobel’s show “a writer’s dream”: “You could see your commas on the screen. He had a rhythm that was totally different.... And he had a sense of humor. A lot of comics don’t have any sense of humor.” By 1956, Lonesome George Gobel was among the highest paid performers on television, earning more than $7,000 per weekly episode. The network further capitalized on his popularity by giving him a regular position on the Eddie Fisher Show, which aired on alternate weeks from his own.

Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, Gobel appeared in several Broadway plays (notably Let It Ride, 1958) and Hollywood movies (including IMarried a Woman, 1958). But his television popularity ultimately declined as abruptly as it had risen. Although Gobel’s show was highly rated during most of its run, it faced heavy competition in 1957 after NBC switched it from its Saturday night time slot to a weeknight slot. Upon the expiration of his five-year contract with NBC, the network cancelled the show. CBS picked it up for the 1959–1960 season, but then cancelled it in less than a year. The writer Hal Kanter recalled that Gobel, already something of a drinker, began to drink even more heavily around this time.

After the cancellation of his show, voice-overs for television commercials became a mainstay of Gobel’s work. In the 1970s, he reemerged on national television as a regular on the game show Hollywood Squares. This led to a role in a situation comedy, Harper Valley P.T.A., but the series was quickly cancelled. He appeared in some Broadway revivals in the 1980s, but Gobel never again achieved the stardom he had known during the heyday of his comedy-variety hour. He died in Los Angeles of a stroke following coronary by-pass surgery and was buried at San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, California.

Gobel’s meteoric rise from obscurity to national stardom in early television comedy-variety reflects the experience of a number of 1950s performers, including Sid Caesar and Milton Berle. The medium’s insatiable appetite for new material, as well as the fickleness of audiences and network programmers, tended to burn out comedy-variety performers. Perhaps none fell so far so quickly as Gobel.

Several relevant interviews are archived at the Steven H. Scheuer Collection in Television History at Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York: they are interviews by David Marc with the writers Everett Greenbaum (1996) and Hal Kanter (1997) and by Bernie Cook with the writer Ed Simmons (1997). Gobel’s life and early career are profiled in Current Biography 1955. Obituaries are in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times (both 25 Feb. 1991).

David Marc