In Memoriam: Arte Johnson 1929-2019

 

Arte Johnson's show biz career starts when, while on lunch break from some boring Manhattan office job, he happened to see a small line outside a theater: an open audition for musical. Having done a bit of acting college, Johnson decided to stand in line just to see what would happen. What happened was he got a small part in an off-Broadway production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Goodbye boring office job. In the late 1950s and early-to-mid '60s, Johnson had small parts in movies, and played many one-shot characters on various TV shows. A number of these roles were dramatic in nature, but his real forte was comedy, and in fact did stand-up between acting gigs. His most memorable role toward the end of that period may have been as a stubborn government assassin in writer-director Theodore J. Flicker's 1967 national security state satire The President's Analyst (a flop in its day but now considered a more-relevant-than-ever comedy classic.) But his big break came when he joined the inaugural cast of TV's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, a sketch comedy show comprised almost entirely of blackout gags (short skits with a single punchline.) Johnson was easily the most versatile male actor on that show, his talent for accents rivaled only by a TV sketch comedy star from a decade earlier, Sid Caesar (which may have proved problematic for both men later on when comically exaggerated foreign accents came to be seen as politically incorrect.)  Johnson's most famous character was an anachronistic World War II-era German soldier named Wolfgang who would poke his head above some shrubbery and comment on the sketch that had just concluded: "Stupid but [here comes the catchphrase] ver-r-r-y interesting" But my personal favorite of his character was a dirty old man named Tyrone whom, for reasons know only to him, found Ruth Buzzi's homely Gladys character attractive enough to continuously make passes at her. By 21st century standards, Tyrone may have been a bit of a stalker, but he paid a mighty price for all that stalking, as the sketch usually ended with him taking a savage beating from Gladys' purse.

Johnson became a household name doing Laugh-In and probably saw it as a stepping stone to greater things, leaving after the fourth season (out of five total.) As it turned out, Laugh-In WAS the greater thing. Both Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin ended up with lengthy movie careers, so lengthy in fact that their Laugh-In beginnings now seem like a answers to Jeopardy questions. For Johnson, however, it was back to pretty much what he was doing before Laugh-In, a lot of guest-shots on TV shows and small parts in movies, though he was at least more recognizable the second time around. His most notable role may have been as the insect-ingesting Renfield in the 1979 movie, Love at First Bite, a Dracula parody. It was a hit but a hit that far better advanced the career of star George Hamilton than Johnson (even, if for my popcorn money, Johnson was the funniest thing about the movie.) Johnson's fall from show biz grace (my view--he never complained about it) had nothing to do with a contraction of talent. He was probably just as funny in 2009 as he was in 1969. But audiences, as well as producers, casting directors, and agents, had come to associate him with a certain time in television history, a time that was now long past. If you happened to have been around during that time in television history (I remember the show that made him famous well, even if I was just in elementary school and probably didn't get some of the more risque jokes), then Johnson's stint on Laugh-In should have had you laughing out loud.