George Leslie Goebel (May 20, 1919 – February 24, 1991) was an American humorist, actor, and comedian. He was best known as the star of his own weekly comedy variety television series, The George Gobel Show, on NBC from 1954 to 1959 and on CBS from 1959 to 1960 (alternating in its last season with The Jack Benny Program). He was also a familiar panelist on the NBC game show Hollywood Squares.
He was born George Leslie Goebel in Chicago on May 20, 1919, the only child of Hermann and Lillian (MacDonald) Goebel. His father, Hermann Goebel, who was then working as a butcher and grocer, had immigrated to the United States in the 1890s with his parents from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother, Lillian (MacDonald) Goebel, was a native of Illinois, as was her mother, while Lillian's father, a tugboat captain, had immigrated from Scotland.
Even before his 1937 graduation from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Chicago, Gobel was a country music singer on the National Barn Dance on Chicago's WLS radio and later on KMOX in St. Louis. In 1942, Gobel married his high-school sweetheart, Alice Rose Humecki. During World War II, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and served as a flight instructor in Curtiss AT-9 aircraft at Altus, Oklahoma, and later in Martin B-26 Marauder bombers at Frederick, Oklahoma. In a 1969 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Gobel joked about his stateside wartime service: "There was not one Japanese aircraft that got past Tulsa." He resumed his career as an entertainer after the war, although he decided to focus predominantly on comedy rather than just singing.
Gobel debuted his comedy series on NBC on October 2, 1954. It showcased his quiet, homespun style of humor, a low-key alternative to what audiences had seen on Milton Berle's shows. A huge success, the popular series made the crew-cut Gobel one of the biggest comedy stars of the 1950s. The weekly show featured vocalist Peggy King and actress Jeff Donnell (semiregularly), as well as numerous guest artists, including such stars as James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Fred MacMurray, Kirk Douglas, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. In 1955, Gobel won an Emmy Award for "most outstanding new personality." On October 24, 1954, Gobel did a 12-minute spot on Light's Diamond Jubilee, a two-hour TV special broadcast on all four U.S. television networks of the time.
Gobel and his business manager David P. O'Malley formed a production company, Gomalco, a composite of their last names. In addition to Gobel's own series, the company produced the first four years (1957–61) of Leave It to Beaver, as well as the films The Birds and the Bees (1956) and I Married a Woman (1958), both starring Gobel.
The centerpiece of Gobel's comedy show was his monolog about his supposed past situations and experiences, with stories and sketches allegedly about his real-life wife, Alice (nicknamed "Spooky Old Alice"), played by actress Jeff Donnell (for the first four years of the series' run). Gobel's hesitant, almost shy delivery and penchant for tangled digressions were the chief sources of comedy, more important than the actual content of the stories. His monologs popularized several catchphrases, notably "Well, I'll be a dirty bird" (later used by the Kathy Bates character in the 1990 film Misery), "You can't hardly get them like that no more", and "Well then there now" (repeated by James Dean during a brief imitation of Gobel in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause and used as part of the closing lyric in Perry Como's 1956 hit record "Juke Box Baby"). Gobel's show used some of television's top writers of the era: Hal Kanter, Jack Brooks, and Norman Lear. Peggy King was a regular on the series as a vocalist, and the guest stars included such notables as Shirley MacLaine, Evelyn Rudie, Bob Feller, Phyllis Avery, and Vampira.
Gobel labeled himself "Lonesome George", and the nickname stuck for the rest of his career. The show sometimes included a segment in which Gobel appeared with a guitar, started to sing, then got sidetracked into a story, with the song always left unfinished after fitful starts and stops, a comedy approach akin to one used by Victor Borge and the Smothers Brothers. Tommy Smothers noted that Gobel "was my motivation when I got into comedy originally", observing that "he didn't do jokes—he did timing and played the guitar." Gobel had a scaled-down version of the Gibson L-5 archtop guitar constructed to suit his own smaller stature. Several dozen of this "L-5CT" or "George Gobel" model were produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He also played the harmonica.
In 1957, three U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bombers made the first nonstop round-the-world flight by turbojet aircraft. One of the bombers was called Lonesome George. The crew later appeared on Gobel's primetime television show and recounted the 45-hour-and-19-minute mission. Lonesome George, the nonbreeding Galapagos tortoise that was the last of his subspecies and that died in June 2012, was also named after Gobel.
From 1958 to 1961, Gobel appeared in Las Vegas at the El Rancho Vegas and in Reno at the Mapes Hotel. In 1961, Gobel and Sam Levene starred as Erwin and Patsy in Let It Ride, an original Broadway musical based on the 1935 original Broadway play Three Men on a Horse (1935) co-authored by George Abbott and John Cecil Holm, which had an initial Broadway run of 835 performances, also starring Sam Levene as Patsy. With a book written by Abram S. Ginnes and a score by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, Let It Ride was directed by Stanley Prager, then a successful TV director of the popular sitcom Car 54, Where Are You?. Let It Ride opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre October 12, 1961, and closed December 9 after 68 performances and one preview. Critics compared the show unfavorably to How to Succeed in Business .... He continued to work club dates and performed in many of the Playboy Club properties.
Gobel was also a skilled guitar player, and as such was issued a specially designed electric guitar in his name commissioned by the Gibson Guitar Company in 1959 - the George Gobel Model. Gibson chose "George Gobel" as a model name, as Gobel was one of the most well-known television personalities at the time with a nationally broadcast show five nights a week. Gibson believed its new model guitar would enjoy greater exposure on national television, as opposed to naming the model after a lesser-known jazz musician, for example. Gobel accompanied himself with this guitar on a number of his comedy routines.
Gobel was a guest on various TV programs, including: The Andy Williams Show;The Red Skelton Show; The Dean Martin Show; What's My Line; The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford; The Bing Crosby Show; The Dinah Shore Show; Death Valley Days; Wagon Train; The Carol Burnett Show; The Donny & Marie Show; and Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, and made cameos on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. An episode of My Three Sons in December 1960 was titled "Lonesome George", in which Gobel played himself. He appeared on F Troop as amateur inventor Henry Terkel in the 1966 episode "Go for Broke".
In an often-replayed segment from a 1969 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Gobel entered after Bob Hope and Dean Martin, walking onstage with a plastic cup with an unidentified drink. Gobel remarked to Carson about coming on last and having to follow major stars Hope and Martin. He quipped to Carson, "Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?", to which Carson, Hope, Martin, and the audience came unglued with laughter. After the laughter died down, Carson asked Gobel about his career in World War II as a fighter pilot. Gobel feigned bewilderment at why people laugh when he says that he spent the war in Oklahoma, pointing out with mock pride that no Japanese plane ever got past Tulsa, deep in the center of the continental U.S. Gobel also began to get some unexpected laughs, being unaware that Dean Martin had begun flicking his cigarette ashes into Gobel's drink. Observing all of this, Carson finally asked rhetorically, "Exactly what time did I lose control of the show?!"