Name the Top Banana
 

There were a lot of great comedians, and the silent era had greats like Chaplin and Keaton, but for me the best were in the era when radio was moving to television and you had great comics working radio, TV, film, and stage.

I still love watching old episodes of they Honeymooners, Your Show of Shows, Sgt. Bilko, some of which were canceled before I was born. To me the golden age was from the 40's through the 60's.

I like the new guys as well, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, etc, but even they took a lot from the guys who stole all their best material from vaudeville.

Do Danny Kaye and the Smothers Brothers count? Either way, but a check next to all those in the poll... I went for Mel, just because he is comedy.

Edit: Sorry, Kaye is on there. My bad.

Mel Brooks is wonderful and I love him . . . but he can't make the cut against Groucho Marx and Jack Benny. (I need to think a bit about who the winner is.)

Laurel and Hardy need to be in there somewhere too.

To many different styles and mediums to compare. How do you compare Brooks writing/producing genius to Lucy's TV genius to the Club monologists genius?

I voted Mel but only b/c I couldn't vote the Mel/Groucho ticket. Tough, tough, tough one. They were/are all brilliant in their own unique way.

Groucho #1
Mel Brooks Close #2
All the rest #3

Dude, no pythons?

Chiquita.

Benny

What about -

Foster Brooks
Dean Martin
Jerry Lewis

Pythons in a whole 'nother class.

No mere comics, they.

The Pythons are Gospel, man, Gospel! The bread that feedeth, the water that quencheth, the holy hand grenade that snuffeth the naughty in my sighteth---this is the Python!

Some olders who stand the test of time:

Johnny Carson

Bob Newhart

I have to go with Groucho. His sense of comedic timing was impeccable, and he could say the most awful things, even in the '40s and '50s, and get away with it.

Besides, I just really don't like Jackie Gleason at all.

I voted for Lucille Ball. I Love Lucy still makes me laugh so hard, I cry.

I picked comedians from the 'golden age' from 1930's through the 1950's. Newhart was a genius and invented his own style, but I wanted to list the guys who still had one foot in vaudeville and who were comics as well as comedians.

Mel Brooks was a writer and performer before he was a producer/director. A lot of these guys worked together as writers and performers on a number of shows. Of the group, Don Knotts and Lucille Ball were the youngest, and Lucy was a bit more reserved that Imogene Coca.

BTW, I'm not sure, but I believe that Don Knotts,Lucille Ball, and Gleason were the only non-Jewish performers on that list. This was not intentional, but during that period, most of the famous comedians were Jewish.

The reason I picked who I did was because these people had the timing, guts, and intelligence to work on the edge of comedy at a time when comedy was being broadcast live on TV and radio. A lot of these people were former vaudevillians who kept up that same frantic pace in a lot of their routines.

My personal favorites are Zero Mostel and Phil Silvers in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks doing The 2000 Year Old Man

Brooks/Reiner doing the 2000 Year Old Man


Brooks/Reiner satirizing coffee shops


Holy S**t!!!! I never saw this one from Mel Brooks (probably NSFW simply because it would probably be offensive to someone)