"I was a dialectitian, a storyteller. I would elongate things," Shecky Greene explained. "If I told a joke, it would be a twenty-minute story. I would do the characters. That was my style of humor. That's why in television, they never could write for that." Old jokes became long jokes. Extended riffs on one idea, such as "Caca on the moon" -- the notion that the Apollo astronauts left more behind than footprints and a flag -- became an eight-minute signature piece.
Shecky Greene
Though he hated the label, Greene became known as a "Vegas" or "lounge" comic because of the way he worked a gambling crowd. "My whole act was about Las Vegas: gambling, drinking. That's what that particular group of people at that time could relate to ... I would take everything that was happening around us, or everything that had happened the night before or that day," and use it in the act. He also worked within an ice-cube's throw of the crowd, feeding off "that personal thing that people feel in a nightclub, that you could not touch in the movies."
Alcohol didn't just free Greene's inhibitions. Because of his manic-depressive personality, the booze was "mood-altering," his friend Pete Barbutti noted. "It would not just make him drunk or mean. It would turn him into a different individual." Like Jekyll and Hyde, friends would come to recognize "the look we all know as 'the animal' -- the tie is off, shoulders broader than normal, hunched over, hair falling in his face."
But the Riviera also was a struggling property, and management had to put up with his excesses.
"I'd come back to work and they'd be taking my name off the sign. I'd say, 'What happened?' 'You were fired.' 'Oh, I guess I'll go home.' And then they'd call me to come back."
Greene hated Riviera boss Ed Torres, and told staffers to keep him out of the lounge while he was working. Management nonetheless insisted upon wheeling out a giant cake one night to celebrate Torres' birthday, so Shecky took it upon himself to smash the cake into his own face. Another night, he decided the casino play was too loud and distracting to his act, so he marched out to the craps table and scattered a stack of $100 black chips across the room. Each time the Riviera fired him, and each time his long-term value to the hotel prevailed.
Sometime during that first year after Caesars Palace opened in August 1966, Greene laid his biggest claim to infamy: He drove his car into the fountain in front of the new jewel of the Strip. (In the early years, the fountain divided a driveway and was bordered only by a standard curb, though Greene says he also took out a signpost en route.) Alas, part of the story is apocryphal. When the police waded into the fountain and opened the car door, legend has it the comedian instructed, "No spray wax." It was a Buddy Hackett line, which both comedians used in retelling the tale. Instead, Greene remembers saying the more mundane "I guess I'm arrested," to the police officer who was surprised to see him alive and well.
