So Long, Goodbye, Farewell (and Don't Step in any Shaving Cream)

Bidding a fond farewell to the Doctor Demento Show, after six decades.

With the combination of ever-changing news stories and ever shorter-attention spans, its possible that many missed the recent news story announcing that, after nearly six decades on the air, the legendary radio host and comedy/novelty music archivist Doctor Demento is retiring later in the year. It’s certainly a well deserved retirement, for the good doctor has been prescribing audiences and turning listeners onto funny music the years through.

I won’t go into Doctor Demento (real name Barrett Hansen)’s entire career, for that’s worthy of a dissertation (or, perhaps better, a dissection). But suffice to say he had an equally diverse and no less fascinating career in music before adopting the Demento persona; studying as an Ethnomusicologist, befriending primitive guitarist John Fahey, working for Warner Bros Records, and living in a house with the members of Spirit. And I know I’m missing scads of other fascinating factoids and diversions.

By the time he premiered the Doctor Demento radio show at the dawn of the seventies at KPPC in Pasadena, he was long a collector of novelty discs, funny records and comedy sides. Up to that point, comedy records and novelty discs didn’t have a home of their own on the airwaves. In the fifties and sixties, those records would just be fit into Top 40 AM Radio playlists, especially if they became cross-over hits, as many did. But it was the idea of Hansen, and the positive reception he received early on from listeners, to create an entire program (and in turn, a persona) around these funny records. The added interest in nostalgia from the previous decades seemingly only boosted the interest in these records, and before long, the Doctor Demento radio show became a cult favorite.

In addition to playing records from his massive collection, the Doctor soon found himself inundated with tapes and reels from dedicated listeners who were recording funny music of their own, and wanted to get airplay. Unlike the majority of disc jockeys and radio hosts whom ignored solicitations, Hansen invited listeners to send in tapes, and through the popularity of giving them play, jump started the careers of a plethora of performers, most famously Barnes & Barnes, Ogden Edsel, and yes, Weird Al Yankovic.

Great as that all is, I want to focus on something that gets neglected a bit when talking about the Doctor Demento Show - his influence and passion for old records. It’s safe to say that without his show (and his anthologies, which I’ll get to in a bit), Spike Jones & the City Slickers would be largely forgotten. Allan Sherman would have been thought of as a one-time novelty shtick writer, instead of the pioneering parodist and Jewish satirist he was. Tom Lehrer would be relegated to the dollar bins (OK, he still tends to be, but only because his records are so plentiful.) Point is, through the Doctor’s passion and constant play for these old records, it breathed into them a new life, and thanks to a rebel upstart label called Rhino Records, the pair put these classic artists back into the public consciousness, and in record shop bins.

Rhino Records and Doctor Demento were seemingly a match made in funny music matrimony. And while Rhino also highlighted fifties and sixties rock in their early days, novelty and comedy was a BIG focus of the label’s energy and attention, both in licensing older material for re-release and recording new studio projects (like the Kosher Club, the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, Wild Man Fischer and about a zillion other great records.) And Doctor Demento provided a radio outlet for these oddball records.

This all leads me to last night, when, in a cycle of late night YouTube surfing (a sport I enjoy thoroughly), I stumbled upon the Doctor Demento 20th Anniversary Special. OK, I knew of its existence, but had never actually seen the full thing, not having cable when it originally aired on the Comedy Central in the early nineties. Ah yes, Comedy Central, before it became a suppository for sitcom reruns and South Park. Back when, like many cable channels, it made up for slickness with variety, and packed the airwaves with reruns of fifties and sixties variety and comedy shows, and brought in fresh programmings like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Higgins Brothers and Gruber.

But I digress, and thanks to the power of YouTube (and my fellow VHS collectors and tapers), viewers worldwide can soak up eighties and nineties cable and stuff taped off television. As was the case with the Doctor Demento 20th Anniversary Show. Taped at a swanky theatre in Pasadena, with Hansen as the master of ceremonies, it featured a dazzling and delightful array of performers; really a who’s who of novelty and funny music in the twentieth century. Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett kicked off the show with his Halloween classic ‘Monster Mash’; viewers (and the packed theatre audience) were treated to performances from the vocalist in Ogden Edsel (gleefully massacring their hit ‘Dead Puppies’), New Jersey’s legendary Uncle Floyd performing his ode to the Garden State, the surreal monologues of Eddie ‘The Old Philosopher’ Lawrence, legend Sheb Wooley performing ‘The Purple People Eater’, the timeless Tiny Tim performing, what else, but ‘Tip Toe Thru the Tulips’, and Weird Al at the top of the bill, performing not one, but two songs, including an accordion medley of then popular hits.

But the highlight amongst highlights was what Doctor Demento saved for the finale, bringing out Borscht Belt legend Benny Bell to perform his hit ‘Shaving Cream’. Where else on the planet would you see an audience in the 1990s give a standing ovation to Benny Bell, BEFORE he started performing? Such was the influence of the Doctor Demento Show…and it was back in 1974, when, thanks to repeated play of the ‘teasing song’, as folklorists call it, Vanguard Records picked up the nearly thirty-year old disc (it was first recorded in 1946), and re-released it as a single, where, presumably to everyone’s surprise, it reached #30 on the Billboard charts, giving Bell a new lease on his career. I don’t think anyone could have predicted in 1974 that a forties novelty record by a Yiddish comedian would hit the top thirty. But it goes to show the power of the good Doctor, and his prescription for funny records, which has lead to a fanbase of tens of thousands of listeners and devotees.

Thanks for the radio, Doctor Demento….and with deep archives of his shows, he’ll truly never stop prescribing doses of humor over the airwaves, even after he steps back from hosting new shows.