Dean Martin's Drunk Act

If he's not actually tipsy here, it's fairly amazing performance art. Things are really weird when Bob Hope is playing straight man:

 

Thanks. I wonder what Dean said near the end when Bob and Ed started walking away...

 

It was an act, but he played it to the hilt.

Great stuff.

 

I heard it was apple juice in the glass and instead of going out with the boys, he always went home to the family.

 

That's what I heard too, Dean was one sharp cookie.
I think Bill talks about Dean being totally wasted on the 20x5 video, guess he had the Stones fooled.

 

it was a total act ! not sure when he started it though or why as he really did not need to.

 

it started when he split w/ j. lewis and needed to come up w/a solo act for nightclubs and vegas

he basically took it from comedian joe e. lewis

 

Dean was so damn special...he fooled most with his drunk act...One of the funniest lines he said at one of his live shows was... "How long have I've been on"? OMG!

 

"I walked all the way from them curtains."

Great stuff. Thanks.

 

Interesting comb over on Johnny: A single white lock across the top. He looks like Silvio on The Sopranos.

 

Yeah a lot of 'comedy actors' struggle with being in the public or being interviewed because they state as themselves they are..."just not that funny!"

People expect them to be as funny and crazy as they are in the movies. So to save disappointment they have to put on a act.

Dean otherwise would have just wanted to talk about his latest round of golf.

 

Yeah, Dino was no teetotaler, but he did not drink anywhere near as much as his act would imply. I loved his line, "You're not to drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on." He liked to be around family and always insisted on eating dinner together as a family. His daughter tells about how he told jokes all through dinner. One of my favorites is when he was talking about his golf game and says. "Today I hit two perfect balls... I stepped on a rake."

He also liked to get up early to play golf. One time he was having a party and the cops showed up because of a noise complaint and to Frank's disappointment they broke up the party. It turns out that Dean was upstairs and called the cops so he could go to bed because he had an early tee time.

 

I THOUGHT this was gonna be a band name. I'm seriously disappointed.

 

On a later visit to The Tonight Show, Dean was seemingly even more blitzed. When he said something that really made the crowd roar, he could be heard saying out of the side of his mouth to Johnny, "I really got 'em now!" in a very sober, clear voice.

Without a doubt, there came a point in his later life when booze and prescription drugs really did him in. However, thru most of his career it was the "happy-go-lucky drunk" act stolen from Joe E. Lewis and Phil Harris. It managed to get "saltier" as he aged, also.

 

And as the years went on, his live act had less and less finished songs and more schtick and his drunk act

 

He did say he never drank when he was working....so....

sean

 

No way you can have the razor sharp timing Dean has/had if you were truly that blotto.

 

Makes me wish, hope and pray an earlier generation, non-bleeped tape of the show exists somewhere. Sounded like it was a doozy!!

 

Jerry in his book about Dean said the seeds of it started during the earliest stages of their partnership as a way to avoid interacting more than absolutely necessary with the gangsters and other shady figures most club performers had to deal with (usually the club owners themselves and their "associates"). Seemingly being constantly tipsy created a nice buffer that helped Dean avoid these "wise guys" as much as possible. After Dean's split with Jerry, the writers Dean hired to construct an act for him seized onto that "persona" and really ran with it.

 

If Dean's "drunk" bit really was all an act, it was a good one. I recently re-visited "The Cannonball Run" and Dean seemed to be genuinely pickled in several scenes, haha.

If memory serves, when MAD Magazine parodied the first "Airport" movie, the artist drew a cocktail glass in Dean's character's hand in every panel of the story.

 

His bits in that film are just gold.

(Dom DeLuise) "Nice car, father!"

(Dean) "Thank you, as@#%le."

 

I've heard when his son Dino was killed he started to drink for real.

 

The act would certainly make for good cover on any occasions where he really was drunk.

 

Dino's death really hit him hard. While he always drank he did hit the bottle a little harder after the death. as paulmock mentioned, he also was taking prescription medication. His son Ricci, though claimed he cut back on the drinking a few years later when his health started to really get bad from his smoking.