We Got Bruce
Bruce Vilanch – Comedy Writer, Songwriter, Actor and 6 time Emmy Award Winner
By Mister D
May 21, 2024

Bruce Vilanch – Comedy Writer, Songwriter, Actor, and six-time Emmy Award Winner

Bruce Vilanch talks about Bette Midler’s impact on his career, his experience with adoption, and his various projects in Hollywood and on Broadway. Bruce is a comedy writer, songwriter, actor, and a six-time Emmy Award winner. Bruce is well known by the public for his years on Hollywood Squares as a celebrity participant. Bruce was also the head writer for the show; he wrote for the Academy Awards and was the head writer for the Oscars from 2000 to 2014. He has been a reporter, a columnist, and a songwriter, published a collection of his writings, and he’s written jokes for the likes of Lily Tomlin, Billy Crystal, Rosie O’Donnell, and Robin Williams. He has appeared on Broadway in Hairspray and various TV shows and has written and performed off-Broadway in his self-penned one-man show, Bruce Vilanch: Almost Famous.

The post Fresh Blood Podcast: Bruce Vilanch Thriving Over 40! first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Columbus Monthly
Comedy Writer Bruce Vilanch Reflects on His Journey from Ohio State to the Oscars Stage
By Sheldon Zoldan
October 16. 2023

Ask Bruce Vilanch if he is famous, and he has a simple answer: It depends. “I will be in an airport surrounded by people giving selfies, and somebody will walk by and say, ‘Who is he?’ 

“So, what can I tell you? It ain’t Brad Pitt. There are declensions of fame.” 

If you still don’t know the name, you might recognize his cherub face—not to mention his attention-grabbing T-shirts, long, blond hair and red-framed glasses. It’s a familiar visage from his four years on the third iteration of Hollywood Squares. 

In show business, however, there is no debate whether he’s famous. Vilanch knows almost everybody, and almost everybody knows him. He’s written jokes for the funny (Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin, Ellen DeGeneres) and the not-so funny (Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley MacLaine, Cher, the Osmonds). He wrote for as many as 25 Oscar shows, at least 14 as head writer. He co-wrote Bette Midler’s Johnny Carson tribute, “You Made Me Watch You,” for her Emmy-winning appearance on the late night host’s last regular show. Vilanch is famous enough to have had a documentary made about him, “Get Bruce.”

On Oct. 20, he returns to Ohio State to host “The Lantern Reunion: An Evening with Bruce Vilanch, the Almost Famous Buckeye,” sponsored by the School of Communication.

Born in 1948 in New York City, Vilanch was adopted four days later and whisked away to Patterson, New Jersey, where he grew up as a happy, chubby, only child who fell in love with the theater. “I was not one of the cool kids,” he says. “What made me palatable to them was I performed.” 

He did summer stock as a teenager, sharing billing with well-known actors of the time, like Tallulah Bankhead and Ethel Merman. Vilanch wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh because of its theater program, but his perfect SAT score in English didn’t counterbalance his 350 score in math. “I couldn’t make change; I was terrible,” he says.  

So, it was off to Ohio State. “I said OK, I’ll go to Ohio State because it had a big journalism school, and it had a theater department, and it was an hour by plane, which was as long as the leash would go,” Vilanch says. 

He started school in 1965, just as the Vietnam War protests were percolating. Vilanch began working for the school newspaper, The Lantern, first as a reporter and then in various editing roles. Being a reporter wasn’t easy. “It was difficult because I was trying to be fair and balanced,” he says, “but I was anti-Vietnam, and I was mad at the [school] administration that they would not do a Black studies course.” 

He took to the stage like he did to journalism. On campus and off, he acted in plays, such as “Carnival,” “Finian’s Rainbow” and the “Glass Menagerie,” to name a few. His favorite was “My Fair Lady.” “Because it was a big show at Mershon [Auditorium], and I played Doolittle the father, and he had a lot of great numbers, and I got to do a lot of dancing and carrying on.” 

Vilanch had a great time in Columbus. “I loved being in Columbus,” he says. German Village was a constant stop. “Very artsy people were living there, and it wasn’t gentrified the way it is now. So, we would go down there with a group that did plays.” 

He finished his five-year program in 1970 minus a graduation ceremony. The school shut down early because of campus protests after the Kent State shootings. “It was probably the only time that the commencement speaker got a kill fee because they canceled,” he jokes. 

That speaker? “It was Walter Cronkite, and I think it cost them a little bit of money.” 

Vilanch’s next stop was the Chicago Tribune as a feature writer; that’s where he met Bette Midler when she was a newcomer performing at a local nightclub. He loved her act, but in his critique, he said she should talk more on stage because she was funny. She asked him to write some lines for her. 

He soon was off to Hollywood where he wrote for the Manhattan Transfer’s summer variety show. Then he moved on to writing for Donnie and Marie Osmond’s variety show, the Brady Bunch variety show, Sonny and Cher, and others. 

Vilanch first wrote for the Oscars telecast in 1989. He was one of the few survivors of a reviled program that included Rob Lowe and Snow White opening with a song medley. 

He had the title of head writer from 2000 to 2014. Vilanch is like a parent who doesn’t want to name a favorite child, but he thought the Hugh Jackman-hosted show was terrific, as were two or three of Billy Crystal’s, Steve Martin’s first show and Whoopi Goldberg’s. 

These days, Vilanch keeps busy with several projects. He just finished a book, “It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time,” about how he wrote some of the worst television shows—including the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special—but survived. 

He also co-wrote a musical, “Here You Come Again,” about a down-and-out waiter stuck in his parents’ home during COVID. The server tries to stay sane by talking to an imaginary Dolly Parton. 

The musical has two characters and 12 Parton songs. It has played in six venues around the country. “We’re going to see what happens with it; so far it’s been a hit every place, and audiences love it,” he says. 

Bruce Vilanch Discusses Some of His Famous Collaborators 

Bette Midler: “She’s one of the few performers I know who can turn on a dime. She can have you laughing hysterically one minute and crying the next.” 

Billy Crystal: “He’s the last of the vaudevillians. He can do everything. He can sing, dance, tell jokes. He can break your heart, and he can probably juggle. He’s a full-service performer.” 

Whoopi Goldberg: “She is unique. There’s nothing like her. She’s equal parts street and Upper East Side.” 

Robin Williams: “He was a force of nature, which is a cheap way of saying he was explosive. There’s nobody who was that fast and funny and congenial at the same time.” 

Cher: “She’s a survivor. She’s had hits in every single decade. She has managed to reinvent herself while still being Cher the whole time.” 

Steve Martin: “He’s an oddball. His stuff is at another level. He has a quality of absurdism about what he does.” 

Bruce Vilanch Recalls a College Prank by R.L. Stine

The Sundial was a campus humor magazine that loved to make fun of The Lantern, the student newspaper. Jovial Bob Stine was the irreverent editor of the magazine, and in one issue put an ad on the back page for a pizzeria offering cheap pizza. The phone number wasn’t the pizzeria’s; it was The Lantern city desk. 

“I was on the desk, and these calls kept coming in from every dorm for pizza orders,” Vilanch says. “I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. Of course, it was Jovial Bob, getting revenge for something we had written about him.” 

Jovial Bob became R.L. Stine, the author of the Goosebumps book series for young teens. 

This is an expanded version of a story from the October 2023 issue of Columbus Monthly. 

The post Comedy Writer Bruce Vilanch Reflects on His Journey from Ohio State to the Oscars Stage first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Bruce Vilanch has enjoyed what I’d call the ideal pop cultural existence: He’s written jokes for about two dozen Oscar ceremonies; he’s costarred in glamorous movies and insane Broadway spectacles (Mahogany, Hairspray); he took up Paul Lynde‘s mantle on Hollywood Squares; he’s become an icon himself thanks to his bright blond hair, red glasses, and goofy t-shirts; most fabulously, he’s relished casual and working relationships with everyone from Bette Midler to Lainie Kazan, the latter of whom costarred with him in the cute indie comedy Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay!! Though that movie was released in 2010, director Evgeny Afineevsky recently tried garnering the film greater distribution with the aid of a Kickstarter campaign. It’s a Bruce Vilanch/Lainie Kazan vehicle, guys. The world deserved to receive and cradle this.

To celebrate that effort, we phoned the awesome Vilanch to talk about working on that movie, the stars who’ve impressed him over the years, and the celebrity men who lived in his “cute boy cul de sac.”

TheBacklot: You shot Oy Vey, My Son is Gay!! back in 2010. What was the set like?
Bruce Vilanch: We shot in Spokane where I’d actually been before, but only for like a night. We were at a studio where they shoot a lot of Lifetime movies. They were very happy to see us because we were the only film to shoot there where no one in the plot had cancer. There were no women in jeopardy either; no one was being chased by her deranged Iraqi vet husband. No Post Traumatic Stress. It was a comedy, and they were relieved they could laugh. It was tremendous amount of fun, though it was the dead of winter, there were blizzards, and we pretended it was spring in New York. That cast: Lainie Kazan’s a riot, and Vinny Pastore, who you remember as Big Pussy from The Sopranos, Jai Rodriguez, Carmen Electra, such an eclectic group. We had a really good time. And it’s a throwback, a ’50s style of comedy.

TB: You’ve known Lainie Kazan for years, right?
BV: She’s an old, old friend of mine. We ended up working on a couple of movies, but we just knew each other for years. This was a chance to really hang out together intensely.

TB: I assume at this point in your life you’ve gotten to work with tons of people whose work you’d admired for years and years.
BV: Sometimes! It depends. In your mind’s eye you think they’ll going to be like their characters onstage or onscreen, but sometimes they’ll be all business. About 23 years ago I did a movie with Charles Durning, and at the time he was a very serious actor who had done all of those gangster pictures. He was a real tough guy. He was playing Santa Claus in this movie, and I was his elf. I was the elf who took steroids. I didn’t know what to expect from him, but he was hilarious and easygoing — and a great actor at the same time. He was nothing like the people he portrayed. One of the leads of the picture was seven years old and from Utah, because we were shooting around there. The second day of shooting, Charles said to me, “I was expecting a seven-year-old kid! Look what I got. Faye Dunaway.” He was going through the same thing I was; he was expecting one thing from his costar and got another.

TB: Do you have a favorite onstage moment?
BV: Oh, Hairspray. Two years of Hairspray onstage. I did Broadway for a year, then toured for a year. It was amazing. First of all, eight times a week with a different audience, it pushes an OCD button you didn’t know you had. Each show is different, and you find yourself making slight variations. I didn’t know that was what it was going to be like. You hear about people doing a robot version of a performance after six months on the same show, but for me, the minute I went out onstage I felt the excitement.

TB: I’m always interested to find out how knowledgeable pop culture historians like yourself stay interested in new media. Are you still excited by new, good movies, etc.?
BV: There are classics that I do watch over and over, but when you discover something that’s new that’s really good, you go completely crazy. You can’t get enough of it. If you close yourself off to the new stuff, then it’s over. You may as well find a Greek island that appeals to you and never emerge. I was watching the Tonys and saw Kinky Boots in Chicago when they were trying it out, and it’s fantastic. It’s a great show and has the same effect that Hairspray has. The audience goes through the roof, because it’s so artfully put together. They fall in love with the characters and want them to succeed. The writers have given them material to soar with. How can you not respond to that? If you become so jaded that you can’t respond to something that’s new, get your rope and do your Prometheus impression. Tie yourself to a rock and wait for high tide.

TB: Speaking of Kinky Boots, did you know Cyndi Lauper is an Oscar away from an EGOT?
BV: I hadn’t thought of that! I guess it’s true. I didn’t know that. They give out so many Emmys and so many Grammys, it’s almost hard to keep track. Now Cyndi’ll write a song for a movie and they’ll give her an Oscar, like Adele.

TB: Does that bother you, the way celebrities can phone in for an Oscar in the Best Song Category?
BV: No, because they’ve set up the category to work that way. The category was established back when there were lots of musicals and people were writing original songs for them. That period is long over. It used to be that people wrote a song for the closing credits, and at least they change that. Now it has to be somewhere in the body of the piece. It can’t be a song that gets tacked on at the end for an Oscar. Now it has to have more of a relationship to the actual movie. They bring top writers in, they write a song for the movie, and it’s not a song that they would write, you know, out of their soul. It’s a song they’re writing on assignment for a lot of money and the chance to have an Academy Award on their mantle. Those are the songs you’re getting a lot of the time. But the system has set itself up that way, so I don’t begrudge [the songwriters]. I mean, you can pretty much carry a movie and be nominated in the supporting category for political reasons and find yourself up against someone who had one four-minute scene and walks away with the picture. That’s the nature of it. That’s what they’ve set up. It’s possible for Judi Dench to win for one scene.

TB: Tatum O’Neal beat Madeline Kahn in Best Supporting Actress, which made no sense since Tatum is the star of Paper Moon.
BV: Exactly. It’s possible for someone nine-years-old to beat someone who had been in the business for 50 years. Tatum O’Neal also beat Sylvia Sidney that year.

TB: I’m glad to see you’re pretty encyclopedic about Oscar trivia still.
BV: [Laughs.] I’ve written 23 of the shows, so some of it does rub off.

TB: Do you have Oscars ceremony? One where you got to nail the perfect joke, etc.?
BV: I wish I could say that, but it’s never one line that makes the show. The Billy Crystal/Jack Palance year lives in memory because we threw away so much of the script and added new stuff as we went along. We rewrote it as we went along. That was pretty successful. There was the year that Quincy Jones produced, Whoopi hosted, and everything seemed to work. A lot of the time, the things you remember about the show are the spontaneous moments, the emotional moments, the stuff that can’t be scripted. That’s what people take away from the show. I thought the Hugh Jackman show was terrific. What I loved was Bill Condon’s idea of bringing out five previous winners in the four acting categories and each one singled out one of the nominees. It was a great idea, but it went by the wayside as it would have to because you run out of Oscar-winners. You run out of people who are willing to actually do that! Even though there are like 84 winning actresses — or less, really, because there are so many multiples — but a lot are dead or disinterested. Which will be the name of my memoirs, Dead or Disinterested.

TB: Right, there aren’t many Eva Marie Saint-types left.
BV: Exactly right. Best Supporting Actor was impossible to cast. There just aren’t that many who are left who would make sense, who the audience would look upon with reverence.

TB: You mentioned Charles Durning earlier, but have you met many legends who were much funnier than you expected?
BV: That’s a great question. Bette Davis? She was funny, but I kind of expected that. I suppose Peter O’Toole because he’s so famous for doing classic roles and big serious things, but later in his career he started doing some really brilliant comic stuff like My Favorite Year where he made fun of himself and that tradition of hammy classical actors. But that was a role, and I didn’t know that offstage he still had that card to play. Offstage, he is an extremely droll storyteller. I expected that he would just be beautiful and stoic. Actually, Laurence Olivier was like that too. I met him late in his life, but though he got kind of quiet, he’d tell stories that were brutally funny and do subtle impressions of other people. That was really unexpected.

TB: Is it possible for you to be starstruck anymore?
BV: Oh, sure. All the big ones of the golden age are gone, pretty much, there are very few left. But I’m starstruck when I meet certain legends. I get can get dazzled when I meet somebody like Lady Gaga, who has created this thing for herself. She’s so smart and so talented. I think it’s more being in the presence of someone like her, you see the wheels turn. That’s pretty fabulous. Anybody who pulls themselves together in what my mother calls “get-ups” — when she walks into a room, it’s hard not to pay attention. I guess anytime you meet somebody you know is genuinely talented and not just artifice, there’s a quality of being starstruck.

TB: My dream is for Lady Gaga to play Laura Nyro in a biopic. She’s be perfect.
BV: Wow. That would be great because Laura Nyro was it for me. I play her music almost every day, and I only met her once for a minute. I was with Bette Midler, we were on tour, and Laura Nyro happened to be playing in town. We couldn’t see her because for some reason are shows were on the same night. So they arranged for a dinner the next night, and that was that. She was everything that I’d heard she was. She was crazy and mercurial, and there were mood swings, and then she was gentle and tender, and then she was manic and nuts. It was all in the course of one dinner. I realized that I was probably better off just listening to the music.

TB: Is there anybody whose jokes make you think, ”Damn, I wish I’d written that”?
BV: Sometimes you hear someone else and think, “They sound so coherent!” I hear myself and think, “You sound like you were grasping for air.” But Cary Grant never sat and looked at his movies — while everyone else said, ‘Cary Grant!’ — he would look at himself and think, my tie’s crooked, a spot of makeup is off or something. I’m always comparing myself to people who for some reason seem more collected when they talk. I used to be the press, so I understand the dynamic.

TB: Selfish question: You were in Mahogany with Diana Ross and Anthony Perkins. Any stories to tell us about the mysterious Tony P.?
BV: Well, I don’t have many Anthony Perkins stories to share because they’re so dark and sexual. [Laughs.] That was a strange movie because it was Diana Ross’ second movie and Berry Gordy fired the director, who was only Tony Richardson. You can imagine the set. We shot everything, then we had to reshoot everything because the picture had to get to Rome, which was prettier than Chicago. Things got rewritten and re-done. This one scene I had, we wrote ourselves. We kept looking down at a piece of paper in front of us, and that’s why we keep looking down — to make sure we knew the lines. The plot had changed. He was a part of that whole thing. He didn’t have too much to shoot in Chicago. I knew him later on when I moved to California because we were neighbors.

TB: Tell me you’ve had some amazing neighbors in L.A.
BV: Over the years, yeah. A bizarre collection. I had tons of people — Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland. That’s a couple no one ever talks about anymore. They almost got married. It was almost Runaway Bride! I was in a cute boy cul de sac once with Scott Wolf, Ian Ziering, Christian Slater, and uh, Paul Reiser. They were all my cute boy neighbors. I would think, “Would one of you mow the lawn with your shirt off? It would liven things up.” But no. No, they all had help. They all had third-worlders who did that. Now Ian Ziering’s a guest stripper or guest host at Chippendale’s in Vegas for a limited engagement, running the show. He’s close to 50, so he’s bulked up. He’s musclebound up there with those guys. He’s in unbelievably fabulous shape. Though he has a small daughter he carries around, so that’s maybe how he stays in shape. He’s a cool guy and a sweetheart.

The post Bruce Vilanch Talks Movies, Oscars, And Cutie Pies first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Comedy writing pioneer Bruce Vilanch is bursting with gayness. One of the first openly gay comedians, he’s known for his continuing role on Hollywood Squares and as a head writer for the Academy Awards show, as well as writing jokes for Bette Midler, Elizabeth Taylor, The Brady Bunch, Donnie and Marie, and Lily Tomlin. (He’s also one of the criminals responsible for the atrocious Star Wars Holiday Special, but we’ll get into that later.)

Vilanch will be featured this Friday at Tracks Gay Comedy Night with Chuck Roy and Hippie Man. In advance of that appearance, we touched base with this iconic joke machine to chat about gay history, Comedy Central roasts and, inevitably, that awful Star Wars movie that everyone has tried so hard to forget about.

Westword: Even though it often gets overlooked for places like San Francisco or New York, it seems that Denver does have a significant place in gay history. Did you ever come through here when you were on the road in the ’70s and ’80s?

Bruce Vilanch: I was there when I toured with Bette Midler, and every show we did was a gay pride show in one way or another. We played Red Rocks in ’73, and Fiddler’s Green — all the outdoor venues, because it was such an outdoor act. So yeah, I’ve seen it evolve over the years. But you’re right: Everything lives in the shadow of San Francisco.

With so much of gay history being routed in the entertainment world of bars and cabarets, was there any standup comedy in there, particularly during the years you were coming up?

Not really. There was some, but not very much in the ’70s and ’80s. There were a lot of cabaret performers, who had a very gay style. I wrote for a lot of them; many were drag queens. Like Waylon Flowers, who had a drag queen puppet. But when the big comedy explosion happened in the ’80s, it was such a straight thing. So many people were still in the closet, and those clubs were a bastion of heterosexuality. The jokes were about dating girls and all that, so it was hard for a gay comic to be popular. But there were a few who broke through. Jason Stuart was one of the first ones.

Looking back, there was a significant amount of homophobia in the jokes that were popular at that time, like Sam Kinison’s AIDS jokes, or even Bill Hick’s bit about lesbians. Do you think that kept a lot of gay comedians in the closet?

Yeah, they were scared it would be a hostile environment. They didn’t want to be a part of it.

You still see some of that today in places like the Comedy Central roasts.

Yes, but many young people today aren’t bigots, because they don’t see people through the same lens. They don’t see the humor in it. So it’s slowly dying away. Now that an NBA player has come out, it’s more difficult to make those kinds of jokes. There will always be jokes about “types,” jokes about ethnicities, women, men — you can’t bleach the humor out of everything in the world, and someone will always be offended by something. But one of the things that is going away is the time-honored joke about being mistaken for being gay. Because what does it matter now?

But you were an out comedian a time when that did mean something. I was just listening to an interview with David Sedaris, and he was saying that in 1960s North Carolina it was literally the worst label you could have, saying he saw someone on TV he thought might be gay, but then assumed that person wasn’t because they wouldn’t allow a gay man on television.

Well, I grew up in New York, so it wasn’t the worst thing. New York was more sophisticated and more diverse. In North Carolina it might’ve been the worst thing, because that was the Bible Belt. The last bastion of homophobia is religious bigotry. The last argument left against same-sex marriage is religion. So if you come from a place like the South, in the era where David grew up, then of course it was the worst possible thing. But I came from New York, where being a Nazi was worse. Hands down.

When you started writing for movies and doing Hollywood Squares, was there complete comfort with being an out comedian?

I inherited what I call what I call Paul Lynde’s chair. There was always a gay presence on Hollywood Squares — but it was known as “the wacky neighbor,” “the eccentric uncle,” it was always unspoken. We all knew that these guys were gay — like Richard Simmons, Rip Taylor, Charles Nelson Reilly — they all did a certain kind of gay character. But they never referred to their sexuality. I was one of the first to actually talk about it, talk about guys I was dating.

I got in a lot of trouble with that, a lot of the affiliates in places like Texas didn’t want to hear any of that. I would get feedback from the producers saying that the guy who runs a station in Waco, Texas, called saying, “He’s very funny, but why must he be so gay?” But those were usually the same people who called about Whoopi and asked, why must she be so black?

That’s part of the reason Ellen DeGeneres‘s sitcom got cancelled. She’d told the network that as soon as I come out, who am I going to date on the show? I’m going to have to start dating other women. Why don’t you just take the show off the air after the coming-out episode, because you’re not going to be happy. And they said no, that the ratings were too great. Well, exactly what she prophesied came to pass — six months later they dumped the show. And it was for all the reasons she said they would.

Beyond your character, you’re known primarily for writing jokes for other comics. And while I don’t want to say there’s a specifically gay personality type, there often can be a kind of gay comedy style. Did you inject any of that flavor into the jokes you were writing for straight comics?

Probably. But it wasn’t deliberate. It was probably just the mindset I was in. Some of the things I wrote for Whoopi had a certain gay slant. We had one joke on the Oscars after she’d dressed as Queen Elizabeth, and she said, “Sorry, I had to get out of that costume. You can’t rush a queen — if you’ve ever had you’re hair done, you know you can’t rush a queen.” So it was a joke about how all gay people are hairdressers. It was a joke in quotes. I’ve done that here and there.

I certainly did that when Bette was starting. The voice that the Divine Miss M had was the voice of a gay man. Which was what made her so entertaining, among other things. You didn’t hear a woman speak like that — you heard a lot of men speak like that, if you were paying attention. One of the reasons she was attracted to that, was it was about being on the outside looking in. As a woman she was on the outside looking at all the beautiful people saying, “I’m beautiful too, you just don’t know it yet.” And that’s a very traditional gay thing, and a traditional Jewish thing: I can’t be a part of your world, so I’m going to create my own world.”

You’ve also written a lot for Robin Williams, and it seems like that gay flavor of comedy works very well for him, too. Even though he’s a straight male.

That’s true, he does have that attitude. I was going to say he’s pansexual, but that’s not quite right — he’s Peter Pan-sexual. He adopts all kinds of attitudes. And when he suddenly spews them out they’re fully formed characters. You know exactly who that guy or that woman is that he’s doing, but he’ll only give you two lines. It’s an entire character in two lines, and then he’ll move onto the next one — that’s his genius.

There’s one thing I want to touch on that has nothing to do with gay culture, it’s more for my own personal curiosity: You were involved in writing The Star Wars Holiday Special.

God yes, and proud of it!

Seriously?

Sure. I’m writing a book write now, and I’m thinking of titling it: How I Wrote the Three Worst Television Shows in History. There’s The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, which is a work of rare art. And there are so many vying for third place. They tend to be the ones I hear the most about from people. They look me up on IMDB and say, “Oh, my god, you did that? That was so awful!”

As a big Star Wars geek, one of the many failures that stands out to me about The Holiday Special is the idea — whoever was responsible for it — that a family of wookies could be entertaining in a domestic setting. I mean, the first twenty minutes of the film has no English dialogue, it’s all wookies grunting at each other. Who thought a wookies could carry a movie with lead roles?

That was George Lucas’s idea. I’ll probably tell the story on Friday night. George had about ten stories ready to go, and six of them he sold off as films, and The Holiday Special was the last one left in the pile. I don’t think even he thought it was going to be done anywhere.

He buried it forever, but then people put it on the Internet. So a whole generation of kids who had grown up watching the first three movies on their VCRs discovered there was this thing they never knew existed, that was done before many of them were probably born. And they looked at it and said, “Holy shit! What a desecration — how could he!” And they went after him for it. Chatrooms were lit aflame.

Bruce Vilanch will perform with Chuck Roy and Hippie Man at 8 p.m., Friday, May 17, at Tracks, 3500 Walnut Street. Tickets are $20: for more information visit www.tracksdenver.com

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The post Bruce Vilanch Talks Gay Comedy And More… first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

BRUCE VILANCH – one of the most sought-after jokesmiths in the entertainment industry – is performing LIVE at the EXDO Event Center as Tracks presents “Gay Comedy Night with Bruce Vilanch” on Friday, May 17th at 8pm (doors open 7pm). Also performing are Denver-based comedians Chuck Roy and Hippieman.

Tickets for this comedy spectacle are only $15 presale ($20 at the door) and all presale ticket holders get to meet Bruce. All ticket purchases include free entry into the Tracks Nightclub.

ABOUT BRUCE VILANCH

Known for his eclectic eyewear and collection of unique T-shirts, Bruce Vilanch began as a child model for Lane Bryant, but soon he became an entertainment writer for the Chicago Tribune. Impressed by his review of her cabaret performance in 1970, Bette Midler hired him to punch up her act where he gave birth to Midler’s famed Sophie Tucker jokes. He later moved to Los Angeles where he wrote for variety shows like the original “Donny and Marie” and “The Brady Bunch Hour” (both ABC) and provided material for Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin and Joan Rivers. He maintained his connection with Midler through the years, working on such projects as the feature “Divine Madness” (1980) and the TV special “Bette Midler–Diva Las Vegas” (HBO, 1997), as well as writing for her short-lived but lively sitcom, “Bette!” (CBS, 2000).

Bruce Vilanch began contributing to Academy Awards telecasts in 1989, collaborating with the likes of Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and David Letterman, graduating to head writer in 2000. He has roasted celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and President Clinton. He has also scripted most of the Academy Awards telecasts over the last decade, two of which won Emmys, including the one featuring Billy Crystal’s Hannibal Lecter entrance. Mr. Vilanch has also written for The Tony’s, The Grammy’s, and The Emmy’s, to name few. He also participates and volunteers at almost every charity function, especially those dealing with GLBT issues.

ABOUT CHUCK ROY

Chuck Roy is “The Bear”, a comedian and host of some of the biggest shows at Comedy Works. Chuck’s TV credits include “Will & Grace,” “3rd Rock from the Sun” and “Last Comic Standing.” This year Chuck co-stars in EUGE!, a new internet radio show starring Eugene Kenny Monday nights at 6pm on tRadioV.com. Chuck joins this podcast of veteran comedians to quiz an amateur comic about upcoming gigs, joke ideas and PR strategy.

ABOUT HIPPIEMAN

John Novosad, a.k.a. “Hippieman” is a stand-up comedian based out of the Comedy Works in Denver, Colorado. John has performed in clubs, theatres and weird little coffee houses across the country for almost three decades. Yes, there were some day jobs along the way.

John grew up in Boulder, Colorado – which is a damn good place to be from if you’re Hippieman. He made his comedic debut sometime around 1980 at the Blue Note in Boulder. John has toured extensively over the years and continues to do so. He’s also a featured performer at The Comedy Works, sharing the stage with some of the biggest national acts working today.

The post Comedy Night With Bruce Vilanch At Tracks, Denver, May 17, Friday first appeared on We Got Bruce!.