Actually, Tony, those posts by Jaime and the others are from 2002. But you're right: he and several others are badly missed here. Back then, this was a much more lively place. Now it's essentially an archive for Wellesnet Facebook, but here are some good recent quotes from there:
Thanks to Tom Sutpen on Wellesnet Facebook for this quote:
"(The Dean Martin Roast) was a dais of despair. They sat at banquet tables at either side of the podium: the undead of dreamland and the fleeting stars of the television seasons, each rising in turn, at the beckoning of Dean or his bloated sidekick, Orson Welles, to deliver the moribund jokes consigned to him for the occasion. Taped in part at the NBC Studio in Burbank and partly at the Ziegfeld Room of the MGM Grand in Vegas, guests often delivered their lines to empty chairs or pretended spontaneous laughter at words that had been uttered in another state. As many as a thousand cut-and-paste edits were done to give each show the illusion that everyone was together in the same place at the same time. But no amount of editing could vanquish the pervasive air of hollow artificiality that came through. The forced attempts at humor came from a ten-writer assembly line; only Jonathan Winters and Don Rickles were ever allowed to write their own material. The jokes were so bad and the canned laughter so false, and that pervading hollow artificiality so funereal, that the shows had the quality of a relentlessly monotonous but vaguely disquieting dream."
-- Nick Tosches
***
Rich Little, who unlike Tosches was actually there, recalled it a little differently an interview with the Delaware County News:
“They wrote jokes for everybody except Don Rickles,” he says. “They didn’t write anything for Rickles. Now, you could use all of the material, or just some of it. I used to use some of it and then do a lot of my own. There were no rules. But everybody was given a script with jokes.”
Little says that some of the performances were so bad that they were cut from the broadcast entirely.
“If you look at some of the long shots of the dais, you’ll see people that never spoke,” he says. “If you weren’t a big enough name and you just laid an egg, they would just take you out of the show completely.”
The magic of editing also added performers to the show that weren’t really there.
“They had guest stars on there that I never met,” Little says. “They weren’t on the dais; they were put in later at NBC. They would film the podium and Dean sitting there. When they introduced them, they go to a tight close-up, so when they stood up, they were above where the people would be on the dais. Then they walked to the podium in a tight shot. A couple of times they would show that person next to Dean. That’s how they put them in the show. I never saw them. I don’t think I ever worked with [Ronald] Reagan at all. I was on a number of shows that Reagan was on, but I never saw him at the roasts.”
***
Here's an interesting quote from Orson Welles on The Dinah Shore Show. He's referring to sitcoms, but what he says about the laugh track could apply to the Dean Martin Roasts as well:
"Anybody that deals with a real audience, as I have...I've been hissed and booed, I've had things thrown at me. Until you've had that experience, you don't understand what dealing with an audience is. Nowadays, everything is a happy ending. In television, everything is happy. The commercial is happy. You get the right soap suds and the husband loves you again. Car chase finishes, the villains are dead; in one hour everything is solved. We live in a world of happy endings, with audiences that make every show, no matter how doomed it is and ready to be cancelled, sound like a smash hit.
And if a comedy isn't a smash hit they have a little black box full of laughter, and they add that to the jokes. And you know that most of the people laughing on that box died long ago. Now think of that, when you see your next sitcom, and you hear those merry peals of laughter, echoing out of the graveyard."
