Dick Shawn

Dick Shawn was an American actor and comedian who worked as a character performer and stand-up for decades. Born in Buffalo, New York, and raised in Lackawanna, he spent more than thirty-five years playing nightclubs worldwide with a comedy act. His award-winning solo stage production, The Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World, was known for a startling entrance in which he emerged from a pile of bricks. Shawn appeared in more than thirty movies and seven Broadway shows, and from the 1960s through the 1980s he worked often on television. In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), he portrayed Sylvester Marcus, one of his caricatures of counterculture figures. For The Producers (1968), he earned accolades as Lorenzo Saint DuBois, called LSD, an actor who wins the role of Hitler in a show meant to fail. He also guest-hosted The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.