Billy Crystal
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For the American political commentator and dick, see William Kristol at Wikipedia
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Personal life
As anyone who's seen his one-man show 700 Sundays -- or has merely heard him speak for five minutes -- knows, he's Jewish, he grew up in New York in a large Jewish family that he loved to perform for, he’s Jewish, he’s obsessed with baseball (particularly the New York Yankees, which is – as most sports teams are – basically a big bunch of dicks), and he’s Jewish.
Career
“Face”
For many, their first exposure to the obscenely-eager-to-please Crystal came in the mid-70s with his “Face” routine, in which he pretended to be an old black jazz man who incessantly repeated the lines, “Can you dig it? I knew that you could.” This was Crystal’s first bid for the catchphrase immortality that would elude him for another decade.
Soap
His character was gay. Big deal.
Rabbit Test
Crystal made his film debut as a pregnant man in dick Joan Rivers’s directorial debut (and swan song) Rabbit Test, beginning a career-long association with terrible movies that went on to include Memories Of Me, Forget Paris, Father’s Day, My Giant, and America’s Sweethearts.
The Billy Crystal Comedy Hour
The NBC show premiered at the end of January 1982 and ran all the way through the end of the following month.
Saturday Night Live
Crystal was originally scheduled to appear on the first episode of the show on October 11, 1975, but when producer and then-budding dick Lorne Michaels told him he’d have to cut his five minute routine down to two, he stormed off in a huff. As writers Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad put it in their book about the show, Saturday Night, “Instead of making his network television debut, Crystal was soon riding a train home to Long Island, his face pressed against the window, wondering how things could have gone so wrong.”
In 1984, he joined the cast, along with Martin Short, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, all of whom – unlike Crystal – are actually funny. During his year on the show, he finally achieved the catchphrase success he’d been craving with his cutting-edge Fernando Lamas impression and its recurring signature, “You look mah-velous.” Lamas’s widow, Esther Williams, was not amused, declaring herself “awfully tired of people coming up to me and saying, ‘You look mahvelous, dahling.’” Williams complained about Crystal to People, saying, “It’s the frequency, the unrelenting constancy of it. In the past few weeks, he was on Good Morning America, David Letterman, Today and 20/20. He was even on the 11 O'Clock News. Everywhere I looked there was a ridiculing kind of imitation of my nice, strong, smart husband. Once or twice, or to be part of a repertoire like Rich Little's is okay, but to make a career out of a man who is gone. . . ."
At the end of the 1984-85 season, NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff called and asked Crystal if he wanted to be the permanent host of the show. Crystal was thrilled. The next day, it was announced that dick producer Dick Ebersol – a friend of dick Don Ohlmeyer, who was the loyal-to-an-absurd-degree friend of murdering dick O.J. Simpson – was leaving the show and original producer (and now full-blown dick) Lorne Michaels was returning. Michaels wasn’t interested in Crystal as a permanent host, or even in keeping Crystal on the show at all. By now, Crystal had learned to handle disappointment better, so this time, instead of smushing his punim against the glass of a Long Island Rail Road car, he embarked on a movie career.
Mr. Saturday Night
Though Crystal has appeared in several successful movies – When Harry Met Sally … (directed by his friend dick Rob Reiner), City Slickers, City Slickers II, Analyze This, Analyze That, and the (probably) forthcoming Analyze The Other Thing – he is most closely linked to his directorial debut Mr. Saturday Night, a wildly self-indulgent fiasco that looked back at the life of a now-old Borscht Belt comic, providing Crystal with just the excuse he needed to appear on screen in some of the worst makeup in cinema history.
The Oscars
Crystal is an eight-time host of the Academy Awards broadcast, where his propensity to run jokes into the ground and then keep stomping on them peaked in 1992 with his countless callbacks to Jack Palance’s push-ups. He hasn’t hosted since 2004, so watch out – he’s due.
Awards
In 2007, Crystal received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The irony of this is that Crystal is in no way funny.
Thin Skin
Crystal is notoriously thin-skinned, so it would be good if this article were somehow brought to his attention.
