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Jackie Gleason was a pioneer of television comedy. "The Honeymooners" and "The Jackie Gleason Show" have been audience favorites for more than half a century.
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Richard Pryor - Comedy Pioneer
Actress-Director Rain Pryor talks about how her father Richard Pryor was a comedy pioneer with his raw stand-up performances and honest critiques of race.
Richard Pryor - Comedic Influences
Actress-Director Rain Pryor talks about her father Richard Pryor's comedic influences including Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Gleason and Bill Cosby and the comedians who have been inspired by him like Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Steve Harvey.
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Play NowJackie Gleason. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 11:58, May 18, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/jackie-gleason-9542440.
Jackie Gleason. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/jackie-gleason-9542440 [Accessed 18 May 2013].
"Jackie Gleason." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 18 2013, 11:58 http://www.biography.com/people/jackie-gleason-9542440.
"Jackie Gleason," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/jackie-gleason-9542440 [accessed May 18, 2013].
"Jackie Gleason," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/jackie-gleason-9542440 (accessed May 18, 2013).
Jackie Gleason [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 18] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/jackie-gleason-9542440.
Jackie Gleason, http://www.biography.com/people/jackie-gleason-9542440 (last visited May 18, 2013).
Jackie Gleason. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/jackie-gleason-9542440. Accessed May 18, 2013.
This innovation, however, never materialized. Instead, Gleason returned to his comedy-variety formula, complete with the opening dance number and his old repertoire of sketch characters. The title soon reverted to The Jackie Gleason Show. In 1966, he was rejoined by Art Carney and Audrey Meadows for new hour-long episodes of The Honeymooners. These had little of the verve of the originals,
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but their nostalgic appeal to older viewers kept the show on the air through 1970, making Gleason one of the longest-lasting of the pioneer TV comedy stars. A second marriage, to Beverly McKittrick, in July 1971, ended in divorce in 1974. The next year Gleason, wed choreographer Marilyn Taylor, the sister of June Taylor.
After spending much of the 1970s in enforced retirement, Gleason successfully returned to feature films as Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Burt Reynolds comedy Smokey and the Bandit (1977), reprising the role in the 1980 and 1983 sequels it spawned. A new generation was introduced to Gleason as a cantankerous, drawling redneck lawman in a squad car. If Ralph Kramden had been culled from Gleason's Brooklyn childhood, Sheriff Justice was a comparable product of his later years in Florida. Following the success of these films, he began to work regularly in movies again, appearing in The Toy (1982), The Sting II (1983), Nothing in Common (1986), costarring Tom Hanks, and Izzy and Moe, the latter a 1985 television movie that reunited him with Art Carney. Gleason died of heart failure on June 24, 1987, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and is buried at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Cemetery in Miami, Florida.
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