Pretty Mixed Up

George Gobel's sudden TV popularity is as baffling as a common cold: everybody gets it, but nobody can explain it. A mild-voiced, crewcut, anonymous sort of a man, he says: "The trouble with me is, people don't remember who I am. I guess I don't make a good impression. When I go to a party, nobody says hello; but when I leave, everybody says goodbye."

One night last week 34-year-old Gobel stood in front of a television camera. For a moment, he seemed like a well-dressed but bewildered boy who had come to deliver coffee and sandwiches to the TV crew, but who somehow had got in the way of the lens. "I am proud to announce,'' he said, "that this program is being beamed to our armed forces at Helsing's Bar and Grill. And let me say something to our fighting men there. Men, stop fighting."

Hold Your Horse? This low-pressure Gobeldygook comes naturally to George. "It's interesting how I got to be called George Gobel," he told TViewers on one show. "One day Dad called all 16 of us children into the living room and said, 'O.K., now, which one of you kids wants to be George Gobel?' I wanted to be Douglas Fairbanks Jr. But that was already taken."

George had a loud singing voice when he was a child. At eight, he was using it in church choirs around Chicago. When he finished Roosevelt High School ("I was voted most likely to dissolve"), he got started in radio as a singer and guitarist on barn dance shows and managed to keep busy as a vocalist at weddings and bazaars. He even had some acting jobs on radio, but they were only bit parts. On the Tom Mix Show, for instance, Gobel was always the boy who said plaintively, "I'll hold your horse for you, Tom."

During World War II, Flight Instructor Gobel spent much of his spare time working out comedy routines, later found work delivering sober-faced, simple monologues in Chicago nightclubs. Then he made some of the better-known TV shows (Ed Sullivan, Hoagy Carmichael) as a guest comic. He was the big splash last month on David 0. Selznick's four-network TV show Diamond Jubilee of Light (TIME, Nov. 8), delivering a deadpan talk on electronic brains that probably set science back three centuries.

Lack of Format. Last year NBC signed him, but spent months trying to work out a proper format for his peculiar, shapeless brand of comedy. It was a tough job, since no one, including Gobel, could pin down his style. "I don't think it's like anybody else's," he says. "I didn't think about it until other people started describing it. They described it in so many ways, I get kind of mixed up. I guess it's offbeat, casual. I get a line I figure will be funny or not, and I don't try to figure it out.

"What we have now is not a format, but a lack of format, which makes it different. Sometimes the guest on my show will be in from the very beginning, sometimes not. It's a mixture of sketch and story line. It's pretty mixed up."

Now that his new network show (Sat. 10 p.m., E.S.T.) is under way and gaining steadily (Plymouth, sponsors of CBS's opposing program, That's My Boy, canceled out last week), Gobel likes to submit himself to a characteristic reverie. Says he: "Walter Winchell has been a great blessing to the cancer drive, Bob Hope's been doin' great work for cerebral palsy, and Eddie Cantor is the big boost for the heart fund. By the time I get started, all the good diseases will be taken."

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