1911–1980 · American humorist, teacher and television host
Samuel Levenson was an American humorist, writer, teacher, television host and journalist. He grew up in a large Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, graduated from Brooklyn College in 1934 and taught high-school Spanish for fifteen years before comedy became the job. From 1949 he was a fixture on CBS — a panellist on This Is Show Business, host of Two for the Money and of The Sam Levenson Show, and a guest on The Ed Sullivan Show twenty-one times. His material was almost entirely domestic: parents, children, relatives and the indignities of both. That is why this joke is so plausibly his, and why it travelled so well without him.