Friars Club chest awarded to Joey Bishop
date: label: date made
content: around 1968
notes: label: Description
content: Small wooden treasure awarded to Joey Bishop by the Friars Club in 1968. The chest is painted brown with gold detailing. A plate engraved "Friar Joey Bishop" is attached to the top of the chest. The chest has a hinged lid that opens to reveal a King's Ransom Scotch whiskey bottle and has three glasses, one tumbler, and two shot glasses.
label: Description
content: The Friars club is a private club for entertainers headquartered in New York City. It is best known for staging roasts of celebrity guests.
label: Description
content: A comedian, actor, and sometimes singer, Joey Bishop was a fixture in American entertainment from the 1960s through the 1980s. Bishop was born in the Bronx in 1918 and served in the Army during World War II. After Frank Sinatra saw him performing comedy at the Latin Quarter club in Manhattan, he asked Bishop to start opening for him, and Bishop became known as “Sinatra’s comic.” As a member of the famed “Rat Pack” alongside Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford, Bishop appeared in <i>Ocean’s Eleven</i> (1960) and <i>Sergeants 3</i> (1962). Independently, Joey Bishop was an influential comedian and entertainer known for his affable yet deadpan and dry sense of humor. Bishop's comedy included ad libs and his catch phrase "Son of a gun!" Alongside contemporaries like Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman, Bishop inspired a new generation of observational comics and helped to transform Las Vegas into a major entertainment destination. He appeared with the rest of the Rat Pack during their Las Vegas residency in the early 1960s, which helped bring national attention to the then-fledgling entertainment culture in the city. Bishop starred in an eponymous television sitcom that aired on NBC from 1961-1964 and hosted his own late-night talk show from 1967-1969. Throughout the 1970s, he frequently appeared as a guest star on television and guest host on <i> The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson</i> at least 175 times. Bishop died in 2007 and was the last living member of the Rat Pack.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: New York, New York City
topic: label: Subject
content: Comedy
setName: label: See more items in
content: Culture and the Arts: Entertainment
label: See more items in
content: Popular Entertainment
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2019.0291.03
label: catalog number
content: 2019.0291.03
label: accession number
content: 2019.0291
objectType: label: Object Name
content: chest
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: wood (chest material)
label: Physical Description
content: metal (fixtures and bottle cap material)
label: Physical Description
content: glass (glasses and bottle material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 27 in x 8 in x 5 in; 68.58 cm x 20.32 cm x 12.7 cm