Drunk Airline Pilot - Dean Martin & Foster Brooks

by Lara on October 24th, 2007

This cracked me up from the very beginning… “Schenectady” is about 15 minutes down the road from me, and when people use that city in a joke, it just is too hilarious to me. I didn’t know much about Foster Brooks until getting into Dean Martin and the “clean comedy” of the era - simply because I was born about 40 years too late to know it, but this is just hilarious. Especially given that Foster Brooks never drank, but he sure as hell knew how to play drunk! And the fact that Dean’s sitting there with a hankie and wiping the tears from his eyes from laughing so hard… well, you just know it’s good.

For what it’s worth, and not that it’s the point of my posting this clip for you, but Schenectady is the home of television, GE, Thomas Edison’s “Machine Works”, and Proctor’s Theater, where my dad took me for my 30th birthday to see a Rat Pack tribute show that I utterly adored. The thing that makes this so funny to me, is that Schenectady is kind of a run down place nowadays. Parts of it are nice, like the area where my mom lives and some of the “outskirts”, and I’m quite sure it was a great city back when Dean and Foster did this skit, but it’s just not so anymore… so the fact that it got brought up in the first line of a comedy skit is quirky enough to me to garner some laughter off the bat. :)

Anyway, here ya go: