Richard Belzer
- Birthday
- Aug 4, 1944
Bio: Launching his career as a standup comic, American performer Richard Belzer entered the 1970s as a member of an odd New York-based comedy troupe called Channel One. Anticipating the home video explosion by over a decade, Channel One staged satirical, scatological routines lampooning the banalities of television -- and staged them in front of TV cameras, which… More Bio: Launching his career as a standup comic, American performer Richard Belzer entered the 1970s as a member of an odd New York-based comedy troupe called Channel One. Anticipating the home video explosion by over a decade, Channel One staged satirical, scatological routines lampooning the banalities of television -- and staged them in front of TV cameras, which transmitted the routines to little TV monitors, which in turn were watched by the live audience. Some of the best sketches were assembled into an X-rated comedy feature, The Groove Tube (1970), which featured Belzer, Ken Shapiro, and a brash newcomer named Chevy Chase. For the next decade, Belzer played the comedy-club circuit, popped up as a talkshow guest, and appeared in occasional films like Fame (1982). He joined still another comedy troupe in 1983, which appeared nightly on the syndicated interview program Thicke of the Night. The host was Allan Thicke, and Belzer's comic cohorts included such incipient stars as Charles Fleischer, Chloe Webb and Gilbert Gottfried. Thicke of the Night was one of the more notorious bombs of the 1983-84 season, but it enabled Belzer to secure better guest-star bookings, and ultimately a hosting job on his own program, debuting in 1986 over the Lifetime Cable Service. It was on this series that wrestler Hulk Hogan, demonstrating a stranglehold on Belzer caused the host to lose consciousness -- which prompted a highly publicized lawsuit instigated by Belzer against the Hulkster. In the early 1990s, Richard Belzer could be seen as a non-comic regular on the TV series Homicide. His Homicide character, John Munch, would become one of the longest-running fictional creations on TV appearing in more than a half-dozen other television shows, most notably Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Filmography
-
Polish Bar (2013)
- Actor
-
Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis (2012)
- Actor
- 60%
-
Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work (2010)
- Actor
- 91%
-
Off And Running (2009)
- Milt Zoloth
- 87%
-
My Dog: An Unconditional Love Story (2009)
- Actor
- See all 47 films
Richard Belzer Videos
My Dog: An Unconditional Love Story
1 minutes 5 seconds
Man On The Moon
3 minutes 31 seconds
Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work
2 minutes 30 seconds
North
2 minutes 26 seconds
Species II
2 minutes 39 seconds
Born Today
- Alfred Molina (60 years old)
- Ray Stevenson (49 years old)
- Eric Close (46 years old)
- John C. Reilly (48 years old)
- Cecilia Cheung (33 years old)
- Kristin Scott Thomas (53 years old)
- Tommy Chong (75 years old)
- Jim Broadbent (64 years old)
- Michael Lonsdale (82 years old)
- Cayden Boyd (19 years old)
- Seijun Suzuki (90 years old)
- Sybil Danning (66 years old)
- Doug Jones (53 years old)
- Gary Burghoff (70 years old)
- Will Sasso (38 years old)
- Bryan Greenberg (35 years old)
- Dash Mihok (39 years old)
- Priscilla Presley (68 years old)
- Déborah François (26 years old)
- Jean-Pierre Bacri (62 years old)
- Billy Gilman (25 years old)
- Nell Campbell (60 years old)
- Bob Dylan (72 years old)
- Patti LaBelle (69 years old)
- See more (24)
