LOS ANGELES–The Rat Pack once was the coolest group of entertainers on the planet – Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. Oh, yeah, and a stone-faced comedian named Joey Bishop.
It was Bishop with his deadpan delivery, dead-on timing and bottomless pit of jokes, who was "the hub of the big wheel," according to Rat Pack leader Sinatra himself.
Bishop, who also starred on two TV shows throughout most of the 1960s, died Wednesday at age 89. He turned out to be the Rat Pack's last man standing, outliving Sinatra, Martin, Davis and Lawford.
The Rat Packers were a show business sensation by the early 1960s, when they appeared together at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in shows that combined music and comedy in a seemingly chaotic manner.
"In reality, he wrote almost all the jokes they all did,'' fellow comedian Sandy Hackett said yesterday. "He'd come up with something funny and they'd go, `That was great, Joey,' and then the next night one of them would use it and he'd have to come up with another joke.''
Bishop starred in two TV programs, both called The Joey Bishop Show. In the first, a sitcom that aired from 1961 to 1965, he played a TV talk show host. In the second, he really was one. That program was started in 1967 as a late-night challenge to Johnny Carson's immensely popular Tonight show.
The show was cancelled after 2 1/2 years, and Bishop became a popular substitute host for Carson.
