You can find all kinds of clips and audio recordings from ’50s and ’60s TV shows on YouTube. Damn near anything and everything. But I can’t find a single clip of a falsetto-voiced Steve Allen saying “schmock, schmock!” And that’s a huge deal. “Schmock, schmock!” was arguably Allen’s signature line, certainly when he was hosting his Hollywood-based talk show in the early to mid ’60s.
After chatting with Allen at the House of Blues some 27 or 28 years ago, I bade farewell with my own falsetto-voiced “smock!” There was no one else in the entire world I would have dared speak to like a three-year-old, but I did so with Allen without blinking. He chuckled right away and gestured approval.
