Irving Benson is an American actor and comedian. He is one of the last survivors of the vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 era.
Having enjoyed a long and successful run on the east coast American Burlesque

American burlesque

American Burlesque is a genre of variety show. Derived from elements of Victorian burlesque, music hall and minstrel shows, burlesque shows in America became popular in the 1860s and evolved to feature ribald comedy and female striptease...

 circuit, Irv Benson travelled west to play Las Vegas for the first time in 1957, with the Minsky Follies show. Benson gained significant national exposure during the 1960s, when fellow vaudevillian Milton Berle

Milton Berle

Milton Berlinger , better known as Milton Berle, was an American comedian and actor. As the manic host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater , in 1948 he was the first major star of U.S. television and as such became known as Uncle Miltie and Mr...

hired him to play a faux heckler named Sidney Spritzer. The character would turn up in the balcony overlooking the stage of Berle's variety show (where the studio audience could see him) and banter with Berle about the host's alleged lack of talent and originality.
Most recently he was honored for Best Documentary at the 2011 Backlot Film Festival for "The Last First Comic" uncovering the roots of American comedy also going inside the colorful world of the Burlesque show.

External links

• IMDB entry for Irving Benson
• An example
• Last First Comic

http://www.thelastfirstcomic.com/testimonials.html