Trivia: "Pound for pound, Jonathan Winters is the funniest man on earth." These words, spoken by talk show host Jack Paar in the early '60s, were not chosen lightly. After war service and graduation from Kenyon College, Winters began his career on a radio station in his hometown of Dayton, OH. The rotund comedian was supposed to merely introduce the records and announce the temperature, but ever so gradually his irrepressible ad-libs and improvisations took over the show. His TV career began on CBS's daytime The Garry Moore Show, where he introduced such imperishable characters as freewheeling senior citizen Maude Frickert and doltish Elwood P. Suggins. He was a regular on the 1955 summer series And Here's the Show, and in 1956 landed his own 15-minute NBC series (the first network program to be regularly videotaped). Though never less than side-splittingly funny on camera, Winters was plagued by severe emotional problems in real life, not the least of which was his reliance on what he called "the sauce." After a highly publicized sanitarium stay, a clean and sober Winters returned to TV, though it would be 1967 before any network would take a chance on his headlining a regular weekly show (during the 1964-1965 season, he starred in a group of well-received specials, and was also a frequent guest on The Tonight Show, The Jack Paar Program, and The Andy Williams Show). During the early '60s, Winters' recorded bits began frequently popping up on the NBC radio series Monitor, and in 1963, he made his movie debut in the all-star It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). In answer to critics who felt that Winters was tied down by scripted material, the comedian starred in the two-season syndicated weekly The Wacky World of Jonathan Winters (1972-1973), which was completely ad-libbed. Many young comics of the 1970s and 1980s have declared that Winters was a prime influence in their choice of career. No comedian was more vocal in his praise of Winters than Robin Williams, who in 1981 arranged for Winters to be cast as overgrown baby Mearth on Williams' popular sitcom Mork and Mindy. Jonathan Winters remained as funny and active as ever into the 1990s, making uproarious appearances on Jay Leno's Tonight Show and co-starring in such big-budget theatrical films as The Shadow (1994). He played multiple parts in the 2000 big-screen version of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and in 2007 he was the center of Certifiably Jonathan. In 2011 he was tapped to provide the voice of Papa Smurf in the big-screen adaptation of the popular '80s animated show The Smurfs. He reprised his role in the 2013 sequel, but passed away at age 87 in April of that year, before the movie was released.

Trivia: Commenting on his notorious on-set irascibility in 1977, Jack Klugman replied that he was merely "taking Peter Falk lessons from Robert Blake," invoking the names of two other allegedly hard-to-please TV stars. Klugman grew up in Philadelphia, and after taking in a 1939 performance by New York's Group Theatre, Klugman decided that an actor's life was right up his alley. He majored in drama at Carnegie Tech and studied acting at the American Theatre Wing before making his (non-salaried) 1949 stage-debut at the Equity Library Theater. While sharing a New York flat with fellow hopeful Charles Bronson, Klugman took several "grub" jobs to survive, at one point selling his blood for $85 a pint. During television's so-called Golden Age, Klugman appeared in as many as 400 TV shows. He made his film debut in 1956, and three years later co-starred with Ethel Merman in the original Broadway production of Gypsy. In 1964, Klugman won the first of his Emmy awards for his performance in "Blacklist," an episode of the TV series The Defenders; that same year, he starred in his first sitcom, the 13-week wonder Harris Against the World. Far more successful was his next TV series, The Odd Couple, which ran from 1970 through 1974; Klugman won two Emmies for his portrayal of incorrigible slob Oscar Madison (he'd previously essayed the role when he replaced Walter Matthau in the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon play). It was during Odd Couple's run that the network "suits" got their first real taste of Klugman's savage indignation, when he and co-star Tony Randall threatened to boycott the show unless the idiotic laughtrack was removed (Klugman and Randall won that round; from 1971 onward, Odd Couple was filmed before a live audience). It was but a foretaste of things to come during Klugman's six-year (1977-83) reign as star of Quincy, M.E.. Popular though Klugman was in the role of the crusading, speechifying LA County Coroner's Office medical examiner R. Quincy, he hardly endeared himself to the producers when he vented his anger against their creative decisions in the pages of TV Guide. Nor was he warmly regarded by the Writer's Guild when he complained about the paucity of high-quality scripts (he wrote several Quincy episodes himself, with mixed results). After Quincy's cancellation, Klugman starred in the Broadway play I'm Not Rappaport and co-starred with John Stamos in the 1986 sitcom You Again?. The future of Klugman's career -- and his future, period -- was sorely threatened when he underwent throat surgery in 1989. He'd been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx as early as 1974, but at that time was able to continue working after a small growth was removed. For several years after the 1989 operation, Klugman was unable to speak, though he soon regained this ability. He continued working through 2011, and died the following year at age 90.