Trivia: Born Clerow Wilson. A comedian who was enormously successful on TV for a few years in the '70s, Wilson was TV's first black superstar. One of 24 children, he spent much of his youth in foster homes and ended up in a reform school. He quit high school at 16 and, lying about his age, joined the Air Force. After leaving the service at 21 he worked as a bellboy in a San Francisco hotel, where he started performing stand-up comedy. Soon he was on the road with his act; at first playing small black clubs, he ended up in major black theaters such as the Apollo, the Howard, and the Regal, gradually building up a following within the black community. He got his big break in 1965: comedian Redd Foxx, appearing on The Tonight Show, was asked whom he considered the funniest comic around; he answered "Flip Wilson," and Wilson was soon booked on the show. Other TV appearances followed and he recorded several comedy albums. In 1970 he was signed by NBC to host his own variety show, The Flip Wilson Show, and it quickly soared in the ratings; the show remained on the air until 1974, and Wilson's characters (Geraldine, Reverend Leroy, etc.) and his catch-phrases ("The devil made me do it," "what you see is what you get," etc.) became nationally famous. After he quit the show his TV work was sporadic. He debuted onscreen in Uptown Saturday Night (1974) but has few other movie credits. He starred briefly in the '80s in the sitcom Charlie & Company.

Trivia: Few American comedians have had so aggressive a "stage mother" as did Milton Berle. Berle's mother Sarah dragged her son to New Jersey's Edison movie studios in 1914 to do extra work, then finessed the lad into supporting roles, including the part of a newsboy in the first-ever feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), which starred Charlie Chaplin. Under Sarah's powerhouse tutelage, Berle moved into vaudeville, making his debut at the prestigious Palace Theatre in 1921. Berle continued as a vaudeville headliner, with occasional stopovers on Broadway and in Hollywood, into the World War II years. His lengthy starring stint in the 1943 edition of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies established Berle as a brash, broad, wisecracking comedian par excellence, whose carefully publicized propensity for "lifting" other comedians' material earned him the nickname "the Thief of Bad Gags." After only moderate success on radio and in films, Berle made a spectacular television debut as star of NBC's Texaco Star Theatre in 1948, which was the single most popular comedy/variety series of TV's earliest years and earned the comedian one of the industry's first Emmy Awards. So valuable was Berle to NBC that the network signed him to a 30-year "lifetime contract" in 1951, which paid him 100,000 dollars annually whether he performed or not (Berle managed to outlive the contract). Though his TV stardom waned in the late '50s, Berle was still very much in demand as an emcee, lecturer, author, TV guest star, motion picture character actor, and nightclub comedian -- still using essentially the same material and delivery which made him a star over 60 years ago. Berle died March 27, 2002 of colon cancer, he was 93.