As a young man, he gained a minor reputation as an original comic/raconteur who performed bizarre elocution of whimsical free verse in small clubs in the New York area as well as on the "borscht belt" circuit in the Catskills.

[citation needed] His first confirmed radio broadcast was on Major Bowes Amateur Hour in 1943, where he did World War II-themed comic impressions of Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, Roland Young and Clem McCarthy.

[1] By the early 1950s, now known as Eddie Lawrence, he continued to appear in clubs of minor reputation[clarification needed], honing his comic timing, while taking bit parts in the numerous live television productions then prevalent in New York.

[citation needed] Speaking in a comically downtrodden, empathetic voice, and accompanied by an accordion rendition of "Beautiful Dreamer", he begins "Hiya, folks," followed by "You say you lost your job today..." and then a litany of improbable disasters like "ya say your wife went out for a corned beef sandwich last weekend, and the corned beef sandwich came back but she didn't," "Your daughter's goin' out with a convict," and "Your wife just confessed she gave your last 60 dollars as a deposit on an airplane hangar" or "you say you can't pull your car outa the mud and you're in the middle of nowhere and it's pouring rain and you can't get the top back up, and your paycheck's all blurred, and your foot went right through the gas and your girl's screaming bloody murder she's scared of the dark, and a stroke of lightning splits your motor in half and your suit's shrinkin up fast, and you start up the windy road on foot and 60 yards of barbed wire hits you right smack in the puss, and you both fall down in the mud and then a wild animal comes over and runs away with your shoes, and your car blows up suddenly and your windshield wiper ends up in your mouth, and you can't move and the mud's rising up to your nostrils and you're sinkin fast, and you don't hear your girl screaming any more" - a pause as the background music retires, and Eddie asks plaintively, "Is that what's troubling you, friend?"

It contained three comic interviews with personalities introduced as "Kiddie Star", "Wolfgang Birdwatcher" and "Fleming of the Yard", a set of brief blackout gags, a long, whimsically strange routine about plucking chickens, and three monologues delivered by the as-yet-unnamed, Old Philosopher-like character.

It was the first of Lawrence's five LPs for Coral Records and proved so successful that the company realized the profitability of releasing the title routine as a single ("King Arthur's Mines," another track from the LP was on the flip side).

Bells Are Ringing, a new musical by Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, which opened at the Shubert Theatre on November 29, 1956, with Judy Holliday in the lead.

The album cover depicts Eddie sitting in a throne-like chair, wearing what appears to be a white bathrobe and a Prince Valiant wig held by a metallic ring shaped like the base of a crown, while gazing sideways with an exasperatedly worried expression on his face.

[2] He also wrote the stories for most of them, including a seven-film series about two characters named Swifty and Shorty whom he used to recreate a number of his routines, such as Panhandling on Madison Avenue and Fix That Clock (both 1964).

It is a first-person account by an anthropomorphized baseball describing its experience of being hit out of Briggs Stadium by Mickey Mantle in a September 10, 1960 home run against the Detroit Tigers.

The management of WPIX realized that Lawrence's monologues were popular with adolescent boys who were the core audience for The Three Stooges two-reelers shown, at the time, nationwide by television stations which considered them children's programming.

His daily recitations of "Old Philosopher" monologues and other comedy routines, most of which were only tested on the show and never committed to record, built him a faithful and dedicated audience and made him a cult figure.

At the end of October 1964, he hosted his final "Three Stooges show", said goodbye to his loyal viewers, and exited, trailing a banner across the television screen, emblazoned with the word KELLY.

While originally signing onto Lawrence's and Charlap's edgy concept of a darkly comic musical about corruption in old New York, they soon panicked over its perceived lack of commercial appeal, despite some good reviews on the road, and hired new writers in spite of the authors' objections.

Lawrence and Charlap subsequently brought a lawsuit charging Susskind and Levine with violation of the Dramatists Guild's clauses protecting the rights of creative artists and, ultimately, settling the case out of court for an undisclosed amount.

Eddie Lawrence continued to perform in clubs and, in 1967, joined the cast of yet another Broadway musical, Sherry!, nicknamed for Sheridan Whiteside, the acerbic literary wit and radio personality created by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart as the title character in The Man Who Came to Dinner.

All that remained were the book and lyrics written by James Lipton who gained celebrity twenty-seven years later, in 1994, as the creator and host of the long-running actor-interview series Inside the Actors Studio.

The music was eventually found in 1999, and a 2004 studio cast album was recorded with stars including Nathan Lane, Carol Burnett, Bernadette Peters and Tommy Tune.

Three years later, Eddie had a couple of fleeting moments as a Bowery derelict in visionary director Ernest Pintoff's little-seen noir-like oddity Who Killed Mary What's 'Er Name?, filmed on the streets of New York in 1971.

On February 22, 1971, Eddie appeared as a guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show (which, until May 1972, was based in New York), performing a five-minute Old Philosopher routine at the end of which Carson was laughing loudly and repeating some of its lines and, in 1974, he was heard as the announcer on a television advertisement for John Lennon and Harry Nilsson's album, Pussy Cats, which also included contributions by Ringo Starr and Keith Moon.

Finally, Her Husband, filmed in New York by the director of a number of The Twilight Zone episodes, Lamont Johnson, with a screenplay by The Defenders creator Reginald Rose, had Eddie in a semi-comical bit as a neighbor of the titular "her" (Farrah Fawcett-Majors).

Despite the creative talents involved, this initial starring vehicle for the most-publicized of Charlie's Angels got generally dismissive reviews, engendering its widely repeated disparagement, "Somebody Killed Her Career".