[1] He was best known as the star of his own weekly comedy variety television series, The George Gobel Show, on NBC from 1954 to 1959 and on CBS from 1959 to 1960[1] (alternating in its last season with The Jack Benny Program).

His father, Hermann Goebel, who was then working as a butcher and grocer, had immigrated to the United States in the 1890s with his parents from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In a 1969 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Gobel joked about his stateside wartime service: "There was not one Japanese aircraft that got past Tulsa.

The weekly show featured vocalist Peggy King and actress Jeff Donnell (semi regularly), as well as numerous guest artists, including such stars as James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Fred MacMurray, Kirk Douglas, and Tennessee Ernie Ford.

"[11] On October 24, 1954, Gobel did a 12-minute spot on Light's Diamond Jubilee, a two-hour TV special broadcast on all four U.S. television networks of the time.

Gobel's hesitant, almost shy delivery and penchant for tangled digressions were the chief sources of comedy, more important than the actual content of the stories.

His monologues popularized several catchphrases, notably "Well, I'll be a dirty bird" (spoken by the Kathy Bates character in the 1990 film Misery), "You can't hardly get them like that no more", and "Well then there now" (spoken by James Dean during a brief imitation of Gobel in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause and as part of the closing lyric in Perry Como's 1956 hit record "Juke Box Baby").

Peggy King was a regular on the series as a vocalist, and the guest stars ranged from Shirley MacLaine and Evelyn Rudie to Bob Feller, Phyllis Avery, and Vampira.

With a book written by Abram S. Ginnes and a score by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, Let It Ride was directed by Stanley Prager, then a successful TV director of the popular sitcom Car 54, Where Are You?.

In an often-replayed segment from a 1969 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Gobel entered after Bob Hope and Dean Martin, walking onstage with a plastic cup with an unidentified drink.

In 1972, the television game show Hollywood Squares, hosted by Peter Marshall, needed a substitute for its resident folksy comedian Cliff Arquette (Charley Weaver), who had a stroke.

Although scripted by Goodman Ace, it also resulted in disappointing ticket sales, and Gobel's career as a movie star came to an abrupt end.

He settled into a succession of TV guest-star appearances and did not return to movie screens until two decades later, as a character actor in Joan Rivers' Rabbit Test (1978), followed by The Day It Came to Earth (1979) and Ellie (1984).

Gobel was considered for the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh by Walt Disney, but turned it down after reading the books and finding Pooh to be "an awful bore.

"[19] George Gobel died on February 24, 1991, about a month after surgery that was intended to improve his mobility after a series of strokes left him unable to walk.