A tribute to Deceased Artiste Floyd Vivino, aka “Uncle Floyd”

Including my 1997 with him in the dressing room of the Bottom Line

In the week since Floyd Vivino died, there’s been a wonderful outpouring of tributes to the man, with people of a certain age (and NJ residents in general) offering their favorite memories of “The Uncle Floyd Show” or of Floyd as a person and performer. I have one unique item to offer, which is my interview with Floyd and his cast when they played the much-missed Bottom Line in Greenwich Village on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend in 1997.

I climbed on the Floyd bandwagon as many did — finding the show by mistake. I used to channel-surf around the dials, both VHF and UHF. One day in fall of 1978 I saw this show that looked like a threadbare children’s program, but which had a lot of people laughing behind the camera (in a very Soupy-like fashion). The action on-camera was definitely closer to old vaudeville than the Children’s Television Workshop.

After 1986 Floyd’s show could only be seen in various parts of New Jersey; thankfully, for N.Y. fans of the program, he and the cast always had a home at the Bottom Line. The live show was a mix of Floyd playing piano and the cast coming out to perform things they had done on the TV show, with the addition of items like Floyd’s “Little Rascals” musical tribute and Mugsy’s “adult” songs, like his parodies of Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” (“(My girlfriend is) On the Rag Again”) and “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys” (not going to cite that title here).

Some of the things Floyd went into in this interview have stuck with me for years. The first is that “You can’t be hip over 40.” (I’ll let him explain that.) The other two involved the TV business. The first was his pride in being an “air broker.” This meant finding one’s own sponsors, which wound up making later TV time-buyers like Byron Allen into millionaires. (Oh, the curse of “Comics Unleashed,” for everyone except Byron!)

Floyd was always centralized in an N.J. suburb; his Jersey-ness was part of his persona. He received national recognition from a syndication package for the show, which in itself was a nightmare proposition that he didn’t profit from (a sad story), but which meant the show was seen around the country for about a year on various stations. (In NYC it ran six days a week on the NBC affiliate, after the Tomorrow Show and SNL; in Boston it ran as early as 11:30 p.m. each weekday night!) He also got national recognition for the movie and TV acting he did. (Good Morning Vietnam being the biggest title; he could’ve clearly had a career as a character actor, if he’d pursued it and moved to either N.Y. or L.A.)

His air brokering was the life’s blood of the TV show, but, after moves from channel to channel and N.J. cable service to N.J. cable service, the “Uncle Floyd Show” went off the air in 1998, with various other TV shows hosted by Floyd airing until 2001. Air brokering is an all or nothing proposition; it also needs to be (as with Byron Allen’s slop) hooked to national advertisers. After the show went off the air, Floyd changed his career path and decided to remain “Uncle Floyd” in costume, but his live appearances were streamlined to him telling jokes and playing the piano in his inimitable barrelhouse style.

The venues he played began to close in the 21st century, but he soldiered on, playing as many as he could, as often as he could. He sadly ran down his health in the process (leading to a point where he got COVID and the doctors discovered two types of cancer, a year before his debilitating stroke). But he left behind a very loyal and loving fan base who have been celebrating his talent and personal kindness in online posts on social media.

The other item he brings up in my interview with him is that Joe Franklin lied about him in the pages of his second autobiography. This hurt Floyd on a personal level, but it was nothing to Joe, who in his final years created insane fictions about himself and celebrities he either never met at all or encountered only briefly. (Check out my blog post on these stories, including: sex with Marilyn and Jayne, and moving a dead body with JFK and Nixon!) All of those stories were positive, thus it was bizarre (and blatantly vindictive) that he created false negative stories about Floyd (whom he had sued earlier for the “Joe Frankfurter” spoofs Floyd did of Joe’s show; the real reason was clearly for Joe to get publicity).

I continued to see Floyd live at the Bottom line until it closed. One particularly cherished memory is going to see Floyd and his brothers Jimmy and Jerry, as well as their father (!), doing a music (and comedy, of course) performance on Father’s Day at the Bottom Line with my father (who was also a Floyd fan). At a center table, the best view in the house, was Soupy Sales, the man who Floyd was accused of copying (and to whom he gave a lot of credit) and who was himself a fan of the Floyd TV show. Another Floyd fan who had the same birthday as Soupy and worked with his sons, name of David Bowie, wrote a song in the early 2000s about his favorite memories of NYC in the early Eighties centered around Floyd and two of his best-loved puppets. (Here’s a live version of it, where Bowie sums up Floyd as “a television hero in America.”)

Floyd’s last big NYC gig was at the old Cutting Room (during which he was strictly a comedian/pianist). The only time I spoke to him after the 1997 interview was at a signing event at Forbidden Planet in 2018 for the “Demented Punk” CD, which reunited Floyd with Dr. Demento (a few decades after Floyd was a part of Demento’s traveling cavalcade of novelty singers, including Tiny Tim and Benny Bell; I saw this show at the Bottom Line as well). The pandemic brought about a new platform for Floyd to play: live streams in which he either played piano or showed clips from the old shows. The final gathering place for Floyd’s fans has been his castmate Scott Gordon’s weekly stream presenting video clips from the shows.

Here is my interview as it was seen by Funhouse viewers in 1997, with me introducing it as a much younger soul, and with clips from “The Uncle Floyd Show.” The interview begins at 6:45, if you want to brush past my intro. Also, the address and timeslots for the show are all woefully out of date. We’re still on, but are now on Manhattan cable on late Sat/early Sun at 1:00 a.m. EST and Monday night at 11:00 p.m. EST on Spectrum/RCN/Fios.