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Actor died while watching television at West Hollywood home, a longtime friend says.
‘Laugh-In’ regulars Alan Sues and Ruth Buzzi in 1972.
MCT photo
LOS ANGELES — Alan Sues, the actor best known as a flamboyantly campy regular on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” in the late 1960s and early ’70s, has died. He was 85.
Sues died Thursday night while watching television at his home in West Hollywood, said Michael Gregg Michaud, a longtime friend.
“He had been in failing health the last couple of years, but it was nothing you could put your finger on; just old age,” said Michaud. “Mentally, he was funny and ’on’ as usual. He was a delightfully funny man, with a wonderful career that spanned six decades.”
As a cast member of “Laugh-In,” the overnight sensation that debuted on NBC in 1968, Sues joined performers including Judy Carne, Goldie Hawn, Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, Arte Johnson and Henry Gibson in the weekly hour of wildly wacky, fast-paced comedy.
During his time on the show from 1968 to 1972, Sues played the recurring characters Big Al, the effeminate sportscaster, who would ring a small bell on his desk and exclaim, “Oh … my tinkle … my tinkle … I looove my tinkle”; and Uncle Al the Kiddies’ Pal, the perpetually hung-over children’s show host. (“Oh, Uncle Al had a lot of medicine last night, boys and girls.”)
“Alan was a free spirit, an outrageous human being who was a love child,” George Schlatter, the show’s executive producer, told the Los Angeles Times on Friday. “He’d say things like ‘a frown is just a smile upside down,’ and he’d scold me if I ever got firm with the cast.
“He was a delight; he was an upper. He walked on the stage and everybody just felt happy.”
Buzzi said Sues was “the funniest person that I ever worked with.”
Michaud said Sues was gay but not publicly because he feared it would ruin his career.
Sues served in the Army during World War II.