When he ventured out on his own some time later, the newly christened Joey Bishop kept the name for himself.
Going by the moniker of Joey Gottlieb, he later teamed up with a pair of friends for a musical comedy act, billing themselves as The Bishop Trio.
It would not be long before the lure of the stage called to Bishop, who later joined his brother to form a comedy vaudeville act. In 1936, the 18-year-old Bishop dropped out of South Philly's Horace Howard Furness Junior High School in order to help his father at the bike shop. By his teens, the boy had learned to play the banjo and mandolin, as well as tap dance. As a small child, Bishop picked up the urge to entertain from his gregarious father, who often played the ocarina and sang traditional Yiddish songs to his son. Soon after his birth, Bishop and his four older siblings relocated to South Philadelphia, PA, where his father opened a bicycle repair shop. 3, 1918 in the borough of the Bronx, New York, NY, he was the son of Central European Jewish immigrants. Although often overshadowed by his larger-than-life Rat Pack brethren, Bishop managed to outlast them all, leaving behind a legacy as a devoted friend, husband and remarkably accomplished entertainer.īorn Joseph Abraham Gottlieb on Feb. With his career winding down, the comic made the occasional return to the screen in features like the action-adventure "The Delta Force" (1986). Following a decade comprised largely of nightclub performances and appearances on television game shows, Bishop made his Broadway debut with a short stint in the long-running musical "Sugar Babies" in 1981. As a solo act on television, Bishop enjoyed a successful run as a sitcom star on "The Joey Bishop Show" (NBC, 1961-64/CBS, 1964-65), followed by a brief run as a late night talk show host with "The Joey Bishop Show" (ABC, 1967-69). He soon broke into acting with small roles in such films as "The Naked and the Dead" (1958), but it was the Rat Pack-defining crime caper "Ocean's Eleven" (1960) that forever enshrined him and his pals Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr. Educated in the hard-knock school of the vaudeville circuit, Bishop had gained a solid reputation as a nightclub comedian by the early 1950s, whereupon he caught the eye of Sinatra, who hired him as an opening act. The cynical, quick-witted funnyman of the iconic Rat Pack, actor-comedian Joey Bishop was held in far higher esteem by pack leader Frank Sinatra than may have been apparent to the casual spectator.
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