Bananas Foster

Happy Anni-hearse-ary™ to the original, loveable lush: ‘60’s actor, comedian and dessert-maker Foster Brooks. Straight-faced, but never straight-laced, Brooks was a fair to middling comic whose fortunes turned when he started performing three-urine-drenched-bedsheets-to-the-wind on live television. His malaprops and stumblebum antics were thought to be an act, but ‘tweren’t so. ‘Twas his love of a pre-show concoction of dark rum, ice cream and bananas — ingested in stupor-inducing quantities — that resulted in rollicking performances that set the censors’ teeth on edge, but the crowd to their feet. His shnockered ramblings caused one critic to describe him as “bananas” and soon “Bananas Foster™” began appearing on restaurant menus and cable TV cooking shows featuring heavyset ladybirds. Like other famously inebriated knuckleheads of the era — Dean Martin, Mel Gibson, Otis Campbell — Brooks’ popularity would wane, but his dessert item caught fire and the stand-up (and fall down) enjoyed an association with it ‘til his drunken, dying day. "Bananas Foster" Brooks, off to the eternal gin and/or rum mill in the sky on this day, December 20, 2001.