The Brady Bunch with special guest star Jim Backus (1971)

The Mike Douglas Show with co-host James Brown and guest William Shatner (1971)

Daniel Boone with special guest stars Rosey Grier, Jodie Foster, Dal McKennon and Foster Brooks (1970)

Classic Television Showbiz's Late Late Show: Tarzan and the Trappers (1958)

The Hollywood Palace with hosts Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and guests Edie Adams, Buddy Rich and Gene Baylos (1969)

The Doris Day Show with special guest star Jodie Foster (1969)

The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (1968)

The Jean Boone Show with guests Adam West and Lee Meriwether (1966)

The Lucy Show with special guest stars Frank Nelson and Alan Reed (1963)

Lock Up (1960)

Classic Television Showbiz's Late Late Show: Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935)

Dais of Despair: The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts

"Yeah, the Dean Martin ones were quickies ... They had terrible writers." - 88 year old comedian Jack Carter

"It was a dais of despair." - Author Nick Tosches

"Dean's presence on television after 1975 would be represented by The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast. It was a dais of despair. They sat at banquet tables at either side of the podium: the undead of dreamland and the fleeting stars of the television seasons, each rising in turn, at the beckoning of Dean or his bloated sidekick, Orson Welles, to deliver the moribund jokes consigned to him for the occasion.

Taped in part at the NBC Studio in Burbank and partly at the Ziegfeld Room of the MGM Grand in Vegas, guests often delivered their lines to empty chairs or pretended spontaneous laughter at words that had been uttered in another state. As many as a thousand cut-and-paste edits were done to give each show the illusion that everyone was together in the same place at the same time.

But no amount of editing could vanquish the pervasive air of hollow artificiality that came through. The forced attempts at humor came from a ten-writer assembly line; only Jonathan Winters and Don Rickles were ever allowed to write their own material. The jokes were so bad and the canned laughter so false, and that pervading hollow artificiality so funereal, that the shows had the quality of a relentlessly monotonous but vaguely disquieting dream.

There were those that found The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast entertaining. There were those who lived canned lives, who found release through canned laughter. "Time cries and lets you care," the commercial said. Canned sadness, canned happiness: a wasteland full of empty cans. 

And there slouched Dean boozily at the dais - perhaps alone among the empty chairs, perhaps with the ghosts of others nearby - laughing forlornly at God only knew what."

- Nick Tosches, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992, Doubleday)

Match Game (1974)

Sanford and Son with special guest star Norma Miller (1974)

Now You See It (1974)

Soul Train with guest James Brown (1973)

Sports Challenge with celebrity contestants Duke Snider, Willie Shoemaker and Jackie Robinson (1973)

Wayne and Shuster (1971)

Love American Style with special guest stars Mantan Moreland, Stu Gilliam and D'Urville Martin (1970)

Lancelot Link (1970)