20 March 12023

☾   20 March 12023 is World Frog Day. It’s also World Sparrow Day and the International Day of Happiness. Other holidays observed include Oil Nationalization Day (Iran), Benito Juárez’s Birthday (Mexico), Otago Anniversary Day (New Zealand), Independence Day (Tunisia), and National Proposal Day (United States). It’s probably JD 2460024 (Astronomical), 7 (Old Style) or 20 (New Style) March 2023 (Christian), 11 Paramhat 1739 (Coptic), 11 Megabit 2015 (Ethiopian), 30 Phalguna 1944 (Indian), 28 Sha’ban 1444 (Islamic), 28 Adar 5783 (Jewish), and 1 Farvardin 1402 (Persian).

It’s Vaughn Meador’s birthday. And who was that, you ask. I asked that myself some sixty years ago when his name turned up in a comedy sketch on an album retailing the adventures of Neubold Flound, income-tax investigator. Who was that, I wanted to know, and why was it funny that he spoke in a thick Yiddish accent?

Well, you see, Vaughn Meador was an impressionist. He did an album called The First Family in which he made fun of the Kennedys, not all that long after JFK became president, if I recall correctly. He was quite popular, and his JFK impression became the standard against which other JFK impressions were measured. The joke of The Income-Tax Man of course was that you would expect Meador to sound more like JFK (as in fact he did) than like a Jewish comedian. Anyway. One of my classmates in fourth grade used to do a Meador-inspired impression of JFK; he had a bit where somebody—I think it was Jack Paar, but it could have been the ubiquitous Ed Sullivan too—interviewed JFK, and he did both parts pretty decently, for a fourth-grade kid. That’s how I remember it, anyway.

And then, when I was in seventh grade, came the news that every American my age remembers the moment they heard it—President Kennedy had been assassinated. It cast a pall on everything, and for Vaughn Meador it was a disaster. You see, although he had branched out considerably in his routine, he was famous for his JFK impression. And overnight imitating JFK went from appropriate humor to sacrilege. His current album bombed, and his earlier albums were deleted from the catalog. People stopped returning his calls.

This is all from memory, and maybe it wasn’t really as brutal as I recall it. Vaughn Meador went down the memory hole. Flushed. Forgotten. I haven’t checked, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he didn’t have a Wikipedia article—lack of notability and all that. I used to have one of his albums—not the famous one, but one of the later pieces. I remember it as being mildly amusing, but not especially striking. Certainly nothing like Dana Carvey would be later on. Him I remember doing his impression of Rich Little doing an Easter special, where Rich Little played all the parts. John the Baptist as Johnny Carson, maybe—that sort of thing. That one I was kind of blown away by—what impressionist would have the absolute gall to do an impression of another impressionist’s impression? Vaughn Meador was not in that class. But he had his moment, and it was golden, even if time has eclipsed it.