Chuck Barris

Chuck Barris (born June 3, 1929, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died March 21, 2017, Palisades, New York) was an American television producer and host who created the iconic 1960s game shows The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game but was perhaps best remembered as the creator and host of the comic talent show The Gong Show, which originally aired from 1976 to 1978.

Barris graduated (1953) from Drexel University and worked in various odd jobs until he was accepted into a management training program at the TV broadcasting company NBC in 1955. After the department that he had been placed in was eliminated, he began working for ABC, where he eventually became director of daytime television on the West Coast. During this time Berris also worked as a songwriter, and his “Palisades Park” was a smash hit in 1962 for rock and roll singer Freddy Cannon.

In 1965 Barris left ABC and formed his own production company. That same year he developed The Dating Game and sold it to ABC. The show featured a single woman (or man), who would choose among three unseen members of the opposite sex by asking questions to determine which of them to go on a date with. The double-entendre tone of many questions and answers were quite risqué for TV at the time, and the show won a large audience and stayed on the air into the 1970s. The following year Barris developed the equally popular and even more provocative The Newlywed Game, in which recently married couples compared their answers to identical questions posed by the host. The Gong Show, part talent show (most contestants conspicuously lacked talent) and part demented variety show, with Barris as host and ringmaster, pushed hard against the boundaries of good taste and was regarded as deplorable by mainstream reviewers, but it won a devoted following. It aired from 1976 to 1978 and then went into syndication. Barris’s other game shows included The Game Game (1969–70), The $1.98 Beauty Show (1978–80), and 3’s a Crowd (1979–80).

After 1980 Barris focused on writing, and he regained notoriety with the publication of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography (1984), in which he claimed that, in addition to producing game shows, he had worked as an assassin for the CIA during the 1960s. It was adapted into a 2002 film directed by George Clooney. Barris also wrote the novels You and Me, Babe (1974), The Big Question (2007), and Who Killed Art Deco? (2009), the serious narrative Della: A Memoir of My Daughter (2010), and Bad Grass Never Dies: More Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2004).