Rodney Dangerfield sold aluminum siding in North New Jersey.
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Bob Newhart started as an accountant until he tried his hand at standup. Not that hard to believe actually.
Tom Lehrer - sort of a Weird Al of the early 1960s, who wrote all kinds of satirical songs - was a university math professor.
Hedy Lamarr is a more interesting person than you could ever imagine:
Reads opening summary
"Okay, mhmmm, interesting life and career as an actress..."
Reads just below that
At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.
"WHAT that's cool"
There's even a headcrab named after her.
It was a cool idea - unfortunately the US Navy decided not to use it because they felt the required gears, motors and circuitry (in the age of vacuum tubes) would add too much weight and complexity to a torpedo, and they were concerned about reliability. So the idea remained on paper, with no prototypes ever being built. In the late 1950s, when transistor technology was replacing vacuum tubes, radio engineers at Phillips Corp (if I remember right) made the concept practical. Some people's version of all this is to credit Lamarr for inventing WiFi or even the Internet, and that the navy wouldn't listen to her because she was a woman until a corporations stole her idea - placing her in the mythical realm of Nikola Tesla.
Hedy Lamarr is absolutely awesome, enjoy the Wikipedia rabbit hole.
Hedly!
Jack Nicholson was once a volunteer firefighter, so for the scene in the shining where he's breaking down the bathroom door with the axe, apparently he kept doing it too quickly on the dummy door, and the the props department were forced to build a stronger door for the scene.
Steve Buscemi was a firefighter in NYC and assisted on 9/11.
That's such a weird story - he happened to be in NYC on 9/11 and saw the news, so he reported to his former firehouse and they had him suit up.
Wow TIL!!!
I might as well give some examples:
Hugh Jackman - PE teacher (someone link that interview clip, please?)
Harrison Ford - Carpenter
Maynard James Keenan - also a carpenter, coincidentally
Bob Ross - air force sergeant
Stephen King - English teacher
Harrison Ford met George Lucas when he installed a door in the studio office.
Hugh Jackman - PE teacher (someone link that interview clip, please?)
Yup, that's the one I was thinking about. Excellent clip posted by an excellent lad or lady. Thank you.
This is probably well known to many, but Steve Martin was a professional musician, magician and TV series writer before more commonly being known as a standup comic, actor, comedian, and later, film writer. Not to mention:
Inspired by his philosophy classes, Martin considered becoming a professor instead of an actor-comedian. Being at college changed his life.
It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff because all you have to do is twist everything hard—you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up.
Martin recalls reading a treatise on comedy that led him to think:
What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. --WP
As a teenager Steve Martin worked in a magic shop in Disneyland.
Never letting the audience climax truly an edgy comedian.
Jack White was an upholsterer through the nineties. He still does it, so not exactly former, but a small fact I found really interesting.
Julia Roberts worked at Baskin & Robbins.