He was only in his early 50s when The Godfather brought him to the public’s attention, but character actor Abe Vigoda always seemed impossibly old, thanks to his sad eyes, slouchy posture, sighing delivery, and general air of world-weary defeat. That image was only enhanced in 1974 when he scored his career-defining role as cranky detective Phil Fish on the police sitcom Barney Miller. In his post-Barney years, though he still turned up in occasional movies like 1986’s Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter, Vigoda became something of a “whatever happened to,” leading to some widely circulated rumors that he was dead.
Improbably, this led to something of a late-in-life renaissance for Vigoda, and he became a regular on after-hours network talk shows, portraying a vaguely Golem-like figure. He had found a new purpose in life: refuting his own false obituaries. In the wake of Vigoda’s actual death at the ripe old age of 94, it is amusing to revisit some of his many television appearances of this nature. Though he became most closely associated with Conan O’Brien in his later years, Abe Vigoda started his “I’m not dead” shtick on NBC’s Late Night With David Letterman in the late 1980s. Here, for instance, is a 1988 Vigoda appearance from Letterman’s show in which the wizened actor agrees to submit to “the mirror test” administered by Late Night director Hal Gurnee.
But it was with Conan O’Brien that Vigoda made his most memorable late-night appearances. Like Triumph The Insult Comic Dog and The Masturbating Bear, Abe Vigoda fit right into the cast of randomly assembled characters on NBC’s proudly post-modern, irony-drenched Late Night With Conan O’Brien. What made it work was that Vigoda was the eternal good sport, totally willing to participate in whatever bizarre shenanigans O’Brien and his writers could cook up. In one strange segment, for instance, the actor was treated as some kind of vast and mysterious celestial body, blotting out the camera’s view of the host.