Long before American Idol, decades before America’s Got Talent, there was The Gong Show. The offbeat TV talent show, created and hosted by Chuck Barris, premiered on June 14, 1976, on NBC daytime.
The Gong Show featured a bizarre mix of amateur talent acts and a panel of celebrity judges, often including Jaye P. Morgan and Arte Johnson, who would strike a supersized gong to end the misery. The best act won a prize of $516.32 on the daytime version of the show.
Featuring bad comedy, musical jugglers, singing dogs, and geriatric dancers as well as recurring acts like The Unknown Comic (Canadian comedian Murray Langston),The Gong Show became a cult favorite entry into the ‘70s game show genre. At the height of the show’s popularity, Barris was even nominated for an Emmy Award, per IMDb.
Barris, who died in 2017 at age 87, once told The Television Academy Foundation that the show started out with a different host (John Barbour), but that because he was auditioning the acts and getting to know them, he felt he would be better suited to be on the show with them.
“As it turned out, I don’t think that was the best idea,” he admitted. "I think I would have been more surprised if I came on the show and saw the act performing.”
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Barris also revealed that he was nervous onstage, thus his multiple wardrobe changes throughout the show.
“I wore a tux to start out with, and soon I began to take off the tie and put on another kind of jacket or a hat. … There was a reason [the hat got lower over the eyes]. I was scared to death of the audience, so I just didn't want to see them, so I wore this hat low over my eyes.”
When asked how he would categorize The Gong Show, Barris said, “I'm not sure what The Gong Show was. … I know what I wanted, and that's all I know.”
He also clarified that he decided to end the show in 1980.
“The end of the show came because of me,” he said. “I think that I had some kind of a like a small nervous breakdown out there, doing strange things. When I see films of the last shows I was, you know, I was walking around busting up flats on the air, and that was not the behavior of a host. That was the behavior of a host who was bored to death, who was ratcheting up his performances every year, and that wasn’t good.”
Barris, who also created the 1978 pageant parody, The $1.98 Beauty Show, also advised other game show hosts not to go over the top as he did.
While Barris was sometimes roasted as a host, he once received a compliment from an EFOT-winning composer.
“When we auditioned for The Gong Show, the number of people who would sing 'Feelings' was remarkable,” Barris told Philadelphia magazine in 2003. “One day I decided to do a show entirely of acts that did ‘Feelings.’ I thought that was hysterical. It was about the third act into the show that they realized they were all singing ‘Feelings.’ Marvin Hamlisch bumped into me a hundred years later and said, 'I’ll never forget that show.'"
Fifty years after its debut, fans still reminisce about The Gong Show. The quirky classic TV show is a recurring topic on Reddit, and reruns sometimes air on the Game Show Network.
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