Adams, Joey (6 Jan. 1911-2 Dec. 1999), comedian, writer, and actor, was born Joseph Abramowitz in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Nathan Abramowitz, a tailor, and Ida Chonin. Growing up in Brownsville, a predominantly Jewish section of Brooklyn, Joey attended local public schools P.S. 171, Patrick Henry Junior High School, and DeWitt Clinton High School. He studied at City College of New York until his senior year but, already active in vaudeville, he dropped out shortly before graduating, in 1931, to pursue his ambitions as an entertainer. As a young child he met Fiorello La Guardia, who was then running for the office of New York congressman, and began spending as much time as he could at La Guardia's campaign headquarters. La Guardia, he reported, "became the inspiration for everything I ever did" (From Gags to Riches, p. 37).

While still in college, Joey took a job in the hat department of Namm's department store, in Brooklyn, but later recalled spending most of his time putting on shows for his coworkers during the lunch hour. He made occasional appearances as a stand-up comic at the Roxy and Paramount theaters, and during the summer months he worked in the "borscht belt," the theater circuit associated with the Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains, about a hundred miles northwest of New York City. He spent fifteen summers in the Catskills, performing as a comedian and master of ceremonies, reaching his peak there as social director at the Plaza Hotel, in South Fallsburg, in the summer of 1934. In this position he received room, board, and fifteen hundred dollars for the summer, from which he paid the entertainers--comics, musicians, and dancers--for a twelve-week period each year. He worked as Joey Abrams until 1930, when he changed his name on the theory that if Adams was good enough for two presidents, it was good enough for him.

His experience as an entertainer and the connections he made in the field led to a job organizing the amateur shows at Loew's Pitkin Theatre, in Brooklyn, where he spent two years as master of ceremonies. It was a step up from the borscht belt, but he credited his entry into the big time in the industry to his appearance, beginning in 1941, at the popular Manhattan nightclub Leon and Eddie's: "It was at Leon and Eddie's that I started to crash the Broadway columns," he wrote in From Gags to Riches. "Until then I couldn't even crash the telephone directories" (p. 79). Columnists in all the New York newspapers, as well as in Billboard and Variety, mentioned him regularly. His act was a rapid stream of insulting or cynical one-liners and puns--a critic's writing instrument was a "tripewriter," for example, and "bankruptcy is a legal proceeding in which you put your money in your pants pocket and give your coat to your creditors"--and, his style, to the end of his career, rarely strayed from its sarcastic borscht-belt beginnings.

During the late 1940s he worked briefly with the comic Leon Fields and the dancer Mary Rose as Fields and Adams and Co. He and Mary Rose were married around 1950, but the marriage lasted less than a year. In 1952 he married Cindy Heller, a photographer's model and later the society and gossip columnist for the New York Post. He had no children in either marriage.

Adams wrote and recorded several comedy albums, including humorous exchanges with his sometime comedy partner, the double-talk expert Al Kelly, titled Crazy Mixed-Up Conversations (1954); dialogues with his wife to accompany his 1957 memoir Cindy and I; and Jewish Folk Songs, with the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon and the Jewish composer Sholom Secunda. He also appeared occasionally in films, from Ringside (1949), where he played a nightclub entertainer with his former comedy-act straight man, the boxing champion Tony Canzoneri, to Silent Prey (1997). In 1956 he both produced and acted in the motion picture Singing in the Dark, whose cast included his wife Cindy. He appeared often on television in the 1950s and '60s, on Toast of the Town (as a quizmaster and guest), The Steve Allen Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Jackie Gleason Show, and he was the host of his own short-lived television series, The Joey Adams Show, in 1957. From 1968 to the early 1980s he interviewed celebrities, often quite acerbically, on a daily radio talk show, also called The Joey Adams Show, broadcast locally by the Manhattan radio station WEVD. His occasional stage appearances included off-Broadway revivals of The Gazebo (1959) and Guys and Dolls (1960).

Adams was widely engaged in social and philanthropic work throughout his long career and was especially noted for his untiring efforts for the March of Dimes Foundation, the United Jewish Appeal, and Israel Bonds, for whose fund-raising campaigns he raised millions of dollars. From 1959 on he served as president of the American Guild of Variety Artists, which in 1960 established a "Joey Award" in his honor, and he was an active member of such other professional organizations as the Screen Actors Guild, Actors' Equity, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. His failure to complete his college education was amply rectified by honorary degrees of "Doctor of Comedy" from Colombia University (1950), City College (1952), and New York University (1959), and he received numerous other awards and titles from educational and humanitarian organizations in the United States, Israel, Korea, and Taiwan. He was named a personal representative of presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, making more than thirty foreign trips as a goodwill ambassador in Asia and Africa. He amusingly chronicled these journeys in his 1963 book On the Road for Uncle Sam.

From 1946 to 1996, Adams published some twenty-five books, mostly anecdotal memoirs of his show business career and collections of jokes. He also wrote articles for magazines and a weekly newspaper column, "Strictly for Laughs," made up of wisecracks and gags, his own and those of his fellow comics. His column, which was nationally syndicated, ran in the New York Post from the mid-1970s until 1998, the year before his death at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan.

Collections of material on Joey Adams's career as an entertainer and writer are the Adams Collection in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, composed of manuscripts, correspondence, printed material, audio recordings, film, and personal memorabilia, and the Joey Adams Folder in the clippings file at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, containing newspaper clippings and photographs. A prime source of information about his personal and professional life is his many books of reminiscences, especially his first, From Gags to Riches (1946); his memoir of married life, Cindy and I (1957); and his recollections (with Henry Tobias) of working in resort hotels in the Catskills, The Borscht Belt (1966). Obituaries are in the New York Times and the Washington Post, 3 Dec. 1999.