Nightclubs: The Dying Pan

His style of comedy would, on someone else, be labeled deadpan. But Jackie Vernon's pan is not dead; it is dying, painfully, by degrees.

For a long while the pain was real; persistent obscurity, cancellations when his act bombed, endless bouncing from cellar to dive in search of a sympathetic audience. At last he found one. Its name was Steve Allen, who caught Vernon's act in Canada and booked him for his TV show. After Allen came Jack Paar, Ed Sullivan, Hootenanny—and success. Last week Vernon fans gathered at Manhattan's Hotel Plaza to pay homage to their anti-hero—the first stand-up comic...