Enjoy Celebrity Radio’s Joe Piscopo Life Story Interview – SNL Saturday Night Live…..
Joe Piscopo is an American comedian and actor best known for his work on Saturday Night Live where he played a variety of recurring characters.
His performances on ‘Saturday Night Live’ stole the show and his association with the Rat Pack in the ‘good old days’ of Vegas is epic!
Piscopo is still touring the US with his cabaret show. He’s got a tremendous voice and is brilliantly funny.
Enjoy a rare exclusive chat with the man himself from the Las Vegas Hilton….
In the early 1990s, Piscopo became a subject of controversy after appearances of his newly buff physique on the covers of fitness magazines led many to speculate he was using steroids.
Piscopo has repeatedly denied the allegations and says he began a campaign to improve himself after battling thyroid cancer from 1981 to 1982. He has also appeared in anti-steroid public service announcements. Piscopo lampooned the controversy in his HBO special, wherein he appeared to undergo a drug test during the show.
In 1997, Piscopo starred on Broadway in “Grease.”
Since January 2014 he has hosted “Piscopo In The Morning” from 6:00 to 9:00 AM, Monday through Friday on 970 The Answer (WNYM) in New York City
In the summer of 1980, he was hired as a contract player for Saturday Night Live. The show had gone through major upheaval when all the writers, major producers, and cast members had left that spring.
The all-new cast bombed with critics and fans with the exception of Piscopo and Eddie Murphy; thus they were the only two cast members to be kept when Dick Ebersol took over the show the following spring.
With the success of SNL, both Murphy and Piscopo moved to Alpine, New Jersey.
Piscopo was best known for his impressions of such celebrities as Frank Sinatra, although he feared for his life due to Sinatra’s alleged Mafia ties. Piscopo thus rewrote the lyrics for a Sinatra sketch with the help of Sinatra lyricist Sammy Cahn, and recalled that “by the grace of God, the old man loved it.”[4] Piscopo left SNL in 1984, but unlike Eddie Murphy he did not find major success. He appeared in a few successful films such as Johnny Dangerously and Wise Guys, and also had his own HBO comedy special.
One of Piscopo’s more successful bits on SNL included his sports commentary on the Weekend Update portion of the show (called “SNL Newsbreak” at that time), led by a series of rhyming or otherwise associated words, rather than a sentence, leading up to his first story. One example surrounded one of Muhammad Ali’s last bouts during the 1980s, with Eddie Murphy in Rick Baker makeup as Ali.
Recorded 2010 at the Hilton Las Vegas by Alex Belfield for the BBC and Celebrity Radio.
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