Funny Man, Thinking Man

If Steve Allen were to do a five-second obituary on himself, it might be: He taught America to watch television from bed. Like everything about Allen, that wouldn’t be the half of it.

True, the late-night TV format that persists to this day, in a line from Allen to Jack Paar to Johnny Carson to Jay Leno, was invented by Allen in “The Tonight Show.” But he was also a stealth intellectual in American pop culture, saved from professorishness by a funny bone as big as his brain. He wrote songs, films, books. He taught jazz to an audience that thought it exotic and was a generous promoter of comedic brilliance. Think of Don Knotts, the Smothers Brothers and that other comedian-intellectual, Steve Martin--all Allen projects.

The latest crusade by Allen, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack Tuesday at 78, was on behalf of nonviolent, family-friendly movies and television. He held a Dutch-uncle belief that everyone should care about politics; one recent effort was a satire for The Times on the 2000 political conventions. This conjunction of the serious and the absurd sustained his 1970s series “Meeting of Minds,” featuring imagined conversations between, for instance, Emily Dickinson and Attila the Hun, or Karl Marx and Marie Antoinette. When Steve Martin paired Alfred Einstein and Pablo Picasso in his 1993 play, “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” the echoes were apparent.

Allen’s reach distinguished him, and not least among his accomplishments was his collaborative marriage of 46 years with actress and writer Jayne Meadows. We got a lot from Steve Allen, but more would have been better.