Biography

When Barris hosted The Gong Show (1976), he was ill at ease before the camera; he had a nervous habit of clapping his hands together and pointing to the camera while talking. He did this so often that, by the show's second year, it had become a running gag. Audience members began clapping their hands in unison with Barris whenever they saw him doing it. Barris caught on, and would sometimes pretend to clap, deliberately stopping short to fool the audience.

Claimed to have been a CIA operative.

The Gong Show (1976) was canceled in 1980, at the end of the fourth season. Three other Barris game shows went off the air that same year: 3's a Crowd (1979), The Dating Game (1965) and The Newlywed Game (1966).

His only child Della Barris was an alcoholic and a drug addict. In fact, it was him who put his daughter in the psychiatric ward, after the rest of his staff did everything they could to protect her and reconciled with him before her death of a suspected overdose.

In the final episode of The Gong Show (1976), Barris appeared as a contestant -- lead vocalist/guitarist of "The Hollywood Cowboys." They performed "Take This Job And Shove It" (and got the gong).

If you stick in the business of being creative, you get hurt. And creative disappointment seems so much harder to take than any other kind. But if you're not prepared to get hurt like that, life can be pretty boring. I think I'm going to keep on going.

[Who talked about reality television with contestants who had underlying schemes]: Yeah. But, you know, every -- every contestant knows exactly what's -- what's in store for him or her when they go on these shows, and that's what they used to say about -- about my shows, when -- about the Gong Show. If a contestant comes on the Gong Show, they're opening themselves up to whatever. But -- so if a contestant goes on American Idol and it's one of the first few and that guy Simon rips them apart, the contestant knows that, and is sort of looking for that, don't you think?

[on a game show he preferred]: The Dating Game has a special place for me because it was my first. It was my baby. In my opinion, the best game-show format ever was The Newlywed Game, because it's so simple: It's just four couples, eight questions, and a refrigerator or washing machine. That's it. You're done, and it worked. The Gong Show, that was fun. That was, for me, the epitome. In between, I had a game show called Three's A Crowd, which was "Who knows a husband better? His wife or his secretary?" It was the most powerful game show I ever created. I mean, it was really a visceral experience. It was too embarrassing and devastating for the contestants, so I pulled that show off the air. I did another one called How's Your Mother-In-Law?, which wasn't good because, as I did with all my shows, I tried to do something that my audience could relate to. And I thought everyone could relate to a mother-in-law. If you didn't have one, you certainly knew about them. But the problem was that you were making fun of somebody's mother, so it didn't work. There were other things. There was a show called Family Game, which was about how well kids know their parents and how well parents know their kids. I hated working with kids, so I didn't like that show.

The whole world has changed. Shows now are terribly mean-spirited. You're rooting for people to be eliminated, rooting for judges to find new ways of being nasty. I wouldn't want to see electrocutions on TV. But I've no doubt some day we will.

[As to who influenced him on writing]: It used to be Hemingway and Fitzgerald. That's why I went to the south of France to write You And Me, Babe, the first book I wrote, and it was a bestseller, so that's part of the reason I finally quit television. The fun kind of ran out of television in the 1980s, and I dabbled around for a couple of years before finally selling the company so I could pretend I was Fitzgerald and Hemingway and go write on the Riviera. I was lucky enough to make enough money to live happily ever after, so I took off. You know, I probably should have never quit my day job. The books I wrote in Europe, I couldn't even get them published. I think I wrote two manuscripts, and neither one was published. Well, one was, but it wasn't that good.