Grover’s Brush with Greatness
Sage advice warns about making a living doing something you love. If Grover Silcox ever got that memo, he didn't read it.
Grover Silcox has interviewed me for television four times since 2005 — three at Daddypop’s in Hatboro — to talk diners. Each time I savored the give and take with someone who who felt like an old friend who shares my affinity for the topic, when in reality, I knew little else about the guy.
He’s such a regular at Daddypop’s, he has his own mug there. When I wasn’t in front of his camera, I often bumped into him at lunch time. Not a native to Philly, I knew little of Grover’s early career, but the frequent, friendly interruptions to our conversation from fans, well-wishers, and long-time friends suggest his impact in this area.
Two weeks before we met for this article, I saw Grover perform live on stage a one-man semi-comedic take on the life of Edgar Allen Poe. As advertised, he gets the laughs until he segues into a recitation of The Raven that ignites an unbridled rage at the black bird over the loss of his beloved Lenore. The performance stuns the room. I now wonder if there’s more to this mild-mannered, jocular TV reporter than his clever puns, quick rejoinders, and classic dad jokes.
I decide it’s time to turn the tables, and we meet — where else but back at Daddypop’s?
Brush with Late Night
Grover is a local boy, having spent his entire life in the Philadelphia area scratching out a career trying to make people laugh. A bit class clown, a bit quiet observer of human nature, he honed his stand-up skills at Philadelphia’s Comedy Factory Outlet during the comedy club boom of the 1980s.
Eventually, Grover developed a lounge-lizard socialite stage persona harboring an inflated sense of self-worth. Local critic Harry Harris wrote “Rodney Dangerfield says he gets no respect. Grover is blithely unaware of it.”
In 1987, the Comedy Factory Outlet received a citation from the city for its tenth anniversary, and AM Philadelphia showed up at the club to talk to its roster of stars. In the segment, which lives on YouTube, we see Grover and his fellow comics answering questions about their lives in the comedy world, but we get a mere glimpse of Grover’s act, martini glass in hand.
Grover often partnered with Rich Ross, “another guy out of Temple,” on developing programs for local television. The team would produce such shows as “Safe Bowling,” and “In Search of the Three Stooges.” Having built up a substantial video reel, they sent clips to the head writer of “Late Night with David Letterman.”
“We got the name of the head writer back in 1987. We sent him a compilation tape of all these crazy things.” Then they waited. Eventually, like one sees in the movies, Rich followed up with another call. Then another… and another.
“Finally [the producer] just got tired and said, ‘Okay. I’ll look at it.’ Then about an hour later, he calls back and says ‘Wow. I showed it to David and he wants to meet you two guys.’”
They beelined up to 30 Rockefeller for the meeting, where Letterman bestows high praise, comparing them to Martin Mull. Letterman clearly watched the entire compilation, because he referenced several parts of it in the discussion. By the end of the hour-long conversation, hope starts to fade. Letterman stressed that his writers don’t work in teams, and that they wouldn’t be on camera.
Thus, the entertainer who popularized the term “brush with greatness” with regular bits by the same name, provided one for Grover and Rich.
With the comedy club craze fading along with the 1980s, Grover executed a soft landing with John DeBella, Philadelphia’s reigning king of morning drive-time radio. The new job brought a higher profile and some financial security.
“I got into a track that enabled me to quickly come up with material they liked.” This included sketches, one-liners, bits, and other ideas that gave him a reputation as a whiz kid and allowed him to employ some of the comics he knew from the circuit.
“What really made me feel good was getting these people paid,” Grover beamed. I get it. It is a great feeling.
However, DeBella’s milder brand of comedy could not withstand Howard Stern’s full frontal shock treatment on the Philly market. The radio ride would last only four years.
Grover soon transitioned into Kuralt-like human interest reporting for Philadelphia’s Fox 29 in 1994, a position he held for the next twenty years. From there, he hopped over to public broadcasting, doing similar work for PBS39’s weekly news magazine “Tempo”, interviewing everyone from doctors to dinerphiles. His affinity for all-things-roadside later inspired the creation of “Counter Culture”, a weekly show Grover produced and hosted, which used Daddypop’s for the studio. Over its run, he conducted well over a 100 interviews. To date, Grover has earned five Emmys.
State of the Industry
Grover comes about as close to anyone I know who’s worked within the belly of the mainstream media beast, although he readily admits he’s no investigative reporter.
“I admire them,” he asserts. “I came by way of stand-up comedy. Who does that? No one!”
Grove credits his comedy chops for much of his career as a reporter. “I started to write ‘normal’ features. By the time I was done at 29, I had done a number of semi-serious feature stories. I got the job at 29 because of comedy. I got the job at 39 because of 29.”
He agrees that his industry’s reputation has taken some hits over the past several years. Hit-and-run reporting with two-minute segments don’t allow for very deep coverage and caters to short attention spans. This lack of depth deprives us of an understanding of the complexities that almost always exist behind the issues.
“That’s fine,” says Grover. “But rather than teach people how to produce these segments, there really should be, starting at ground level, a course or curriculum to teach them how to be viewers.”
He emphasizes that the consumer bears much of the responsibility for the quality of our news. “The internet — while it has tremendous advantages — stovepipes the information. If all we listen to are things we agree with, there’s no pushing back. There’s no conflicting information. It becomes doctrinaire after a while.”
His suggestion? “I would teach how to consume news and be analytical. Critical thinking is really at the hub of it.”
No second road
In the recently released documentary about his life, Albert Brooks shares a delicious anecdote. “I had a very famous agent and he said to me, ‘I don’t know why you always take the hard road.’ And my answer was, ‘You think I see two roads.’”
We all know funny people, but few of those have the nerve to stand up on a stage before a room full of strangers and attempt to make them laugh. Those who do often see it as their destiny — at least until they don’t.
Grover’s career and mine have a some parallels. I never saw myself on stage, and Grove never published a magazine, but we both took our passion for something we loved to do and ran with it, even if the job description didn’t demand it.
Grover reminds me that those of us who toil in the creative professions never seem to stop working. We may find ourselves unemployed from time to time, but we never rest.
“In every job job that I had, I was always the guy that made people laugh. Companies have it made with creatives, because they know you’d be doing it anyway.”
I ask Grover if he ever saw a second road.
“I’ve learned to not think about that. It would have been nice to have had my own network sitcom or talk show, but looking back, I pretty much led the life I wanted: telling jokes, writing and performing comedy on radio, TV and stage, and I’m still at it. So, I’m grateful.”
Grover can currently be seen performing with the Gypsy Stage Company in “The Other Side of Dicken's Ghosts. The Ones You Never Knew”, at McCoole's Arts & Events Place, 10 South Main St, Quakertown, PA 18951. Click here for tickets. Sorry about the short notice, but you only have two performances left!
If you’re in the area and you’re hedging, keep in mind that McCoole’s is a two-building complex that includes the historic Red Lion Inn that must be seen to be believed.
i remember Sterns relentless bashing of the Philly morning man and feeling sorry for him and all the people on the other side of Sterns mean shtick. If Letterman compared Grover to M Mull that's a pretty good reason to check him out on those Utube clips. Mull was comedy gold and a major inspiration to people coming up in the late 70s trying to get somewhere in the performance arts