Super Dave Osborne
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Super Dave Osborne (born November 20, 1942, in Los Angeles, California) is the stage name of Robert "Bob" Einstein. In real life, he is the brother of actor Albert Brooks and is an Emmy Award-winning comedy writer. As Osborne, he is a comedic fictional stuntman whose persona is modeled after Evel Knievel.
Super Dave made his first appearance on The John Byner Comedy Hour, a 1972 TV series, and was a regular on the 1980 TV series Bizarre. In 1987 he got his own variety show named Super Dave, followed in 1992 by the animated series Super Dave's All Stars that aired on FOX. Super Dave starred in a movie released in 2000, The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave. He currently plays the recurring character of "Marty Funkhauser" in Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO, as well as the recurring character of surrogate "Larry Middleman" in the third season of Arrested Development. He is also featured on the Comedy Central show Crank Yankers as obnoxious district selectman Tony Deloge.
Super Dave's signature performance is to perform outrageous daredevil stunts which invariably go awry and result in his grievous injury. The Super Dave show usually ended each episode with him performing such a stunt. These included such things as riding inside the hub of a giant yo-yo suspended from a crane (the yo-yo broke free of its string and rolled off a cliff into a ravine) and being flung inside a giant football (the catapult malfunctioned and "spiked" the football instead of throwing it). Super Dave would sometimes instead perform non-daredevil feats for charity or unveil new inventions his organization had supposedly developed, which would also invariably result in just as bad an injury to himself as the stunts would. After an injury has occurred, Super Dave's limbs or body would be torn apart, broken, stretched, and more.
Super Dave was accompanied by several recurring characters including:
the barely-comprehensible stunt coordinator Fuji Hakayito (Art Irizawa)
the fashion-impaired announcer Mike Walden
the Super Dave Band, which was invariably unable to appear on the show when scheduled (making them an unseen character). They always sent, as their replacement, a Jamaican steel drum band which only knew how to play Barry Manilow's song "Copacabana".
Safety equipment frequently included "genuine Saskatchewan seal-skin bindings", which was peculiar considering Saskatchewan is landlocked.
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External links
http://www.extravalue.com/video/superdave/about/
Bob Einstein at the Internet Movie Database
http://bobeinstein.com