Nipsey Russell, who died Sunday at 81, was a pioneering black comedian who was successful enough to became ubiquitous as a guest on game shows, among other venues, setting him up as the kind of celebrity of whom nobody is quite sure how he got there or why.

Yet Russell was part of a generation for whom appearing in regular television roles was itself a step forward. It was a breakthrough for a black person to be an ordinary person and not some kind of grotesque.

As he climbed the show business ladder from Harlem comedy clubs to a regular role on “Car 54, Where Are You?” and then variety shows, talk shows, and especially game shows, Russell helped foster a quiet revolution in show business.

“The comedians who came along in my era” – stars like Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby – “came as ourselves, not as comedy characters, which had been true of Lincoln Perry as Stepin Fetchit and Eddie Anderson as Rochester” [on “The Jack Benny Show”], Russell told Los Angeles Times in 1993.

Russell’s trademark was to deliver a few lines of doggerel at the start of each appearance, for which he was dubbed “the poet laureate of television” by Ed McMahon, himself perhaps the ultimate on-air courtier. One example of the Russell touch: “The opposite of pro is con / That fact is clearly seen / If progress means move forward / Then what does Congress mean?”

“Truck drivers stop me and say, ‘What is the poem for the day?’ or ‘Give me a poem for my girl,'” he said. “I have one on almost every subject.”

Yet if his humor in later years seemed light enough to evaporate, he came up being serious about race during the civil rights movement. In the 1950s,Russell performed at benefits for the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1965, at the climax of the Selma to Montgomery march, Russell was one of a bevy of entertainers to appear on a makeshift stage in the middle of a muddy field, lit only by flashlight, before a crowd of 10,000 freedom marchers. King rolled up his pant legs and urged “every self-respecting Negro here” to join in the demonstration the next day.

Russell – his given name actually was Nipsey – was raised in Atlanta, and was on stage from age 3, as part of a tyke tap dance team called Ragamuffins of Rhythm. Later, he played the straight man in comedy teams. His family was poor, and Russell once defined humor as “the escape valve from the deadly reality of adversity.”

Russell idolized the boxer Joe Louis and Bill “Mr. Bojangles” Robinson. “Athletes and dancers were about all

black kids could use as role models in those days,” he said. He developed a comedy act at an unusual public venue, at Atlanta’s popular Varsity drive-in, where he worked as a car-hop.

After serving in the Army in World War II, Russell attended the University of Cincinnati, and then toured on the black comedy circuit. He appeared on the CBS-TV talent search “The Show Goes On,” and by the mid-1950s, had a regular gig as emcee at the Club Baby Grand, a fashionable east Harlem nightspot. A joke from this period conveys both his politics and ambition: He quipped that he would start a new game show in which black customers would guess how much they were being overcharged at a Southern department store. The program’s title: “The Price Isn’t Right.”

After numerous appearances on Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town,” Russell was cast as Officer Anderson in “Car 54, Where Are You?” in 1961. In 1964, he made his first game show appearance, opposite host Ed McMahon in “Missing Links.” That same year, he had a stint as co-host of the ABC talk show “Nightlife.”

From there, Russell began to achieve ubiquity. He became a regular on “The Dean Martin Comedy World,” as Martin’s poetry-spouting barber. In the 1970s, he came to rule the game show circuit, appearing on “To Tell the Truth,” “Match Game,” “What’s My Line,” and any number of others. He wore it as a point of pride that he was “the very first [black] and the only one who did it as a regular thing over the years.”

Russell also appeared in several films, all clunkers, including a well-received turn as the Tin Man in “The Wiz” and a cameo in the execrable movie version of “Car 54.” He had recurring roles on NBC’s “Search for Tomorrow” and ABC’s “As the World Turns.” He often headlined at resorts and was especially popular at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where his poetry continued to go over well.

Most recently, he became a regular on Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show, where he alternated with other “where are they now?” types, like Abe Vigoda. One skit saw Mr. O’Brien threatening to replace Russell with a younger actor playing Russell, which inspired some new lines from Russell: “Roses are red / Violets are blue / The real Nipsey Russell says / ‘Conan Screw You!'”

When he was briefly host of the NBC’s “Your Number Is Up” in 1985, Russell told UPI’s Vernon Scott that he looked forward to “entering the Mrs. America supermarket audience, the Proctor & Gamble group,” as if he had not been there for decades. His optimism was inspiring: “People tuning in the show will see me as a familiar face. As for my color, people will say, ‘That’s not a black man. That’s Nipsey Russell.'”

Nipsey Russell
Born October 13, 1923 [some sources say 1924], in Atlanta; died October 1 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York; he never married.