Joby Baker was a Canadian-born American actor, nightclub comic and painter whose easy, low-key charm made him one of the most familiar supporting faces of 1960s Hollywood. Audiences knew him from all three original Gidget films, from playing the drummer Wilbur alongside Elvis Presley in Girl Happy (1965), and from Disney comedies such as The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, Blackbeard's Ghost and Superdad. In 1967 CBS chose him to lead Good Morning World, the sitcom built by the creative team behind The Dick Van Dyke Show. Yet Baker always said he was a painter first, and he spent the second half of his life making figurative paintings, sculpture and jewelry in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.
He was born Joseph N. Baker in Montreal, Quebec, on March 26, 1934. His mother died when he was a toddler, and his father, who called him "Jobela" (the source of the nickname Joby), took him to live on Oahu in what was then the Territory of Hawaii. On December 7, 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the house where the seven-year-old was living was hit by friendly fire. He escaped injury, and he and his stepmother left the islands aboard the RMS Aquitania with thousands of other evacuees bound for San Francisco, as he recalled in 2022.
After school in New York City he went to Los Angeles, where he built a nightclub act that drew laughs with a Jerry Lewis impression. He worked as an NBC page in Hollywood and got onto The Red Skelton Hour in 1952. While serving in the U.S. Army, where he entertained troops, he served alongside the husband of Lou Costello's daughter Paddy, persuaded the comedian to perform at his camp, and Costello became first a friend and then his manager. Baker often spent weekends at the Costello home in the San Fernando Valley. On the club circuit he sang and told jokes as an opening act for Johnny Mathis, including at the Latin Casino, and worked the Sahara in Las Vegas ahead of Abbott and Costello.
His film debut came as a soldier in Target Zero (1955). His breakthrough was a screen test for The Last Angry Man (1959), in which he played Myron Malkin opposite Paul Muni in the great actor's final film. As a Columbia Pictures contract player he appeared in Gidget (1959) as Stinky, then in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963), alongside three different Gidgets: Sandra Dee, Deborah Walley and Cindy Carol. He shared the USS Echo with Jack Lemmon and Ricky Nelson in The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960), played a young hood in Phil Karlson's Key Witness (1960), and worked with Connie Francis in Looking for Love (1964) and When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965). In Girl Happy he played drums in a band led by Presley's character, and in a 1965 American Bandstand interview he said he and Presley had become very good friends.
Television kept him constantly busy. He was Pvt. Kelly in the first season of Combat!, and he guest starred on Dragnet, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bachelor Father, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Perry Mason, Dr. Kildare, Gunsmoke, Ben Casey, 12 O'Clock High, F Troop, Death Valley Days and two final-season episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. A painter all along, he was showing his work at a gallery on La Cienega Boulevard when Ray Bradbury walked in. That meeting led to his casting as Vamanos in Bradbury's play The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, and his largely ad-libbed performance helped convince Bill Persky, Sam Denoff, Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard that he could succeed Dick Van Dyke at CBS.
Good Morning World premiered in September 1967 with Baker as Dave Lewis and Ronnie Schell as Larry Clarke, the morning-drive team of a Los Angeles radio station, with Julie Parrish, Billy De Wolfe and a young Goldie Hawn in her first professional role. The network wanted to call it The Joby Baker Show, and Baker begged them not to. The series ran one season of 26 episodes. He went on to Disney's Blackbeard's Ghost (1968) and Superdad (1974), regular roles on the short-lived series Stone and The Six O'Clock Follies, and guest parts on Mannix, Medical Center, The Streets of San Francisco, Barnaby Jones, Quincy, M.E. and Simon & Simon. His last screen credit was the 1984 television adaptation of The Paper Chase.
By the 1970s he had established himself as a serious painter and sculptor, exhibiting in Los Angeles, New York and New England. He traced his roots to the Nueva Presencia group of Arnold Belkin and Francisco Icaza and to the Bay Area Figurative painters. In 1984 he married the lyricist and singer-songwriter Dory Previn, left acting, and moved with her to an old farmhouse in Southfield, Massachusetts, where each kept a studio. He illustrated The Dory Previn Songbook (1995) and appeared in the 2024 documentary Dory Previn: On My Way to Where. Previn died in 2012, and in 2014 he married Megan Moore. That year a show of his work at the Lauren Clark Gallery in Great Barrington drew a local collector's praise as the best show seen in the Berkshires in 25 years.
Joby Baker died of natural causes on June 22, 2026, at the age of 92, in Westchester County, New York. The Hollywood Reporter, citing his granddaughter Sofia Silverman, said he died at a hospital in Yonkers, while Deadline, citing his family, gave the place as Mount Kisco. His death came ten days after that of Ronnie Schell, his Good Morning World partner. He was survived by his wife Megan, his daughters Fredricka (Ricka) Baker and Michelle Wayland, Scott Zimmerman, whom he helped raise as a son, his stepdaughters Emma and Eliza, six grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. "I was not interested in stardom, in fact I was embarrassed by it," he once said. "I was the wrong type of person to be an actor."
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5Posts by Joby, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.