Curiosidades

Donated his scripts and tapes from Laugh-In (1967) to his alma mater (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)'s communications school.

Treated successfully for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but later died of cancer of the bladder and of the prostate.

His stage name "Arte" came about by accident: Originally billed as "Art E. Johnson", his name was mistakenly posted as "Arte" on a playbill. Johnson liked the look and sound of the name, so he kept it.

Was a master of accents and dialects.

Attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the same time as Allan Sherman ('Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!") and Sheldon Keller, both of whom were five or six years older than he. Johnson graduated in 1949.

Claimed he won his first showbiz job by impulsively stepping into an audition line at a Broadway theater and was selected for a small role in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes".

His repertoire of more than 60 comic characters included Tyrone F. Horneigh, a dirty old man who accosts Ruth Buzzi on a park bench in Laugh In, Piotr Rosmenko, an Eastern European song-and-dance man, Rabbi Shankar, an addled Indian guru and a man in a yellow raincoat who could not help falling off his tricycle.

His younger brother, Coslough Johnson, was a television comedy screenwriter.

Johnson can be heard doing books on tape, most notably for a number of Dave Barry's collections, the most recent being "Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up", among others.

Son of Edythe Mackenzie (Goldberg) and Abraham Lincoln Johnson, an attorney. His father was born in New York and his mother was born in Illinois, and all four of Arte's grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants.

Left for New York when no jobs in Chicago ad agencies opened for him. Worked at Viking Press and developed life-long love of reading and book-collecting.

Graduated with a major in radio journalism from the University of Illinois..

Biography in: "Who's Who in Comedy" by Ronald L. Smith, pg. 228-229. New York: Facts on File, 1992. ISBN 0816023387

When his career hit a rough patch, he toiled as a salesman at the men's clothing store Carroll & Co. in Beverly Hills.

Johnson married German model Gisele Johnson, after divorcing Texie Waterman in the late 1960s. The couple had no children together, but appeared alongside Lorne Greene on an episode of the CBS game show Tattletales in 1976.

Retired from acting in 2006.

Owned property in Bel-Air, Los Angeles, and Hawaii. Upon Johnson's death, his body was cremated, with his ashes scattered in Hawaii.