Bob Barker, the longtime host of television’s “The Price Is Right” who used his combination of comfort-food charm and deadpan humor to become an American television staple, has died, according to his longtime publicist. He was 99.
“It is with profound sadness that we announce that the World’s Greatest MC who ever lived, Bob Barker has left us,” publicist Roger Neal said in a statement Saturday.
Neal served as Barker’s publicist from 1987 to 1994 and again from 2020.
When producers hired Barker to host “The Price Is Right” in 1972, they hit the jackpot. The game show had faded significantly from its glory days in the late ‘50s and had been punted by two networks before it landed at CBS.
But in Barker, the show found its voice, and it has continued to air a decade and a half after he retired.
Robert Thompson, the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said one reason Barker became an iconic game show host was the sheer length of his career. Barker spent more than half a century on TV, taking over as host of the popular “Truth or Consequences” in 1956 and retiring from “The Price Is Right” in 2007.
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