Paul Conrad "Biff" Rose (born October 15, 1937, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States) is an American comedian and singer-songwriter.
Born in New Orleans, Rose moved to Hollywood where he found a job working as a comedy sketch writer with George Carlin. Among other assignments he wrote for the Mort Sahl TV show. Rose tried his hand as a stand-up comic and eventually began writing songs, performing his own compositions on piano. His piano-playing demonstrated a solid versatility, ranging in style from honky-tonk to lilting melodies, his singing made no pretense of technical accomplishment yet his songs and performances emitted a genuine sweetness that appealed to many in the late 1960s.
Rose recorded his first two records for Tetragrammaton Records. Following the release of 1968's The Thorn in Mrs. Rose's Side, which contained his hit single "Buzz the Fuzz", Rose made 12 appearances on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show from 1968 to 1970. He performed his songs ("Gentle People" and "Myrtle's Pies") on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, He also appeared on American Bandstand, The Merv Griffin Show, The David Frost Show and Hugh Hefner's Playboy After Dark. He was master of ceremonies at the Atlantic City Pop Festival of 1969 and the Atlanta Pop Festival of 1970.
Biff is a given name, a nickname or part of a stage name.
Biff may refer to:
Biff is a British cartoon strip, created by Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd, which debuted in 1982 and has appeared in the newspaper The Guardian from 1985 onwards (Biff Weekend ran there weekly for 20 years). The comic originated in a series of single-panel postcards before evolving into multi-panel comic strips. It has also been published in the magazine Viz and since 2001 in the magazine of the Rough Guides.
The cartoons are notable for their absurd, ironic, satirical and metafictional edge.
Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd met at grammar school in the 1950s and have collaborated on Biff since the mid-1970s. Chris Garratt creates the artwork (a mixture of collage, found images, tracings and original drawings) and Mick Kidd is responsible for the text. Kidd lives in London and Garratt in the Scilly Isles. They have created their strips and other artwork over the last 30 years by means of phone, post, email and occasional meetings.
In 2007 Chris Garratt introduced a retrospective of Biff work in these terms:
When I was a young man
I ran away from home
I went to join the circus
I went to see the cotton candy world
And make me lots of money
On my own
For Molly oh my pretty Molly
She's waitin' all alone
Someday soon I will return to her
Then I made the big time
Bright lights show biz
I'm really in the circus
There's only one thing wrong
I haven't saved a penny on my own
For Molly ah my pretty Molly
But she's writing every day
Molly understands so it's okay
Ride a windy boxcar
And see a thousand children young and old.
Oh that greasepaint smile can hide you so
Here comes the carousel
Guess wich town it is
Feel the thrill
Greasepaint covers everything
But winter's chill
I'm reading Molly's letter
The ink is fading and
The page is turning yellow
Long ago
I promised Molly
Don't you know I
I will close my eyes
And go to her