George Leslie Goebel (May 20, 1919 – February 24, 1991) was an American humorist, actor, and comedian. He was best known as the star of his own weekly comedy variety television series, The George Gobel Show, broadcasting from 1954 to 1959 on NBC, and on CBS from 1959 to 1960, (alternating in its final season with The Jack Benny Program). He was also a familiar panelist on the NBC game show Hollywood Squares.
He was born George Leslie Goebel in Chicago, Illinois, on May 20, 1919. His father, Hermann Goebel, who was then working as a butcher and grocer, had emigrated to the United States in the 1890s with his parents from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother, Lillian (MacDonald) Goebel, was a native of Illinois, as was her mother, while Lillian's father, a tugboat captain, had immigrated from Scotland.
Even before his 1937 graduation from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Chicago, Gobel was a country music singer on the National Barn Dance on Chicago's WLS radio and later on KMOX in St. Louis. In 1942 Gobel married his high school sweetheart, Alice Rose Humecki. During World War II, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and served as a flight instructor in AT-9 aircraft at Altus, Oklahoma, and later in B-26 Marauder bombers at Frederick, Oklahoma. In a 1969 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Gobel joked about his stateside wartime service: "There was not one Japanese aircraft that got past Tulsa."

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