Comedian Freddie Prinze is one of only a handful of Hispanic Americans to earn national prominence as a popular entertainer. Prinze was born in Washington Heights, New York, a multi-ethnic neighborhood on the Upper West Side. His father was a Hungarian immigrant who worked as a tool-and-die maker; his mother was a Puerto Rican immigrant who worked in a factory. Playing on the name "Neuorican," which is how many Puerto Ricans living in New York identify themselves, Prinze called himself a "Hungarican."

Prinze not only came from a diverse ethnic background, but a diverse religious one as well. His father was part Jewish and his mother was Catholic, but they chose to send him to a Lutheran elementary school. On Sundays he attended Catholic mass. "All was confusing," he told Rolling Stone in 1975, "until I found I could crack up the priest doing Martin...