Don Rickles, Equal Opportunity Offender of Comedy, Dies at 90

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The New York Times  /  April 6, 2017

Don Rickles, the acidic stand-up comic who became world-famous not by telling jokes but by insulting his audience, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90.

The cause was kidney failure, said a spokesman, Paul Shefrin.

For more than half a century, on nightclub stages, in concert halls and on television, Mr. Rickles made outrageously derisive comments about people’s looks, their ethnicity, their spouses, their sexual orientation, their jobs or anything else he could think of. He didn’t discriminate: His incendiary unpleasantries were aimed at the biggest stars in show business (Frank Sinatra was a favorite target) and at ordinary paying customers.

His rise to national prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s roughly coincided with the success of “All in the Family,” the groundbreaking situation comedy whose protagonist, Archie Bunker, was an outspoken bigot. Mr. Rickles’s humor was similarly transgressive. But he went further than Archie Bunker, and while Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, was speaking words someone else had written — and was invariably the butt of the joke — Mr. Rickles, whose targets included his fellow Jews, never needed a script and was always in charge.

One night, on learning that some members of his audience were German, he said, “Forty million Jews in this country, and I got four Nazis sitting here in front waiting for the rally to start.” He said that America needed Italians “to keep the cops busy” and blacks “so we can have cotton in the drugstore,” and that “Asians are nice people, but they burn a lot of shirts.” He might ask a man in the audience, “Is that your wife?” and, when the man answered yes, respond: “Oh, well. Keep your chin up.”

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As brutal as his remarks could be, they rarely left a mark. (“I’m not really a mean, vicious guy,” he told an interviewer in 2000.) Sidney Poitier was said to have once been offended by Mr. Rickles’s racial jokes. But in “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project,” a 2007 documentary directed by John Landis, Mr. Poitier sang Mr. Rickles’s praises.

Recalling the first time he saw Mr. Rickles perform, Mr. Poitier said: “He was explosive. He was impactful. He was funny. I mean, outrageously funny.”

Mr. Rickles got his first break, the story goes, when Sinatra and some of his friends came to see him perform in 1957 — in Hollywood, according to most sources, although Mr. Rickles said it was in Miami. “Make yourself at home, Frank,” Mr. Rickles said to Sinatra, whom he had never met. “Hit somebody.” Sinatra laughed so hard, he fell out of his seat.

Mr. Rickles was soon being championed by Sinatra, Dean Martin and the other members of the show business circle known as the Rat Pack. Steady work in Las Vegas followed. But he was hardly an overnight success: He spent a decade in the comedy trenches before he broke through to a national audience.

In 1965, he made the first of numerous appearances on “The Tonight Show,” treating Johnny Carson with his trademark disdain to the audience’s (and Carson’s) delight. He also became a regular on Dean Martin’s televised roasts, where no celebrity was safe from his onslaughts. (“What’s Bob Hope doing here? Is the war over?”)

Mr. Rickles’s wife, who he said “likes to lie in bed, signaling ships with her jewelry,” was not immune to his attacks. Neither was his mother, Etta, whom he referred to as “the Jewish Patton.” But off the stage, he didn’t hesitate to express his gratitude to his mother for unflaggingly believing in his talent, even when he himself wasn’t so sure.

“She had a tremendous drive,” he recalled in “Mr. Warmth.” “Drove me crazy. But she was like the driving force for me.”

He shared an apartment with his mother and did not marry until he was almost 40. After marrying Barbara Sklar in 1965, he saw to it that his mother had the apartment next door. His wife survives him, as do a daughter, Mindy Mann, and two grandchildren. Mr. Rickles’s son, Lawrence, died in 2011.

Donald Jay Rickles was born in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens on May 8, 1926, to Max Rickles, an insurance salesman, and the former Etta Feldman. During World War II, he honed his comedic skills while serving in the Navy. (“On the ship that I went over to the Philippines,” he told The New York Times in 2015, “out of 300 men I was the class comedian.”) After being discharged, he followed his father into the insurance business, but when he had trouble getting his customers to sign on the dotted line, decided to try acting.

He studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, an experience that he later said gave him a greater sense of himself. But he found it difficult to get acting jobs and turned to stand-up comedy.

For a while, he pursued acting and comedy simultaneously. He did his stand-up act at Catskills resorts and in strip clubs, and his movie career got off to an auspicious start with a small part in the 1958 submarine drama “Run Silent, Run Deep,” starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. But the bulk of his film work in the 1960s was in low-budget beach movies: “Bikini Beach,” “Muscle Beach Party” and “Pajama Party,” all in 1964, and “Beach Blanket Bingo” in 1965.

By that time, his comedy career had begun gathering momentum. Focusing less on prepared material and more on interaction with his audience, he had found his voice. He was not the first insult comedian — and in fact an earlier master of the comic insult, Jack E. Leonard, was known to complain that Mr. Rickles’s act was too similar to his — but he soon became far and away the most successful.

Bookings in the late 1950s at the Slate Brothers nightclub in Hollywood and the lounge of the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas spread the word. During his Slate Brothers engagement, Carl Reiner recalled in “Mr. Warmth,” the biggest names in show business felt that “if they hadn’t been insulted by Rickles, they weren’t with it.”

His appearances insulting celebrities on the Dean Martin roasts and his sparring matches with Carson cemented Mr. Rickles’s reputation, but his unscripted brand of humor proved an uneasy fit for weekly television. A variety show in 1968 and a situation comedy in 1972, both called “The Don Rickles Show,” were short-lived, as was “Daddy Dearest,” a 1993 sitcom in which he and the comedian Richard Lewis played father and son. The closest thing to a hit show he had was “CPO Sharkey,” a Navy comedy, which aired from 1976 to 1978.

Critics were often not sure what to make of Mr. Rickles. John J. O’Connor of The Times wrote in 1972 that for some his humor “will always remain tasteless,” while for others “it has its delicious moments of madness.” Tom Shales of The Washington Post, 26 years later, was more enthusiastic, praising him as “mythic, timeless, fearless — endowed by the gods with some absurd miraculous gift.”

No critic, however thoughtful, could quite explain Mr. Rickles’s durability in show business, given that until the end of his career he was peppering his act with slurs and stereotypes long out of favor. And yet he not only got away with it, but he also flourished.

His own theory was that he was being rewarded for saying things others wanted to say but couldn’t. “I’m the guy at the Christmas party,” he said more than once, “who makes fun of the boss on Friday night and still has his job on Monday morning.”

Although Mr. Rickles sometimes expressed regret that he did not have more of a career as an actor, he did enjoy unexpected cinematic success late in life. In 1995, Martin Scorsese cast him in “Casino,” with Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone, and that same year he found a new audience as the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the hugely successful animated feature “Toy Story,” a role he reprised in its sequels. “Toy Story 4” is scheduled for release in 2019, but it is not known whether Mr. Rickles had done any recording for it before his death. In 2011, he was the voice of a frog in the movie “Zookeeper” and played the long-lost husband of Betty White’s character on the sitcom “Hot in Cleveland.”

In 2007, Mr. Rickles published a loosely structured memoir, “Rickles’ Book,” and was the subject of Mr. Landis’s documentary, shown on HBO, which was built around a performance at the Stardust Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas shortly before it was torn down.

In 2014, he was the subject of an all-star tribute (inevitably, it turned out to be more like a roast) broadcast on the Spike cable channel. That show included appearances by David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart and Bob Newhart, whose soft-spoken style of comedy could not be further removed from Mr. Rickles’s, but who he often said was his closest friend in show business.

Health problems inevitably slowed Mr. Rickles down, but even after a leg infection in 2014 affected his ability to walk, he continued performing, making occasional concert and television appearances. In May 2015, he was one of the last guests on “Late Show With David Letterman.”

As recently as 2007, the year he turned 81, Mr. Rickles had been working, by his count, about 75 nights a year.

“The only way I would stop is if my health goes, God forbid, or the audience isn’t with me anymore,” he told The Times that year. “Besides, I got to keep going. My manager told me he has to put his kid through college. His kid is 10 years old.”

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[kscarbel2]

Don Rickles, lightning-fast launcher of comic insults, dies at 90

The Washington Post  /  April 6, 2017

Don Rickles, the irrepressible master of the comic insult whose humor was a fast-paced, high-volume litany of mockery in which members of his audience were the (usually) willing victims of his verbal assaults, died April 6 at his home Los Angeles. He was 90.

The cause was kidney failure, said his publicist, Paul Shefrin.

When Mr. Rickles developed his stand-up act in the 1950s, his humor was considered shocking, with a raw, abrasive, deeply personal edge. If he wasn’t the first “insult comic,” he was by far the most successful and most widely imitated, becoming a fixture on television and in nightclubs for decades.

Trained as a dramatic actor, Mr. Rickles appeared in films and television series and was the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the popular “Toy Story” series of animated features that debuted in 1995. But for more than 50 years, he practiced a distinctive brand of improvisational, sarcastic humor that made him one of the most original and influential comedians of his time.

His brash, snappish style became a major influence on many younger performers, including comedians Louis CK, Lewis Black and Zach Galifianakis, radio shock jock Howard Stern and even the writers of the mouthy cartoon character Howard the Duck.

People vied for front-row seats at nightclubs, practically begging to be skewered by Mr. Rickles, who was variously known as the Merchant of Venom, the Sultan of Insult or, as “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson dubbed him in ironic endearment, Mr. Warmth.

“Don is saying the things that other people are thinking,” comedian Bob Newhart, Mr. Rickles’s best friend, told The Washington Post last year. “There’s an expectation of risk when you go and see a Rickles show.”

No one was spared from his hectoring, whether celebrities, royalty, presidents or, especially, Mr. Rickles himself. His reputation was established in 1957, when he noticed the often-combative Frank Sinatra in the audience at a nightclub in Miami Beach.

Mr. Rickles poked fun at a recent movie Sinatra had made, then said, “Hey, Frank, make yourself at home. Hit somebody!”

Sinatra burst out laughing, became one of Mr. Rickles’s biggest supporters, and a career was launched.

Mr. Rickles did not tell jokes with traditional punchlines, did not make topical comments about the news and did not use crude profanity. Every show was spontaneous, built largely around his caustic observations about members of the audience.

“There’s something truly artful about his delivery,” director Martin Scorsese — who hired Mr. Rickles to play a Las Vegas casino manager in the 1995 film “Casino” — once told the New York Times.

“Many other comedians who practice insult humor are either way too broad or they hide behind a character,” Scorsese added, “but Rickles keeps this balance between levity and relentlessness. And it’s all improvised, which is really the hardest thing to do, and he makes it look like the easiest, most graceful thing in the world.”

Short, bald and stocky, Mr. Rickles walked on the stage “looking like a snapping turtle surfacing in a pond,” as a New Yorker profile put it in 2004. He glanced around the room at his prey. Overweight people, men accompanied by younger women, racial and ethnic minorities — all were subject to his relentless barrage of smart-aleck buckshot.

[Don Rickles was politically incorrect before it was incorrect. And at 90, he’s still going.]

Mr. Rickles’s chief comedic weapons were exaggeration and ridicule, deployed in a rapid, sharp-tongued style that stacked one quip on top of another until audiences were helpless with laughter. He especially delighted in tweaking the rich and mighty and became renowned for his biting performances at celebrity roasts.

“The bigger a person is,” Mr. Rickles told the Newark Star-Ledger in 1993, “the more pleasure I take in knocking them down a notch.”

At a tribute to Clint Eastwood, Mr. Rickles said, “Clint, I’m sorry, but I just gotta say what’s on everybody’s mind here tonight: You’re a terrible actor.”

While filming “Casino,” Mr. Rickles decided to needle the film’s star, Robert De Niro, who had twice won Academy Awards.

“They warned me what a serious guy De Niro is,” Mr. Rickles told the New York Daily News. “They warned me not to make jokes. So the third day of shooting, I looked him straight in the face and told him: ‘I can’t work with you. You can’t act.’ The guy fell on the floor. He didn’t stop laughing for 18 weeks. Scorsese fell on the floor too, but he’s so small we couldn’t find him.”

Mr. Rickles developed a persona that was a carefully crafted combination of cocksure wiseguy, playground bully and naughty, insecure child who just pulled the dog’s tail. In the 1950s, he was working in Washington at a cramped strip club called the Wayne Room when he hit on a formula that became his stock-in-trade: He became a heckler from the stage.

“The place was like a hallway,” he recalled in a 1977 Post interview. “The customers were right on top of you, always heckling, and I began giving it right back to them.”

The secret of his comedy was in his delivery, which was a blizzard of mockery, raillery and mayhem. His all-purpose put-down for dolts was to call them “hockey pucks.”

He often mentioned his Jewish background, his mother and his wife, Barbara, for comic effect, as one sharp-edged observation collided with another in madcap verbal detonations.

During a live 1968 performance at the Sahara in Las Vegas, every element in Mr. Rickles’s comic arsenal was on display when he discovered that an audience member was Lebanese:

“God put us on this earth to laugh. Am I right? He made you a Lebanese? He made me a Jew. So what?

“What’s your first name? Mohammed? Habib?

“I’ve met you before, haven’t I? That’s right, you hung my uncle. . . . Where’d I meet you, Habib? Lake Tahoe, that’s — Barbara was pregnant. Are you the guy that made my wife pregnant?

“How do you like that? My kid’s an Arab.”

Mr. Rickles seldom used language that would have to be censored on television, but many people considered his humor brazen and in poor taste, especially early in his career. As time went on, his style seemed caught in a sometimes uncomfortable time warp.

Long after it was considered insensitive or worse, Mr. Rickles used outmoded stereotypes to mock women and practically every conceivable ethnic group. He continued to appear on late-night talk shows and in nightclubs into his late 80s.

In 1998, Washington Post television critic Tom Shales spent a weekend attending Mr. Rickles’s performances at a nightclub in Atlantic City.

“On a giant stage,” Shales wrote, he was “much more complex and poignant than the loudmouthed guy who guests on the talk shows. . . . Rickles seemed mythic, timeless, fearless — endowed by the gods with some absurd miraculous gift.”

Although he disliked the term “insult comedy,” Mr. Rickles knew that insults were what his audiences came to expect.

“I have this gift for saying things with a certain attitude, walking a very fine line with that attitude and staying on the right side of it,” he told the Star-Ledger in 1993. “But it’s always a gamble. Sometimes it’s tough to judge whether you’re about to cross that line.”

He often turned nervously away from the butt of his jokes to address the rest of his audience in mock fear: “Is he laughing? Take a look, is he laughing?”

Donald Jay Rickles was born May 8, 1926, in Queens. His father, who sold insurance, had an acerbic sense of humor, but it was his mother who encouraged him to stand up at family gatherings and poke fun at his uncles.

During World War II, Mr. Rickles served with the Navy in the Philippines, which he often referred to in his comedy act. After the war, he studied for two years at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where his classmates included Anne Bancroft, Grace Kelly and Jason Robards.

“Most of these people were dedicated actors,” he told The Post in 1977. “You had to do all these improvisations. The teacher would say, ‘We are two moths on a curtain.’ I was always in trouble because I was always doing the jokes. I said, ‘What do I have to do, eat the drapes?’ ”

While looking for work as an actor, he sold used cars, life insurance and pots and pans. Almost out of desperation, he turned to comedy, billed in the early 1950s as Don “Glass Head” Rickles.

By the late 1950s, he was appearing in Las Vegas, while still finding occasional work as a dramatic and comic actor. He was in the 1958 submarine movie “Run Silent, Run Deep” with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. He played a nightclub bouncer in “The Rat Race” (1960), alongside Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds. He was in two Annette Funicello-Frankie Avalon beach movies in the mid-1960s, and in 1970 played a supply sergeant-con artist in “Kelly’s Heroes,” starring Eastwood.

Mr. Rickles appeared in dozens of sitcom episodes, from “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to “Gilligan’s Island,” and starred in several short-lived comedy shows of his own, the best-known of which was probably “C.P.O. Sharkey,” in which he played a Navy noncommissioned officer for two seasons on NBC in the 1970s.

Despite his many forays into acting, Mr. Rickles was always at his best alone on stage, armed only with a microphone and his wit.

For years, until he got married at 38, Mr. Rickles lived with his mother. She then moved into the adjoining apartment. Survivors include his wife of 52 years, the former Barbara Sklar, of Los Angeles; a daughter, Mindy Mann; and two grandchildren. A son, Larry Rickles, a TV comedy writer and producer, died in 2011.

Mr. Rickles’s closest friend in show business was comedian Bob Newhart, whose mild, cerebral style of humor could not have been more different.

“There’s a part of all comedians that remains a child, while other people get civility pounded into them,” Newhart told The Post in 2007. “But somehow comedians don’t. This is particularly evident in Don. Whatever he sees, he says. And it’s what we all think, but we’re too civilized to say.”

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[mrsmackpaul]

Well thats no good I guess we all fall off the perch at some stage 

A very funny bloke